Israel and Hamas at war | Demonstrations in support of Palestinians in several cities

(London) Tens of thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday in support of the Palestinians in London, like thousands in Paris and New York, while the Gaza Strip was bombed again on the 22^e day of the war triggered by the Hamas attack, the deadliest in Israeli history.

In the British capital, for the third consecutive weekend, a procession was formed at the call of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) movement: it left the banks of the Thames to follow a route leading to Parliament Square, not far from Big Ben, while more than a thousand police officers were mobilized.

“A humanitarian pause is not enough, there must be a complete ceasefire,” one demonstrator, Dani Nadiri, a 36-year-old television producer, told AFP, “it is time to do something rather than further escalation.”

Condemning both the Hamas attacks and the Israeli government, “which has a much bigger arsenal,” Amar Picha, 31, a marketing project manager, lamented the “destroyed innocent lives.”

“I’m disgusted, it doesn’t make sense,” added Noori Butt, a 38-year-old teacher, “I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to my two-year-old son when he’s older.” . “I want peace”, “lasting peace for everyone”.

London police announced two arrests: that of a man suspected of assaulting a police officer, who was taken to hospital, and that of another man for a public order offense aggravated by his character racial and death threats.

Peaceful protests

In the French capital, thousands took part, peacefully, in a rally “in support of the Palestinian people”, banned by the authorities, notably shouting “Gaza, Gaza, Paris is with you!” » and “It is humanity that is being assassinated, children of Gaza, children of Palestine,” noted an AFP journalist.

There were at least 15 arrests and 1,077 fines, according to the Paris police headquarters.

Place du Châtelet, in the city center, the crowd was prevented from moving by a very large police force.

Among the 3,000 and 4,000 demonstrators, according to the police, were elected officials.

“The emergency is the ceasefire, to stop killing women, children, men,” said the deputy mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes, in the Paris region, Elsa Touré, on site, while asserting that “the Israeli state has been walking on international law for years.”

“In the current context, this ban [de la manifestation] is scandalous,” responded Bertrand Heilbronn, president of the France Palestine Solidarity Association.

The authorities had cited in particular “the seriousness of the risk of disturbances to public order” and the “exacerbated tensions […] with a rise in anti-Semitic acts in France.”

In Marseille, in the south-east of France, an authorized demonstration brought together 1,800 people according to the police headquarters, 4,000 according to its organizers.

Peaceful gatherings in Switzerland too.

In Zurich, the demonstrators numbered around 7,000, according to the organizers, “several thousand”, according to the police.

There were 2000 in Lausanne, 1800 in Geneva, more than a thousand in Bern.

Brooklyn Bridge closed

Across the Atlantic, thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators descended on Brooklyn, the largest borough of New York, on Saturday.

The crowd, which left the Brooklyn Museum, reached the famous Brooklyn Bridge which links this borough to the island of Manhattan and which the police had to close to traffic due to the crowds.

The New York megalopolis, home to between 1.6 and two million Jews – the largest Jewish community in the world after Israel – and hundreds of thousands of Muslims, has been shaken for three weeks by demonstrations, rallies and vigils for the Palestinians. or for Israel.