THOUSANDS of pro-Palestinian protesters in the Netherlands on Sunday protested at the presence of the Israeli president at the opening of the country’s new National Holocaust Museum.

This comes as Israel’s killing spree against the Palestinians in Gaza is set to top 31,000.

President Isaac Herzog was in Amsterdam to open the new museum that tells the story of some of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps, as well as the history of their persecution under German occupation during World War II, before the deportations began.

The museum “gives a face and a voice to the Jewish victims of persecution in the Netherlands,” the Dutch King Willem-Alexander said in the address at the inaugural ceremony on Sunday. 

It also “shows us the devastating consequences that anti-semitism can have,” he said.

President Herzog hailed the Netherland’s initiative to create a new Holocaust museum amid rising anti-semitism around the world.

“At this pivotal moment in time, this institution sends a clear, powerful statement,” Herzog said. “Remember! Remember the horrors born of hatred, anti-semitism and racism and never again allow them to flourish.”

But thousands of protesters gathered at the Waterloo Square in central Amsterdam, near the museum and the synagogue, waving Palestinian flags, chanting “never again is now” and demanding an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The protest leaders made it clear that they were against President Herzog’s presence, not the museum and what it commemorates.

Joana Cavaco, an anti-war activist with the Erev Rav Jewish collective, said: “How is it possible that such a sacred space is being used to normalise genocide today?”

Pro-Palestinian Dutch organisation the Rights Forum called Mr Herzog’s presence “a slap in the face of the Palestinians who can only helplessly watch how Israel murders their loved ones and destroys their land.”