A number of arrested as they tried to march in Brooklyn to protest the Gaza conflict and the 1948 ethnic cleaning of the Palestinians.
Police have overwhelmed and arrested a number of demonstrators at a pro-Palestine protest in New York’s Brooklyn within the newest crackdown on voices talking towards the conflict on Gaza in america.
Protesters gathered on Saturday within the Bay Ridge neighbourhood in southwest Brooklyn, house to a big Muslim neighborhood, together with individuals of Palestinian and Yemeni origins.
The peaceable protest to mark the Nakba – the ethnic cleaning of a whole bunch of 1000’s of Palestinians in 1948 – went on for a number of hours amid heavy police presence, with officers attempting to stop a march.
“Protesters started to march on the street and shortly after, the New York Police Division got here in from a aspect road and began grabbing individuals at random,” Katie Smith, a contract journalist who was on the scene, advised Al Jazeera.
“They have been tackled to the bottom and have been typically positioned underneath arrest by a number of officers, who beat them, punching them on their higher our bodies and round their heads. There have been a number of waves of arrests throughout the march, which was peaceable.”
Smith mentioned the response from the area people had been one in every of “outrage”, particularly as Bay Ridge has seen pro-Palestinian marches for over a decade, however by no means a police response this brutal.
Native sources mentioned a minimum of a dozen arrests have been made on Saturday out of a crowd of a number of hundred. Movies from the scene confirmed police dragging demonstrators away as individuals yelled at them to cease, and a line of handcuffed protesters might be seen loaded right into a van.
The NYPD has made a whole bunch of arrests in protests demanding an finish to the conflict on Gaza, together with throughout a large raid on the campus of Columbia College in the beginning of Could.
On Saturday, a crowd of a number of hundred individuals, together with a variety of Jewish demonstrators, additionally protested in Washington, DC underneath the rain to mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba.
“They’re Palestinian People and they’re supporters, coming to the nation’s capital, chanting ‘free Palestine’ and accusing US President Joe Biden of being complicit in genocide,” reported Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou Castro from the scene.
Mohamad Habehh, a member of the rights group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) demonstrating, mentioned neighborhood members have been attempting to coach individuals in regards to the Israel-Palestine battle.
“We see the clean checks that hold going to the Israeli army,” he advised Al Jazeera.
Earlier this month, Biden halted a cargo of some 3,500 large bombs to Israel because the Israeli army launched a floor offensive on Rafah in southern Gaza – together with different areas of the besieged enclave – regardless of the dire humanitarian state of affairs.
However Biden has promised that weapons shipments to Israel aren’t stopping altogether, and is advancing a brand new $1bn bundle together with tank shells regardless of rising worldwide condemnation.
