The Hague, Netherlands ? Israelis and Palestinians brought the arguments over Israel’s controversial barricade in the West Bank onto neutral ground Monday, using a legal hearing here to press their grievances in the court of world opinion.

Legal debate over the barrier took place inside the Peace Palace, where the International Court of Justice meets. Outside the courtroom, grisly images of violence — from the blasted shell of an Israeli bus to photos of Palestinian children’s bullet-torn bodies — competed for sympathy on the streets of this placid European city.

The world court’s hearing was a trigger for violent demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where thousands of Palestinians threw rocks at Israeli troops — and dodged tear gas or rubber-coated bullets in return — during a day of coordinated marches. They were responding to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s call to “make your voices heard.”

“There cannot be peace and security between the two peoples, or in the whole region, as long as this racial segregation wall is being built,” Arafat said.

In The Hague, Palestinian lawyers argued that Israel’s 452-mile link of wire, military patrol paths and concrete tower blocks that cuts through Palestinian land was the foundation of a permanent border that must be uprooted. They called it a “wall,” and its construction was nothing less than an Israeli land grab that will make it impossible to patch together an eventual Palestinian state.

The Palestinians are hoping that the United Nations’ highest judicial body will heed a request from the General Assembly to deliver a nonbinding “advisory opinion” on the barrier’s “legal consequences in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

The Israeli government contends the court has no business offering an opinion on something as vague as “legal consequences.” Its lawyers complain the process does not refer to Palestinian “acts of terrorism” that make the barrier necessary. They are building a defensive “fence,” the Israelis say, that can be removed should the suicide attacks end.

The official Palestinian position does not object to the Israelis building a wall, only to the route the existing one runs. Nasser Al-Kidwa, head of the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations and an architect of the legal challenge, told the court the Israelis could build a wall “and raise it to 80 meters rather than 8 meters if it wished,” provided it stuck to Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

A demonstrator in favor of the barrier wall around the West Bank stands near a poster with pictures of the 926 terror victims outside the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands. Hearings began Monday in The Hague on the legality of the Israeli barrier.