New York police violently arrest pro-Palestinian protesters marking the Nakba | Israel’s War on Gaza News

Several people were arrested while attempting to demonstrate in Brooklyn to protest the war in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948.

Police beat and arrested several protesters during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Brooklyn, New York, in the latest crackdown on voices speaking out against the war on Gaza in the United States.

Protesters gathered Saturday in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of southwest Brooklyn, which is home to a large Muslim community, including people of Palestinian and Yemeni descent.

The peaceful protest marking the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 – continued for several hours amid a heavy police presence, with officers attempting to prevent a march.

“Protesters started marching down the street and shortly after, the New York police came from a side street and started randomly arresting people,” Katie Smith, an independent journalist present, told Al Jazeera. on site.

“They were pushed to the ground and often placed under arrest by several police officers, who beat them, punching them on their upper bodies and around their heads. There were several waves of arrests during the march, which took place peacefully.

Smith said the local community’s response has been “outraged,” especially since Bay Ridge has been the site of pro-Palestinian marches for more than a decade, but never such a heavy-handed police response.

Local sources said at least a dozen arrests were made Saturday from a crowd of several hundred. Videos from the scene showed police dragging protesters away as people shouted at them to stop, and a line of handcuffed demonstrators could be seen being loaded into a van.

The NYPD has made hundreds of arrests during protests calling for an end to the war on Gaza, including during a massive raid on the Columbia University campus in early May.

On Saturday, a crowd of several hundred people, including a number of Jewish demonstrators, also demonstrated in the rain in Washington, DC, to mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba.

“These are Palestinian-Americans and their supporters, coming to the nation’s capital, chanting ‘Free Palestine’ and accusing US President Joe Biden of being complicit in genocide,” Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou Castro reported from the stage .

Mohamad Habehh, a member of the advocacy group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), said community members were trying to educate people about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We see the blank checks that continue to be paid to the Israeli army,” he told Al Jazeera.

Earlier this month, Biden halted the shipment of some 3,500 massive bombs to Israel as the Israeli military launched a ground offensive on Rafah in southern Gaza – as well as other areas of the besieged enclave – despite the dire humanitarian situation.

But Biden has promised that arms shipments to Israel will not stop completely and is proposing a new billion-dollar package including tank shells despite growing international condemnation.