Riot police fired teargas to push back hundreds of Jordanian demonstrators marching on the Israeli embassy in Amman on Sunday in protest at Israel’s latest storming of hospitals in Gaza and mounting civilian deaths, Reuters reports.

The authorities had earlier deployed riot police to disperse demonstrators gathered in the Kaloti mosque in the capital who were planning to march on the heavily fortified Israeli embassy nearby.

Several protesters were beaten and several arrested as they tried to break a heavy police cordon around the embassy, witnesses said. Police were not immediately available for comment.

They chanted “No Zionist embassy on Jordanian land,” in one of the slogans that have become customary at protests that call on Jordan to scrap its unpopular peace treaty with Israel that often prompt accusations of a sellout.

Many of Jordan’s 12 million citizens are of Palestinian origin, they or their parents having been expelled or fled to Jordan in the fighting that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948. They have close family ties with their kin on the other side of the Jordan River.