The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, on Thursday ordered a ban in France on “pro-Palestinian demonstrations because they are likely to generate disturbances to public order”, with arrests for offenders.
On October 7, in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish rest, hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel in vehicles, by air and sea, to kill more than a thousand civilians in the streets, in their homes or in the middle of a rave, sowing terror under a deluge of rockets.
Around 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed in the Hamas offensive, and 1,354 Palestinians according to local authorities, including many civilians, died in six days in the Gaza Strip, drowned under Israeli strikes launched in response, which transformed entire buildings into ruins.
The Minister of the Interior sent this instruction to the prefects through a message that AFP was able to consult. The ministry specified that the arrests would concern “the organizers and troublemakers”.
For its part, the Paris administrative court confirmed the ban on the demonstration in support of the Palestinian people planned for the evening at Place de la République, rejecting the association’s appeals which requested its maintenance. However, it still took place.
“The major risk is that a dynamic of growing tensions is triggered which fuels resentment,” explains the president of the Viavoice polling institute, François Miquet-Marty, to AFP.
According to him, there “is therefore a phenomenon of fears which are accumulating: fear of violence, community tensions, economic concerns, in a country where the French are already worried about the future”.
A risk taken seriously by Minister Darmanin, who has identified “more than a hundred anti-Semitic acts”, ranging from tags to insults, since Saturday and announced 41 arrests.
Some 500 sites (schools, synagogues, etc.) are now protected by 10,000 police officers and gendarmes.
Gérald Darmanin, however, stressed that there was “no sign in the neighborhoods, in the streets” of the conflict being imported into France.
Call for unity
French President Emmanuel Macron called on the French on Thursday to remain “united” at a time of a bloody war since Saturday between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
“Let us not add by illusion or by calculation national fractures to international fractures and let us not give in in the face of any form of hatred,” declared the French head of state during a televised speech, specifying that the results of the French people killed during the bloody Hamas offensive had climbed to 13 nationals.
“The only response to terrorism, the only possible one, is always a strong and just response, strong because it is just,” Emmanuel Macron also said.
“Israel has the right to defend itself by eliminating terrorist groups, including Hamas, through targeted actions but by preserving civilian populations, because that is the duty of democracies,” he insisted.
The French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, also announced Thursday that she will travel to Israel on Sunday.
Anti-terrorism investigation
Seventeen French people, including four children, were also missing before the president announced a 13th death on Thursday.
“I am thinking of the families this evening. I want to tell them that France is doing everything possible alongside the Israeli authorities and with our partners to bring them back safely to their homes,” declared the French president, pressed during the day, from Tel Aviv, by French families of hostages presumed to “intervene”.
The French national anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office announced Thursday that it had opened a preliminary investigation, in particular for assassinations in connection with a terrorist enterprise, after the Hamas attack in Israel, in which at least 13 French people were killed.
Investigations were also opened for kidnapping and sequestration of people, including minors, in an organized gang and in connection with a terrorist enterprise.
The so-called “mirror” investigation, carried out in parallel with the Israeli investigations, will notably allow French victims — dead, injured or missing — or their relatives to be interviewed and informed of the progress of the investigations by Israel.
With The duty