Across Mideast, demonstrations erupt over Gaza
Pro-Palestinian protesters decry ‘horrific scenes’
CAIRO — They donned the black-and-white checkered Palestinian scarf known as the kaffiyeh in Tunis, unfurled giant Palestinian flags in downtown Cairo, and chanted against Israeli occupation in the normally sleepy Oman capital of Muscat. In Morocco and Bahrain, they demanded a reversal of their government’s normalization with Israel, the country they consider responsible for oppressing their Palestinian brethren.
In Lebanon, they pushed toward the US Embassy, denouncing the superpower for enabling Israel’s brutality toward civilians in the Gaza Strip. In Istanbul, 80,000 people massed outside the Israeli Consulate, including some who attempted to storm the building with stones, sticks, torches, and fireworks.
Thousands of protesters marched in grief, fury, and solidarity across the Middle East on Tuesday night and Wednesday, after hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. Although Israel and the United States said the evidence pointed to a faulty rocket fired by Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant group, there was little doubt for those protesters that Israel was to blame — and not just for the hospital attack, but for the broader conflict as well.
“What is happening is an extermination,” said Khaled Mhamdi, 27, a content creator who was among the thousands who gathered outside the French Embassy in Tunis on Wednesday. “The whole world should do something to stop it.”
The carnage at Ahli Arab Hospital, the site of the blast in Gaza on Tuesday, unified not only Arabs in the street but also the rulers they tend to regard with distrust. Some Arabs have berated their governments for failing to stand up to Israel in the past, but now those governments have nearly uniformly condemned Israel for the attack. The leaders of Jordan and Egypt canceled a meeting with President Biden after the hospital explosion, apparently unwilling to stomach being seen with the leader of Israel’s staunchest supporter as images of bloodied children at the hospital were ricocheting around Arab social media.
The widespread criticism made for a striking convergence: For once, many Arab publics long frustrated with their leaders over a wide range of issues appeared to be more or less on the same page as them.
Whatever conclusions the investigators still parsing the evidence might eventually reach about the blast’s origins did not seem likely to change, for many Arabs, the stark truth: It was Israel that was now bombing Gaza, killing far more civilians than Palestinian militants had killed in Israel 11 days ago, in a repeat of the lopsided math of previous Israeli retribution campaigns.
It was Israel that had herded 2 million Palestinian civilians into the open-air jail that rights groups say Gaza has become and systematically diminished any Palestinian chance at statehood, laying what experts have said were the foundations for conflict. And it was Israel that, many Arabs charged, had a history of obfuscating its role in previous abuses.
Against that backdrop, they said, there was only one side to hold accountable for Tuesday night’s horror.
It was galling to discover instead that Israel’s chief backer, the United States, was pinning blame on the Palestinians, and that the Western news media did not condemn Israel over the deaths — further reason, protesters said, to correct the record by raising their voices.
“As a journalist, I feel a responsibility to counter this propaganda by the media that’s covering for this crime,” said Saida El Kamel, a Moroccan journalist who had joined a gathering in front of the Parliament in Rabat, Morocco’s capital, on Tuesday night, to protest against both Israel and the United States.
Such demonstrations erupting outside US diplomatic outposts across the region prompted the US Embassy in Lebanon to warn citizens not to visit the country, while the consulate in Adana, Turkey, closed down.
Hassan Bennajeh, who has helped organize pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Morocco over the past week, said people had rallied in 23 Moroccan cities Tuesday night after the hospital blast, a striking figure given the rarity of demonstrations in Morocco and authorities’ usual swiftness in putting them down.
But Morocco’s Foreign Ministry quickly joined its citizens in blaming Israel for the hospital explosion, even though Morocco normalized relations with the Jewish state in 2020.
In Egypt, whose autocratic government usually stamps out almost any flicker of protest, authorities sat back as demonstrations erupted in multiple cities Wednesday, including on university campuses in Cairo, Alexandria, Minya, Mansoura, and Beni Suef.
“Arabs, where are you?” shouted students at Mansoura University in the Nile Delta, according to videos posted on social media. “Palestinian blood has been shed.”
Journalists and activists also massed outside the journalists’ syndicate building in downtown Cairo, while a group of liberal opposition political figures organized a protest outside the US Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday night.