..As reports say Children among dozens killed by explosion at Syria weapons depot***

Thousands of Israelis gathered at Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Saturday night to march in a protest, led by the Arab community, against the controversial nation-state law.

Organizers said the demonstration drew at least 30,000 people.

It was the second such demonstration against the legislation in as many weekends, with last week’s gathering, led by the Druze community, drawing at least 50,000 people.

Dozens of the protesters at Saturday’s protest carried Palestinian flags, defying a request by the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee, which organized the demonstration, not to wave the flags at the event. At times, some participants chanted in support of Palestine and against Israel, including cries of “With blood and fire, we will redeem Palestine,” and “Million of martyrs are marching to Jerusalem.”

Protesters marched from Rabin Square to the Tel Aviv Museum Square, where a rally took place under the banner: “No to the nation-state law, yes to equality.”

Organizers of the protest had urged participants not to wave Palestinian flags as to not deter Jewish Israelis from attending the protest march in solidarity. But despite the request, dozens of activists from the Arab Knesset party Balad — one of the three factions in the Knesset’s 13-MK Joint (Arab) List party — were seen waving Palestinian flags at the demonstration, as were marchers in the streets en route to the rally. Balad had harshly criticized the request not to carry the Palestinian flag.

Other protesters carried signs in Hebrew and Arabic demanding: “Justice and equality now” and others calling the law “apartheid.”

Former MK Mohammad Barakeh, a longtime leader of the left-wing Hadash party who currently heads the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee, told the crowd during a speech that the demonstrators were all at the square to “erase this abomination and remove the stain made by Netanyahu and his government called the nation-state law.”

Barakeh told a Times of Israel reporter at the event that the committee had “asked the public not to bring [Palestinian] flags, but I can’t control what people do.”

On stage, Barakeh was quoted as saying it is the “flag of the oppressed Palestinian people, the flag they are trying to eradicate from history via the nation-state law.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to Twitter to criticize the display, posting a short video of protesters waving Palestinian flags and writing that there was “no better testament to the need for the nation-state law.”

“We will continue waving the Israeli flag and singing Hatikva with great pride,” he wrote.

The head of the Joint (Arab) List, Ayman Odeh, told Ynet before the protest that “thousands of Arabs and Jews are making their way to Tel Aviv with a democratic and ethical message [against] the nation-state law. A democratic state must be a state for all its citizens.”

The Arab Higher Monitoring Committee had organized some 300 buses for the event, filled with participants from at least 26 non-governmental organizations, a majority of them left-wing.

No high-profile politicians or figures were set to participate at the rally.

Labor Party chairman Avi Gabbay, head of the Zionist Union, said that while he backed efforts to amend the nation-state law, he would not attend the protest since he said it would include Palestinian nationalist elements.

“I can’t go to a protest where they are calling for the ‘right of return,” he told Hadashot. “I can go to a protest that calls for equal rights,” he added.

Israel has long insisted that the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, as defined by the Palestinians, is a non-starter in peace negotiations. The UN categorizes as refugees not just those Palestinians who were displaced or expelled from their homes in 1947 and 1948, but also all of their descendants. No other refugee population is treated as such, and so the Palestinian refugee population increases each year, and now numbers in the millions, while the rest of the world’s decreases.

As a consequence, accepting the “right of return” would mean millions of Palestinians being allowed to enter Israel, ending Israel’s majority Jewish status.

The nation-state law, passed by the Knesset July 19, for the first time enshrines Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people,” and says “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It also defines Arabic as a language bearing a “special” status, effectively downgrading it from its de facto status as Israel’s second official language.

Arab citizens make up some 20 percent of Israel’s population.

The Arab Higher Monitoring Committee was among a group of Arab Israeli organizations that petitioned the High Court of Justice against the law earlier this week.

Their petition said the law passed by the Knesset last month denied Palestinian national rights and was “colonialist,” “racist,” and “massively harmful to fundamental human rights.”

The government has argued the new law merely enshrines the country’s existing character, and that Israel’s democratic nature and provisions for equality are already anchored in existing legislation.

But critics, both at home and abroad, say it undermines Israel’s commitment to equality for all its citizens outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

It has prompted particular outrage from Israel’s Druze minority, whose members say the law’s provisions render them second-class citizens. Last week, at least 50,000 Israelis attended the Druze-led demonstration against the law in Rabin Square.

The legislation was passed as one of the so-called Basic Laws, which, similar to a constitution, underpin Israel’s legal system and are more difficult to repeal than regular laws.

Several other petitions against the law have also been filed to the High Court, demanding it be overturned on constitutional grounds.

Druze leaders, including three MKs, were first to demand the High Court strike down the “extremist” legislation, saying it anchored discrimination against minorities in Israeli law.

Two Bedouin former IDF officers also called on the High Court to either change the formulation of the law so it applies equally to all Israelis or abolish it completely.

Netanyahu has been trying to placate the Druze with a package of benefits, but efforts to negotiate this have stalled.

In the meantime, an explosion at a weapons depot in a rebel-held town in north-west Syria killed at least 39 civilians, including a dozen children, according to reports.

Rescue workers used bulldozers to remove rubble and extract people trapped in the two buildings flattened by the explosion in Sarmada in Idlib province on Sunday.

A civil defence source told AFP that rescue workers had pulled out “five people who were still alive”.

But the death toll rose as more bodies were retrieved from the rubble, according to Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

Three members of the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were also killed, he said.

“The explosion occurred in a weapons depot in a residential building in Sarmada,” said Abdel Rahman, whose group relies on a network of sources inside Syria.

The cause of the blast was “not yet clear”, he added.

Most of those killed were family members of fighters from HTS, an alliance led by jihadists from Syria’s former al-Qaida affiliate, who had been displaced to the area from the central province of Homs.

A rescue worker carried the motionless body of a small child from the wreckage to an ambulance, an AFP correspondent at the scene said.

White Helmet rescue workers attempted to lift part of a floor of one of the buildings with a tall crane, as three young boys watched on in silence, perched on a rock.

Behind mounds of rubble, the facade of a building was scorched black, due to a fire after the blast.

Most of Idlib is controlled by rebels and HTS, but the Islamic State jihadist group also has sleeper cells in the area.

President Bashar al-Assad’s regime holds a small slither of south-eastern Idlib.

In recent months, a series of explosions and assassinations – mainly targeting rebel officials and fighters – have rocked the province.

While some attacks have been claimed by IS, most are the result of infighting since last year between other groups.

Regime forces have since last week ramped up their deadly bombardment of southern Idlib and sent reinforcements to nearby areas they control.

On Friday, 12 civilians, three of them children, were killed in regime bombardment of the towns of Khan Sheikhun and al-Tah.

Assad has warned that government forces intend to retake Idlib, after his Russia-backed regime regained control of large parts of rebel-held territory in other parts of Syria.

On Thursday, government helicopters dropped leaflets over towns in the eastern part of Idlib urging people to surrender.

The United Nations appealed the same day for talks to avert “a civilian bloodbath” in the province.

Jan Egeland, head of the UN’s humanitarian taskforce for Syria, said: “The war cannot be allowed to go to Idlib.”

Around 2.5 million people live in the province, half of them displaced by fighting in other regions of the country.

More than 350,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since Syria’s civil war started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

Times of Israel with additional report from Guardian UK