Jerusalem police closed all entrances to the Old City to traffic and virtually all restaurants in the city were closed.

Thirty families who were evicted from Homesh and Sa-Nur three years ago when the northern West Bank settlements were evacuated and destroyed made their way back there for Tisha b'Av prayers over the ruins of their former homes.

Yossi Dagan, who lived there, said: "There's nothing like the ruins of Homesh, which had been maliciously and pointlessly destroyed, to truly get a sense of the tragic fall of the Temple."

The saddest day in the Jewish calendar was marked by Jews throughout the world.

In NEW YORK, 100 people gathered to pray for Israel and for Jewish communities in danger.

They told passers-by it was Tisha b'Av and that their prayers were for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the threat to Israel from Iran and for jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

In war-torn TBILISI, Lasha Zhvania, who was Georgian ambassador to Israel until a month ago, said of the Russian invasion: "Today isn't just the Jews' Tisha b'Av, it's a Tisha b'Av for Georgia as well."

In BEIJING, Israel's President Shimon Peres, who was in the Chinese capital for the Olympics, was joined by Chabad Rabbi Shimon Freundlich at a reading of the Book of Lamentations on Saturday night.

In a desire to enable the president to avoid transgressing Shabbat, the Chinese arranged for him to be accommodated in the Olympic Village inside the stadium so that he could easily walk to the opening ceremony.

In VILNIUS, Lithuania, on Tisha b'Av the Jewish community centre was daubed with "Jews get out" and other antisemitic graffiti.

The museum next door was covered in swastikas, a Star of David on which a hanging man was depicted, and drawings of concentration camps.

Daniel Kirshner, 25, from Jerusalem but now living in Vilnius, told the website Ynet: "We were walking in the Jewish quarter and suddenly we saw this.

"Our first thought was that we were back in 1934."