Alleged context (feel free to correct if you have info in comments):

After Israeli Maccabi hooligans terrorized Amsterdam, the Dutch government demonized the pro-Palestine movement and banned protests. People came to protest anyways (peacefully)

The police arrested peaceful protesters and put them in a bus. They were driven to a parking lot. The police released them from the bus in a parking lot near a station.

While the protesters were walking to the station the police started hitting them. Allegedly for not moving fast enough.

  • SopEnglish
    34·
    1 month ago

    @lalehamirali on instagram has reported this whole event in their story. But here’s a summary:

    1. There was a peaceful protest on Amsterdam dam square. Due to the events with maccabi hooligans the city decided that protests are not allowed in the city until Thursday (today). Trough court decision the protest of Wednesday evening was allowed after all, but not in certain locations like the dam square. So the police considered the protest illegal.
    2. After a while the police started surrounding the protesters and called on them to leave and go to the assigned protest location.
    3. When the protesters didn’t leave, there were told by the cops to get into a bus that would bring them to the assigned location.
    4. Protesters didn’t comply and were forcibly put into the bus that they thought would bring them to the assigned location.
    5. Instead they were brought to a parking lot in the outskirts of the city. This is a tactic the police uses often to end protests they deem illegal or ‘dangerous’, because it allows them to end the protest without arresting all protesters. It’s on the protesters to get home safely (which can be very tricky because sometimes this happens at night when there is no public transport and not everyone will have their phone/money on them).
    6. There was no police on the parking lot so the protesters thought they could just leave and try to get home.
    7. Laleh says in their story that apparently someone in the bus, when most people had already left, broke a window.
    8. This resulted in lots of police coming to the parking lot and basically hunting on protesters who are trying to run away to safety. You can see in Laleh’s story how panicked everyone is because they don’t know what’s going on and the police just keeps going after them and hitting them, resulting in people having to run into nettle bushes and ditches. This goes on for a while and according to Laleh about 3/4 of the people in the bus were arrested.

    Mainstream news has reported on the violence (one of the rare occasions that they actually do that) and police is ‘investigating’ the incident.