Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar contacted his Greek counterpart, Giorgos Gerapetritis, regarding one recent incident, and the Athens government pledged to adopt a harsher stance and use anti-racist legislation to crack down on protesters.

“Anyone who attempts to prevent a third-country national from entering the country legally will be prosecuted, arrested and subsequently subject to criminal proceedings under anti-racism legislation,” Minister for Public Order Michalis Chrisochoidis said last week.

On Tuesday afternoon, demonstrators unfurled a huge Palestinian flag and shouted, “Free, free Palestine” as tourists disembarked the Crown Iris from Israel for bus tours of the island.

According to local media reports, scuffles broke out between riot police and protesters. Police used pepper spray to disperse the crowd and detained four people.

This is the third similar incident in a week. On Monday, a fracas took place when another cruise ship carrying 600 Israelis docked in Rhodes. Organizers said 13 people were detained during the demonstration.

Demonstrators unfurled a huge Palestinian flag and shouted, “Free, free Palestine” as tourists disembarked the Crown Iris from Israel for bus tours of the island. | Lefteries Damianidis/EPA

Last Tuesday, the Crown Iris docked at the island of Syros, but its passengers didn’t disembark after protesters demonstrated at the port. Some passengers reacted by waving Israeli flags and chanting against the demonstrators. The cruise ship eventually departed for Cyprus.

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“Having lost control of the pandemic and the economy, the government tries to set up an artificial scene of tensions in order to distract from its criminal responsibilities,” Syriza, the main opposition party, said of the demonstration ban.

Greece’s Amnesty International branch, meanwhile, documented several incidents in recent months of detainees and protesters being mistreated, overuse of chemical irritants such as tear gas, and other cases of excessive force.

Amnesty — as well other organizations such as the Hellenic League for Human Rights, opposition parties and the Athens bar association — say police brutality has surged since Mitsotakis came to power a year and a half ago in an election that toppled the leftist Syriza government.

In a report published in November but completed in May, a special committee set up to investigate police violence found that officers often acted with impunity when they became involved in violent incidents. It also observed failures to take testimony from critical witnesses and to have detainees examined by doctors, bias by investigative police bodies and a striking similarity in the statements of officers accused of brutality.

“Police violence and impunity have a long record in Greece and in no case can they be considered ‘isolated incidents,’” said Gabriel Sakellaridis, Amnesty International’s executive director in Greece. “Especially in the last year and a half, it is pretty evident that there is a hike in these incidents.”

Protest ban

Mitsotakis was elected on a law-and-order platform, having accused Syriza of allowing pockets of lawlessness to form, particularly in Athens’ anarchist Exarchia neighborhood. The country and particularly its capital had been rocked by at times violent protests over the past decade as Athens became the heart of Greece’s anti-austerity movement; its streets sometimes resembled a battle zone.

The battle against coronavirus has shuttered European cities and created huge traffic jams on what just a few weeks ago were open borders.

Sometimes the best way to understand a new situation is to step back — in this case way, way back — and get a look at what Europe under coronavirus lockdown looks like from space.

Those images show empty plazas and streets, and also contain practical information that the European Commission is using in an effort to cajole countries into letting traffic flow across closed borders.

The Commission’s images — obtained by POLITICO — offer a detailed view of how border closures are impacting logistic supply lines, endangering the flow of food and medical goods within the EU’s single market. Such measures have created kilometers of tailbacks along frontiers that, until just a few days ago, had been the world’s largest border-free zone.

“We … used satellite images to show the states what they are doing to themselves by cutting themselves off economically,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told German radio Friday morning.

The satellite images, below, show a traffic jam Thursday at the crossing of Nickelsdorf-Hegyeshalom on the Austrian-Hungarian border, stretching up to 30 kilometers into Austria. Hungary on Tuesday closed its borders to passenger traffic and restricted freight traffic to designated corridors.

The pictures come from the EU’s Copernicus system of Earth surveillance satellites. They are activated to provide mapping in the event of natural disasters and to monitor climate change and air pollution.

Private Earth imaging companies such as Planet and Maxar — both from the U.S. — also have access to their own imaging.

One shows Venice, a tourism hub now left with empty streets and cleaner canals, a stark change from the crowds there a year ago.

Agnieszka Lukaszczyk, from Planet, said the shots are helping governments and emergency services respond to rapid changes.

“Empty streets, reduced traffic, stockpiling of materials, are the direct results of the virus and with daily imaging we capture all of these changes in near real time,” she said.

Maxar has images that show empty city squares in Lisbon, Munich and Milan, along with a deserted Colosseum in Rome.

“Particularly now, people are hungry to know what’s happening,” said Stephen Wood, a senior director at Maxar.