CAIRO, April 1: Anti-Israeli protests were dispersed by riot police using batons and tear gas in Egypt and Jordan on Monday, as angry demonstrations erupted across the Arab world to denounce the Jewish state’s assault on the Palestinians and its ally the United States.
At least five people were injured and 10 arrested as riot police in Cairo fired tear gas and water cannon to break up a rally by thousands of protestors marching toward the Israeli embassy, AFP correspondents on the scene said.
In one of the largest and most violent protests here since the Palestinian uprising erupted 18 months ago, an estimated 20,000 people gathered inside and outside Cairo University, 200 metres from the embassy.
Police were using the teargas not only to break up the protest, but to prevent large numbers of passers-by from joining it. Some groups of protestors, which were largely made up of students, journalists, artists, and musicians, retaliated by throwing stones at police armored vehicles.
But the security forces failed to prevent an outlet of the US Kentucky Fried Chicken chain from being trashed by demonstrators near the university economics and politics faculty after they broke windows.
Well-known film director Yussef Shahin complained police were too quick to use tear gas and swing their clubs. “They hit students who wanted to leave the university,” he said, adding the police were too “severe.”
An ambulance rushed off with a teenage girl, her face bleeding after she was apparently hit by a police baton. Another four people were treated on the scene for the effects of tear gas.
Similar scenes of rage occurred at campuses in Jordan, notably at the University of Jordan where students clashed with police as they tried to march out of the compound in defiance of a ban on public protests.
Riot police entered the campus firing tear gas grenades and water cannons and clubbing hundreds of angry students who demanded that Jordan cut ties with Israel and open its borders to anti-Israeli fighters.
Police also surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Baqaa and Wihdat, to prevent demonstrations from spilling out and clashed with stone-throwing protesters in Wihdat.
“We had to close shop early because they were firing so much tear gas,” a merchant in Wihdat said.
Across the country, where nearly the half the population of five million is of Palestinian origin, thousands of people observed a six-hour strike called by political parties and professional unions.
“It is the least we can do for our brothers in Palestine,” the secretary general of the professional unions Mahmud Abu Ghanimeh said.
All around him more than 500 people, many school and university students, vented their rage against Israel and the United States, accusing the key sponsor of the Middle East peace process of “protecting terrorism”.—AFP