Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched through central London to the United States embassy on Saturday to protest against President Donald Trump’s proposal that the US “take over” Gaza.
Waving Palestinian flags and placards saying “Hands off Gaza,” several thousand people walked from Whitehall in Westminster over the River Thames to the embassy in Nine Elms.
Earlier this month, Trump stunned the world when he suggested the US could redevelop the war-ravaged Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
His proposal envisages resettling Palestinians elsewhere, with no plan for them ever to return.
Other western leaders and the Arab world have widely condemned the idea.
Protesters held banners that read, “Stand up to Trump” and “Mr Trump, Canada is not your 51st state. Gaza is not your 52nd.”
“I think it’s completely immoral and illegal and also impractical and absurd,” 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos told AFP.
“You simply cannot deport two million people, especially that the surrounding countries already said that they wouldn’t take them, not out of the goodness of their heart but because it would destabilise those countries.
“So it’s not going to happen but it does a lot of damage simply stating that as an endgame,” he added.
The march, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), was the 24th major pro-Palestinian protest in Britain’s capital since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
A heavy police presence was deployed as officers kept protesters away from a counter-march called “Stop the Hate”, where participants waved Israeli flags.
Hamas’s attack resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 48,264 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the isolated territory that the United Nations considers reliable.
On Saturday, Hamas released three Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian inmates freed by Israel, completing the latest swap of a fragile Gaza truce deal.