Thousands of Parisian protesters have staged a mass rally in solidarity with Palestinians and demanded the Israeli regime forces put an end to the “massacre” in Gaza, calling French president Emmanuel Macron an “assassin.”
Footage shows protesters marching on Sunday with Palestinian flags and banners displaying slogans such as ‘From Gaza to Paris, Resistance!’ and ‘Cease the fire’. Others were heard chanting ‘Macron assassin’ and releasing green and red smoke.
Some protesters were singing and holding photos of victims killed by Israeli forces during the months-long onslaught in the besieged territory, while another group was marching with a large banner reading (French): ‘Stop the massacre in Gaza, France must demand an immediate ceasefire.’
“How much more time was needed for France, its government, and all the political and trade union organizations to finally commit forcefully to say alongside the Palestinians: ‘Stop the genocide’,” Omar Alsoumi, Member of Urgence Palestine association and co-organizer of the march said during the rally.
“The words are so important, yes it is a massacre, yes these are war crimes, yes these are crimes against humanity, this is genocide,” Alsoumi added.
Other protesters lashed out at the French government for not taking any actions against the Israeli regime’s onslaught in Gaza, saying the silence amounts to “complicity.”
“The government has lost the little humanity that it had, it no longer has any humanity in the end. That’s the least we can say,” Abdou, a protester, said.
“What worries me is that deaths are added to deaths, that massacres are added to massacres, that’s what worries me, and I think that this should worry a large part of the population, I believe that this is the case, but also it must have worried our political leaders, who honestly for a large part of them are in a form of silence which is a guilty silence and which honestly amounts to complicity,” said Manuel Bompard, Deputy from La France Insoumise (LFI).
Similar rallies were held in other European capitals which came after the Israeli regime forces began bombings, shelling, and land attacks on Gaza on October 7. The war has killed more than 19,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Elsewhere across Europe, thousands of people took part in pro-Palestine demos in London, Barcelona, Munich, Brussels, Istanbul, and other major European cities over the weekend.
Protesters in Brussels took to the streets on Sunday afternoon to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. According to Brussels police, around 27,000 demonstrators took to the streets.
In Istanbul, thousands of Turkish demonstrators took part in the pro-Palestine rally.
Footage from the rally showed demonstrators waving flags of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement as well as large Palestinian and Turkish flags, banners and placards reading, “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Stop war,” “To wake up all those asleep,” and more.
“I condemn the baby killers from here,” said one demonstrator Murat Omeroglu.
“This march has only one purpose; we have been witnessing a massacre for 72 days in Gaza, which has become an open-air prison in the world for 17 years. People here are being tested with hunger, disease and death. All the people here want to call out to the world to be a breath for Gaza, to be medicine for Gaza, to stop the massacre of Gaza. This is the only goal,” said another demonstrator, Osman Atalay.
