Lebanon police beat demonstrators rallying against US embassy move
Police in Lebanon beat demonstrators and fired tear gas and water cannon as more than 1,000 people protested against president Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Protesters burnt tyres, American and Israeli flags and an effigy of Mr Trump, in front of a barricade that had been erected by police about a kilometre from the American embassy in Lebanon.
The embassy was relocated from downtown Beirut to a well-fortified compound on a hill outside the city after the building was targeted in a 1983 bomb attack that killed 63 people.
Yesterday’s demonstration began about 9am, with clashes breaking out soon after as demonstrators tried to remove the police barrier, although the situation later calmed down.
At times the protest took on the atmosphere of a party, with the demonstrators, including young children, singing and chanting. A few hours later it turned violent again.
It was unclear how many injuries there were among the demonstrators, or how many arrests had been made. At least one young man appeared to have been shot with a rubber bullet.
“Police were hitting protesters with batons,” said Tarek Ghuneim, a young man from Nahr Al Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
Other demonstrators said they saw police beating protesters who had already been subdued and were on the ground. They also attacked people trying to help the injured.
The Beirut English-language newspaper The Daily Star reported that police had attacked one of their reporters as she filmed the scene.
There are more than 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who are registered with the UN in Lebanon, many living in the country’s 12 official camps.
“There will be more protests,” Mr Ghuneim predicted.
A few hundred people had travelled by bus from Nahr Al Bared, including Ahmed Dawood, an official with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
“Today we are struggling against Trump’s decision,” Mr Dawood said.
“Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine. Put the capital of Israel in New York. We support a new intifada. No US embassies will be safe.”
The demonstrators included members of Palestinian parties as well as Lebanese Islamists and leftists.
“Even groups with different political views stand together on Palestine,” said Noor Bachir, a member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, which helped to organise the demonstration and advocates for a unified “greater Syria” that includes Lebanon and Palestine.
Lebanese and regional leaders have widely condemned Mr Trump’s decision.
Israel occupied southern Lebanon for 22 years before withdrawing in 2000, but the two countries remain technically at war.
A demonstration organised by Hizbollah was planned for today in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where the group has widespread support.
It is likely to be the largest in Lebanon since Mr Trump’s announcement.
In 2006, Israel fought a war against Hizbollah in Lebanon that killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 120 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
US officials said Mr Trump’s decision on Wednesday last week to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would take at least two years to be implemented.
The move breaks with decades of US foreign policy that previously stipulated, along with most of the rest of the world’s governments and two UN resolutions, that control of Jerusalem should be decided as part of negotiations between Palestinians and the Israeli government.