NYPD suppresses pro-ceasefire demonstrators in Gaza

On Saturday, large protests broke out in the Brooklyn neighborhood against the Israeli war on Gaza, demanding the US administration and US President Joe Biden to impose an immediate ceasefire. The demonstration was brutally suppressed by the New York City police, according to the orders of the city’s mayor, Eric Adams.

It is noteworthy that an investigation published on Saturday in the Washington Post revealed that New York Mayor Adams was under pressure from a number of billionaires and American Jewish business giants to suppress all protests denouncing the Israeli war on Gaza in exchange for financial support for his election campaigns.

The police arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators and confronted them with unprovoked violence. In videos posted on social media reviewed by Al-Quds, police officers can be seen punching several people while they were lying on the ground during the demonstration in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge neighborhood. Eyewitnesses confirmed that the police aggression occurred without reason. Another video clip showed the police beating a demonstrator for filming the police beating the demonstrators and arresting him.

According to the police themselves, at least 34 people were arrested, a senior law enforcement official told the New York Times (who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the evolving situation). Police had not released details about the charges the protesters were facing as of early Sunday

“I saw the police grabbing people randomly from the street and the sidewalk,” Nereen Kiswani, founder of Within Our Lives, a Palestinian-led activist group that organized the demonstration, told the New York Times. “They were grabbing people randomly.”

In recent years, the “In Our Lives” organization organized an annual march in mid-May to commemorate the Palestinian Nakba in Bay Ridge, a neighborhood with a large Arab population.

Due to the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip for more than seven months, intense and successive demonstrations broke out in New York and its universities in a charged manner. According to the city’s local media, “a number of demonstrators attacked and demanded that they should go to the sidewalk, and the police told them that those who remained in the street would be arrested,” which is an act It is not in keeping with the city's protest traditions.

In one video, taken by independent journalist Katie Smith, a police chief wearing a white shirt is seen punching at least three punches at a person lying on the pavement. In another video I recorded, an officer punches a man on the ground at least six times, and a commander in a white shirt delivers a kick to the man, although it is not possible to know whether the kick landed.

In a separate case filmed by another independent journalist, Talia Jean, an officer threw a protester against a sign and then pushed him to the sidewalk, where two officers pinned him down while a third officer punched him.

Footage of police, including at least one commander, beating protesters is reminiscent of some of the NYPD's attitudes. The behavior was captured on video at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020. The city ended up paying $13 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by those protesters, according to the New York Times.

In a video of Saturday's protest posted on Twitch, six people can be seen filming a group of police officers and commanders walking down Bay Ridge Avenue. One officer grabbed the closest one, followed by two other officers and a group of blue-shirted officers.

The protester was pushed to the ground, handcuffed, and arrested. Other people in the crowd continued to record the event.

The detainees were transferred to police trucks and transported to the main headquarters in Manhattan, and the nature of the charges against them is not yet known.