Israel's biggest Gay Pride event was slated to kick off at noon Friday, after being cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic.

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Police expected the event to draw the country's biggest crowds since the start of the pandemic, with tens of thousands of revelers and supporters expected to flock to Tel Aviv for the party.

The parade is scheduled to set out at 12 p.m. from Shalag St. at the corner of Herbert Samuel and move toward Charles Clore park at the southern end of the Tel Aviv promenade, for a total distance of 1.7 km. (1.05 miles).

The gay pride parade was scheduled to coincide with a government decision to reinstate masks indoors, but security forces were more concerned about other safety risks to participants, and nearly 1,500 police personnel, as well as MDA paramedics and firefighters, were deployed all along the route of the march.

Sadly, the concerns about participants' safety were not empty.

Detectives from the Tel Aviv District Police arrested on Friday a man carrying various weapons, including an electric taser, nunchuks, and chains. The man, a resident of Tel Aviv in his 30s, had been under surveillance. He was arrested and his weapons confiscated. Later Friday, the man was due to appear at the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court for a remand hearing.

Police have asked the public to keep their eyes open about potential threats and call the 100 hotline to report any suspicious activity.

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New York, one of the most progressive cities in the world, was dressed in rainbow colors to welcome two parades in Manhattan as well as several more in the other four boroughs.

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It was also the first time the US hosted the global World Pride parade.

Some 150,000 parade marchers and an estimated 4 million spectators commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising that triggered the modern LGBTQ movement, with corporate sponsorship and police protection that would have been unthinkable half a century ago.

A world away from the New York celebration, marchers in Istanbul braving the official order banning the pride parade were faced with a heavy police response.

Tear gas sent people scurrying for cover in the megalopolis bridging Europe and Asia, as security forces enforced the ban for the fifth year in a row.

Last week, Erdogan's AKP party lost Turkey's largest city in an electoral upset, with a secular progressive to now be in charge.

This article was originally published by i24NEWS.

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Some 10,000 revelers waving rainbow flags joined the carnival-like procession, as over 2,500 police officers in plain clothes, in uniform and on horseback patrolled the crowd.

"Homosexuals, lesbians, transgenders. Jerusalem is mine too," marchers chanted.

The gay community's visibility in conservative Jerusalem tends to draw vocal protest from members of the city's substantial Orthodox population. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews reject the public display of homosexuality as an "abomination" that desecrates the biblical city and flouts Jewish law.

Police said they arrested 52 suspects who planned to disrupt the event, including a man carrying a knife near the parade route. Counter-protesters jeered through megaphones and carried signs saying "Jerusalem is not Sodom" and "Keep the Holy Land holy." Police confined their demonstration to a penned-off park far from the procession.

Ahead of the event, the city said it had taken down a series of homophobic banners that had recently appeared on Jerusalem billboards.

The parade passed peacefully this year but has ended violently before: In 2015, an ultra-Orthodox extremist stabbed a 16-year-old girl to death and wounded several others. The assailant struck shortly after completing a 10-year prison sentence for stabbing participants at the 2005 march.

Jerusalem's tense march contrasts with the more free-wheeling one staged every year in Tel Aviv, a secular coastal city celebrated for its gay-friendly lifestyle, set to draw hundreds of thousands of tourists for the occasion next week.

Support for gay rights is increasingly widespread in Israel, where gay people serve openly in the military and parliament. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Amir Ohana, the country's first openly gay cabinet minister, from his right-wing Likud party. Ohana stopped by the parade and was met with boos from the liberal crowd.

Wrapped in a string of rainbow flags, Meitav Aaron, an American gay student who grew up religious, said he wore a Jewish skullcap to the parade "to show that there are religious Jews who are also believing in this cause ... that Judaism means as much to me as to the Orthodox guy that might be protesting this entire event."

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