Tens of thousands of Palestinian supporters have gathered, in recent days, to take part in mass demonstrations, across the globe, against Israel’s ongoing military assault on the Gaza Strip. The collective outrage incited by the current string of atrocities committed, by Israel against the Palestinian people, has extended as far as Kashmir and Beijing, as photos, footage and eyewitness reports continue to surface on the internet, gripping the international community in an unprecedented state of shock and horror.
While newly commenced ground operations continue to stack the human toll in Gaza at an ever-increasing rate, nearly 20,000 people from various parts the United Kingdom marched, on Saturday, from PM David Cameron’s Downing Street residence to the Israeli embassy, where masses of protesters observed a minute’s silence for the victims.
The anti-Israeli demonstration was the largest in recent history, according to Ma’an, and reminiscent of the millions who demonstrated against the West’s coalitive war on Iraq, in 2003, when people from over 600 cities around the world came together to voice their communal anti-war dissent.
‘Speakers during the rally were shouting their anger, singers sang for Gaza, and there was a very moving minute of silence for Gaza during which many people sobbed,’ one of the protesters told Ma’an.
Helicopters, she said, did not deter anybody from speaking, adding:
‘We will be back every Saturday for the foreseeable future; tens of thousands of us will not stop until Gaza’s siege is lifted and Palestinians begin to taste freedom.’
London photos(s): Guy Smallman, Video: Reel News
Thousands marched in cities around France as well, on Saturday, according to Haaretz, who recently reported Paris demonstrators climbing to the top of a building in order to burn an Israeli flag and at least one car, in the streets.
(The French government attempted to ban the march, but citizens defied the ban.)
Last Saturday, the Israeli daily reported that Indian forces fired on protesters in Kashmir, killing a teenage boy; dozens of students were arrested the week prior, while demonstrating outside the Israeli embassy in New Delhi. National Conference constituents marched in Srinagar on Saturday, as well; protesters gathered on Thursday, in Ahmadabad.
Friday gatherings took place in the Indonesian city of Jarkata, as well as in Beijing, China, where protesters gathered outside the Palestinian embassy, voicing their dissent over the recent Israeli airstrikes which have targeted mostly Gazan residential homes, municipal facilities and hospitals, to include centers for the elderly and disabled, while killing hundreds — young, old, entire families — and injuring thousands, with tens of thousands left to seek shelter at a small number of UNRWA schools located in the region.
South African supporters cried out for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, in the streets of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.
In Turkey, hundreds pelted a top Israeli diplomat’s Ankara residence with stones on Friday, also, while police unleashed water cannons on protesters trying to enter the Israeli Consulate grounds in Istanbul.
Just the day prior, protesters gathered at La Constitucion square in Malaga, Spain, as Israeli PM Netanyahu’s office announced the ground assault that is now rapidly morphing the Gaza Strip from a heavily militarized zone of occupational siege into a smoking cesspool of chaos and human despair. More than 2,000 gathered in Madrid, on the same day, to protest the atrocity currently taking place under the Israeli regime.
Protests also took place on Thursday, in Seoul, South Korea, as well as Athens, Greece, where demonstrators also burned an Israeli flag outside of the Israeli embassy.
Earlier in the week, on July 11, solidarity movements from London and Berlin to Tunisia and Washington DC organized with banners and shouted slogans, in the streets of their cities, against the devastating and repeated Israeli air strikes.
Mass protests were also organized in the other cities, worldwide, including Tokyo, Bogota, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Maldives, Milan, Rome, Santiago, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Oslo, Sydney, Houston, Tempe, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, New York City, Columbus, Vienna, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ottowa, Montreal, Metz, Akwar, Haifa and Amman.
To be noted, the Jewish community has played a considerable role in the international outcries of the past week — as in recent days, when tens of thousands of orthodox patrons gathered in the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, in mass mourning over the newly proposed Israeli military draft bill which would require all Jewish citizens of Israel to take part in the massacre and ethnic cleansing being perpetrated on Palestinians by the Netanyahu coalition.
Over the past few years, the orthodox community has engaged in a number of related acts of civil disobedience against the increasingly historical abominations of the so-called ‘Jewish state’from Jerusalem to London and New York City, going so far as to burn the Israeli flag in the streets, also, in mass protest with family members and friends.
