US police respond as encampment near LA city hall likens IDF to Ku Klux Klan
Video uploaded to social media Monday night shows officers shaking tents, appearing to remove them from premises
US police in Los Angeles cordoned off an area outside the Los Angeles City Hall Monday night where protesters had set up a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel encampment earlier that day.
Videos shared to social media showed police shaking tents and ordering protesters to vacate, and some footage appeared to show officers loading tents onto a sanitation vehicle.
About 50 protesters with 20 tents were seen lined up on the sidewalks outside the building at Main and First streets, KABC-TV reported earlier in the day.
Several tents had Palestinian flags and phrases such as “Free Palestine” and “Free Gaza.”
Video posted online showed participants chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a controversial slogan that is common at protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
Social media footage also showed protesters chanting, “LAPD, KKK, IOF, you’re all the same!” referring to the Los Angeles Police Department, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, and the Israel Defense Forces, sometimes referred to in anti-Israel circles as the “Israeli Occupation Forces.”
COP RIOT IN LA:
LAPD raiding Palestine solidarity encampment outside city hall. Tearing up tents and threatening people with arrest. https://t.co/6V1suONcuU pic.twitter.com/aFypD6NkCZ
— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) June 4, 2024
The Los Angeles Police Department said on the social network X that it was monitoring the non-permitted demonstration and urged people to keep an eye out for others on the street. No arrests or injuries had been reported as of late Monday night Los Angeles time.
More than 3,000 people had been arrested on US campuses before summer break began last month, including anti-Israel protesters at the University of California’s Los Angeles, San Diego and Irvine campuses. Many of the encampments featured instances of antisemitism or support for terrorism.
The movement on campuses has partly died down as students return home for the summer, but encampments remain, such as at the University of Toronto in Canada. Meanwhile, some encampments that were previously dismantled have been reestablished, such as at the University of Pittsburgh, where police faced off with protestors on Monday.
Last week, several student groups at the forefront of the encampment movement on Ivy League campuses issued a call to “escalate protests to an open intifada in every capital and city,” and to “paralyze all aspects of normal life.”
Calls for “intifada”— a word meaning “uprising” that has been used in the past to refer to several bouts of deadly terrorist violence in Israel — have been common at such encampments, along with similar rhetoric calling for “revolution” and the “fall” of Israel.
War broke out between Israel and the terror group Hamas on October 7, when thousands of terrorists poured into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 36,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though only some 24,000 fatalities have been identified at hospitals. The toll, which cannot be verified, includes some 15,000 terror operatives Israel says it has killed in battle.
Two hundred and ninety-four Israeli soldiers and one civilian defense contractor have been killed during the ground offensive against Hamas and amid operations along the Gaza border, and it is believed that 120 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive.
