Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Rennes, Bordeaux… Several thousand people demonstrated on Saturday in France to demand a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
The Parisian demonstration, numbering several thousand people, set off from Place de la République with the slogan “Stop the massacre in Gaza! France must demand an immediate ceasefire.”
In the procession, we could see many Palestinian flags or in the colors of the parties and associations classified on the left and the extreme left which gave their support to this march, such as La France insoumise (LFI), the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA ), the Ecologists or Attac.
“I came to support the Palestinian cause, for the ceasefire in Gaza,” Ahlem Triki, an engineer from Yvelines, told Agence France-Presse (AFP), a Palestinian flag on her shoulders.
Five weeks into the war sparked by the Hamas attack on October 7, 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Israel and 11,078 in retaliatory bombings in the Gaza Strip, mostly civilians too, including 4,506 children, according to the Hamas health ministry.
“This mobilization is essential”
LFI deputies Mathilde Panot and Eric Coquerel, whose party is under fire for its positions considered ambiguous with regard to anti-Semitism, were present in the Parisian procession.
“This mobilization is essential in the face of massacres, because it is a massacre that is underway today in Gaza with more than 10,000 dead (…) in the silence of a large part of the international community,” declared the LFI coordinator, Manuel Bompard, in the Marseille demonstration, which brought together at least 1,300 people, according to the police headquarters.
The march took place peacefully, with shouts of “Liberate Gaza! “. “Stop genocide in Gaza! », “Palestine will live! » or even “Ceasefire!”, could we read on the demonstrators’ banners.
In Montpellier, where 500 people marched, according to the police, Hayat El Yakoubi, a 40-year-old care assistant, came with her 10-year-old daughter holding a rose in her hand as a sign of peace.
“We’re human. The massacres we are currently seeing in Gaza break our hearts. We think about them day and night. Sometimes we have trouble sleeping. It is humanity that is affected because children are affected,” she told AFP.
In Bordeaux, two separate demonstrations in support of the Palestinian population brought together a few hundred people. Other marches in Toulouse, Rennes, Nice or Ajaccio also brought together a few hundred to a few thousand people, according to the authorities or the organizers.