The escalation in the Middle East conflict is driving Palestine supporters in particular onto the streets in Berlin. Once again, emergency services are pelted with bottles, stones and fireworks. The police chief speaks of a tense situation.
Berlin – Despite a ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, crowds of people and hours of clashes broke out again in Berlin’s Neukölln district on Wednesday evening. The police spoke of a heated atmosphere on Sonnenallee, which only gradually calmed down very late in the evening. Stones and bottles were thrown at police officers and pyrotechnics were burned, as the authority announced on Platform X, formerly Twitter. According to a police spokesman, some emergency services were injured as a result. According to preliminary data, most of them remained in service.
“The situation in Nord-Neukölln is tense,” said Berlin’s police chief Barbara Slowik on the RBB evening show in the early evening. There are certainly several hundred people on the streets in Sonnenallee. “We have to expect that smaller and larger groups will be on the streets tonight, chanting and perhaps even resorting to crimes,” Slowik said. The police are deployed with water cannons to extinguish burning obstacles such as garbage cans or tires on the streets. “We are intervening clearly,” the police chief emphasized.
The police told X that many demonstrators did not comply with the officers’ requests. There is resistance to arrests of suspects, so that the forces have to “use direct coercion”. The demonstrators were clearly participants in a substitute event for a pro-Palestinian rally, which was also banned. According to the spokesman, in addition to Sonnenallee, Reuterstraße, Donaustraße and Hermannplatz were the scenes of the previously banned demonstration.
A dpa reporter spoke in the evening of an aggressive mood and dozens of arrests. According to him, people mainly chanted “Free free palestine” and “Viva viva palestina”. Police said on X: “We see people indiscriminately throwing objects on the street, setting them on fire, filming themselves and celebrating.” Throwing pyrotechnics caused a fire on a balcony, which police officers extinguished.
The chairman of the police union (GdP), Jochen Kopelke, has called for consistent action in connection with such riots. “We need quick court proceedings and verdicts against the rioters,” Kopelke told the editorial network Germany (RND) on Wednesday. He spoke of an “absolutely disgusting mood in Germany” and referred, among other things, to the attempted arson attack on a Jewish community in Berlin on Wednesday night.
According to police, several hundred people also gathered at the Foreign Office. According to the police, however, the rally against violence in the Middle East was ended directly by the organizer because she had no influence on the participants. Accordingly, 50 participants were registered. Several hundred had come.
After the attempted arson attack on the synagogue in Berlin’s Brunnenstrasse on Wednesday night, around 50 people gathered for a vigil against anti-Semitism organized by neighbors. “Since we ourselves live in this neighborhood, we feel urgently obliged to resolutely oppose the anti-Semitic motivated failed arson attack of this morning as well as anti-Semitism in general,” said the chairwoman of the meeting, Sonja Kloevekorn, to the German Press Agency.
A rocket hit at the Al-Ahli clinic in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, possibly killing hundreds, has sparked great anger, especially in Arab and Islamic countries. There were anti-Israel demonstrations there and also in Germany. On Tuesday evening, the Hamas-controlled health authority immediately blamed Israel for the rocket strike, and neighboring Arab states joined in. Israel firmly rejected this, calling it the impact of a stray rocket belonging to the Palestinian militant organization Islamic Jihad. The U.S. government also does not consider Israel to be responsible, according to “current assessments.”
It was only on Wednesday night that there were riots at pro-Palestinian rallies in Berlin, especially in Neukölln. 20 police officers were injured, it said. Two would have had to end the service. According to the police, 39 people were arrested and 65 criminal cases were initiated. In addition, 12 administrative offences were registered. Dpa
Source: merkur / https://newsrnd.com/news/2023-10-19-riots-with-firecrackers-and-stones-in-berlin.BJlRadQ0bT.html