Early Friday, Palestinian militants threw a bomb at a French cultural center in Gaza City, and many Palestinians began boycotting European goods, especially those from Denmark.
“Whoever defames our prophet should be executed,” said Ismail Hassan, 37, a tailor who marched through the pouring rain along with hundreds of others in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
“Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up,” protesters in Ramallah chanted.
In mosques throughout Palestinian cities, clerics condemned the cartoons. An imam at the Omari Mosque in Gaza City told 9,000 worshippers that those behind the drawings should have their heads cut off.
“If they want a war of religions, we are ready,” Hassan Sharaf, an imam in Nablus, said in his sermon.
About 10,000 demonstrators, including gunmen from the Islamic militant group Hamas firing in the air, marched through Gaza City to the Palestinian legislature, where they climbed on the roof, waving green Hamas banners.
“We are ready to redeem you with our souls and our blood our beloved prophet,” they chanted. “Down, Down Denmark.”
Up to 300 hardline Islamic activists in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, went on a rampage in the lobby of a building housing the Danish embassy in Jakarta.
Shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest), they smashed lamps with bamboo sticks, threw chairs, lobbed rotten eggs and tomatoes and tore up a Danish flag. No one was hurt.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, hundreds of Palestinians attended a Hamas-organised rally, tearing up a French flag and holding up banners reading: “The assault on the Prophet is an assault on Islam”.