The ban on the demonstration did not put off the participants. There were around 3,000 of them, according to the Paris Police Prefecture, who gathered on the Place de la République on Thursday, October 12, in the early evening, in the midst of Israel’s military response to the Gaza Strip, from which it left on Saturday. , a surprise and bloody attack by Hamas on Israeli soil.

The crowd is mixed. First of all, there are many students, members of far-left movements under the flags of Permanent Revolution. Young women wear headbands made of the Palestinian flag around their heads or in their hair. Everyone is filming live on social networks those who climb the statue. Palestinian, Egyptian, Algerian and Iranian flags are brandished, smoke bombs are set off, then the slogan “Free Palestine” is sprayed in capital letters on the white marble, to the cheers of the participants.

A few mortars pierce the sky, to the sound of “Israel assassin, Macron complicit” then “Palestine will win”. Alongside them, older activists, recurring fighters for the Palestinian cause, distribute leaflets. After an hour, the demonstrators attacked the numerous buses of CRS and gendarmes gathered. The water cannon disperses the crowd who escape through the only exit offered by the police, continuing to shout their slogans in the streets of the 11th arrondissement. In total, twenty-four fines and ten arrests were made, according to figures from the Police Prefecture.

Ban maintained by the Paris administrative court

On Thursday, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, ordered the systematic banning of “pro-Palestinian demonstrations, because they are likely to generate disturbances to public order”, in a telegram sent Thursday to the prefects. The ministry told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that “the organizers” of these demonstrations and “the troublemakers” would be arrested.

Police prefect Laurent Nuñez banned the Parisian gathering on Tuesday, predicting that it would be “the scene of attitudes, words and gestures, mainly of an anti-Jewish nature, inciting racial hatred and advocating the terrorist attacks perpetrated in recent days in the Middle East.”

Urgently contacted by several associations, the Paris administrative court decided Thursday afternoon to maintain this ban. A few days after the Hamas offensive on Israel, the summary judge invoked a context of “extreme violence” and “proven risks of the export of this violence (…) on national soil” in view, in particular , of the “resurgence of anti-Semitic acts” since this attack.

The presidents of the AFPS (France Palestine Solidarity Association), Bertrand Heilbronn, and the FTCR (Federation of Tunisians for Citizenship of the Two Shores), Mohammed Ben Saïd, indicated to the AFP that they were not maintaining the call to demonstrate Thursday evening. For her part, the leader of CAPJPO-Europalestine, Olivia Zemor, told AFP her intention to “let people” demonstrate “if they want to do so”.

Ten arrests in Lille

Other equally banned gatherings took place on Thursday in the center of Rennes, bringing together around fifty demonstrators, according to a journalist from Agence France-Presse (AFP), but also in Lille, where there were ten arrests for “rebellion” and “refusal to disperse,” the prefecture said. In Toulouse, despite the ban and cancellation by the organizers of the pro-Palestinian demonstration, around a hundred people gathered, before being dispersed by mobile gendarmes using tear gas, according to a photographer from the AFP.

In Bordeaux, around a hundred responded to the call from the Girondin Collective for a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis, AFP journalists also noted. Unlike the one organized the day before in the same city, this gathering was not prohibited by the prefecture.

On Wednesday evening, pro-Palestinian rallies had already been held in Nantes, Nîmes and Toulouse, despite prefectural bans taken for lack of prior declaration as well as for reasons of public security. On Thursday, the prefect of Hérault banned two other demonstrations, planned for Friday in Béziers and Saturday in Montpellier.