New York Police Violently Arrest Pro-Palestinian Nakba Protesters | Israeli War on Gaza News

Several were arrested as they attempted to march in Brooklyn to protest the Gaza War and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948.

Police beat and arrested several demonstrators at a pro-Palestinian protest in Brooklyn, New York. This was the latest crackdown on voices opposing the war on Gaza in the United States.

Protesters gathered Saturday in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of southwest Brooklyn, home to a large Muslim community, including people of Palestinian and Yemeni descent.

The peaceful protest marking the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 – lasted several hours with a heavy police presence and officers trying to prevent a march.

“Protesters started marching in the street and shortly after, the NYPD came in from a side street and started randomly grabbing people,” Katie Smith, a freelance journalist who was at the scene, told Al Jazeera.

“They were tackled to the ground and often detained by multiple police officers who beat them and punched them in the upper body and around the head. There were several waves of arrests during the march, which was peaceful.”

Smith said the reaction from the local community was “outraged,” especially since there have been pro-Palestinian marches in Bay Ridge for over a decade, but never before has there been such a brutal police response.

Local sources said at least a dozen arrests were made Saturday in a crowd of several hundred. Videos from the scene showed police dragging protesters away as people shouted for them to stop, and a line of handcuffed protesters could be seen being loaded into a van.

The NYPD has made hundreds of arrests during protests calling for an end to the war on Gaza, including during a massive raid on the Columbia University campus in early May.

On Saturday, several hundred people, including Jewish demonstrators, also protested in the rain in Washington, DC, to mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba.

“They are Palestinian Americans and supporters, coming to the country’s capital, chanting ‘Free Palestine’ and accusing US President Joe Biden of complicity in genocide,” Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou Castro reported from the scene.

Mohamad Habehh, a member of the protesting human rights group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), said community members tried to educate people about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We see the blank checks that keep going to the Israeli military,” he told Al Jazeera.

Earlier this month, Biden halted a shipment of about 3,500 massive bombs to Israel as the Israeli military launched a ground offensive on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip – along with other areas of the besieged enclave – despite the dire humanitarian situation.

But Biden has promised not to stop arms sales to Israel entirely and is proposing a new $1 billion package including tank shells despite growing international condemnation.