Thousands of demonstrators gathered Tuesday evening, October 17, in front of the French embassy in Tunis to protest the deadly shooting at a hospital in the Palestinian city of Gaza and called for the dismissal of the French and American ambassadors. The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, reported more than 200 deaths and blamed Israel, which denied it.
“The French and the Americans are the allies of the Zionists,” chanted angry demonstrators in front of the French embassy headquarters in the center of Tunis, AFP journalists noted. “The dismissal of the ambassador is a duty”, “no American embassy on Tunisian territory” they shouted, surrounded by a police force.
Initially, hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the French embassy but their numbers grew to more than 3,000 people. The demonstrators, including opposition figures and representatives of civil society as well as lawyers, also chanted slogans hostile to French President Emmanuel Macron.
At least 200 people were killed Tuesday evening in a shooting at a hospital compound in Gaza City, the Hamas health ministry reported, blaming it on Israel. The Israeli army, for its part, attributed the strike to a failed rocket attack by the Palestinian organization Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas.
Tunisia, which hosted Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1982 to 1994 after his departure from Lebanon, has always adopted a position of firm support for the Palestinian cause. In his speeches, Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed has repeatedly called normalization with Israel a “crime” and a parliamentary committee is due to soon examine a bill aimed at penalizing such a process.