PARIS - Thousands of protesters calling for Israel to stop its military campaign in Gaza rallied in European cities Saturday, even as Israel reportedly is poised to declare a unilateral ceasefire.
The demonstrations across the continent were largely peaceful apart from bursts of violence in Paris and London.
In the French capital, an estimated 2,600 people, some carrying Palestinian flags, marched through the city centre behind a banner declaring "Palestinian resistance: Stop the French-Israeli collaboration".
Police however stepped in when the marchers reached the Garnier Opera plaza, using tear gas to stop some protesters who tried to force open a gate at the opera house. Several people were arrested, an AFP correspondent reported.
Similar protests were held in cities around France including Marseille where Mustapha Mohammadi, the head of a Franco-Palestinian peace group, told the crowd that in Gaza scenes of massacre were "taking place before the cameras and in the face of the passivity of the Americans and the Europeans".
In London, police detained one group of up to 200 people who repeatedly avoided filter cordons, who police believed were heading to the Israeli embassy which was the scene of violent protests last weekend.
Some protesters smashed windows and looted shops, Scotland Yard said.
Earlier about 3,500 people filled Trafalgar Square, police said, for what was billed as a "demonstration against Israel's barbarity and war crimes".
"We must negotiate with Hamas, now," said veteran socialist Tony Benn, 83, referring to the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, where more than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed since the Israeli offensive began on December 27.
Israel's main ally the United States was a target of protesters' anger in Muslim-majority Turkey, where around 400 activists from a pro-Islamic group rallied across from the US embassy in Ankara.
They held banners reading "Down with the great Satan!" and "USA: You are shareholders of the crime organisation Israel" as riot police prevented them from approaching the embassy building.
On Istanbul's main commercial street, Amnesty International erected mock gravestones marked with "Killed while helping the injured" and "Died because of lack of medicines" to protest the killing of civilians in Gaza.
In Bosnia, with its large Muslim population, protestors wearing yellow armbands marked "Gaza" formed a line next to a former football pitch in Sarajevo that was turned into a cemetery during the country's 1992-1995 civil war.
"What we want is to remind the people of Israel of Jewish suffering and to call on them to show solidarity with the suffering of the civilians in Gaza," said Bosnian film director Jasmila Zbanic, referring to the yellow armbands that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust.
"We who have survived the (Sarajevo) siege know that aggression is a horrific act," she added.
The UN European headquarters was the rallying point in Geneva for hundreds of protesters against Israel's attacks on Gaza, who formed a circle around rows of white bundles on the ground.
The bundles symbolised the "number of dead in Gaza", said one organiser Hafid Ouardiri.
"They did not die for nothing. They are dead so that the Palestinians can be free," he told AFP.
Many children were present at the Geneva protest "because children have become the symbol of those buffeted in this conflict," Ouardiri said.
Demonstrations also took place in cities around Spain and Belgium, and in Athens where more than 1,000 marched to the Israeli embassy, led by some 30 Palestinian immigrants.
The local Palestinian community also organised demonstrations in Berlin and in Rome, while a protest in Assisi drew former Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema who has criticised the Israeli offensive for fuelling Arab extremist propaganda and damaging Israeli interests.
While Europeans have displayed chiefly pro-Palestinian sentiment in most demonstrations, support for Israel could be seen Saturday in the Swiss capital Bern at a rally that drew some 1,500 people, the Swiss news agency ATS reported.
Karl-Hartmut Moerschel, who heads the Bern section of the Swiss-Israel association, told told the gathering that the Gaza offensive was "necessary and fair."
On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and three civilians have been killed in combat or in rocket strikes by militants in Gaza, who have fired more than 700 rockets and mortar rounds into Israel since the start of the war, according to the Israeli army.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was poised to announce a unilateral ceasefire later Saturday after a security council meeting, a senior government official told AFP.
Hamas however has vowed to battle on until Israel withdraws all forces from the battered enclave and reopen Gaza's border crossings.