The pro-Palestine supporters blocked the Bay bridge as the city started hosting APEC, chanting “No US Military Aid to Israel” while being detained by the police.
The local Emergency agencies alerted people about the advancing protest on the bridge, connecting Oakland and other East Bay cities to San Francisco. The incident emerged during the morning commute causing distress for all travellers.
Ahead of San Francisco preparing for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on Thursday, officials reopened the key Bay Bridge, which leads into the city.
However, Thursday morning took a turn as hundreds of police officers gathered, moving from car to car, searching for and detaining anti-Israel protests.
Blocking the main commuter road into the city, the protesters held posters reading “Stop The Genocide” and “No US Military Aid to Israel” and demanded a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
According to the reports, an email was sent to Reuters stating that “dozens” of activists had been arrested by police. After being taken into custody, the protesters carried on chanting, “Free, free Palestine” and “Palestine will be free”.
The demonstrators were instructed to disseminate by the California Highway Patrol, but when the protest started during morning rush hour, police sent tow trucks to the bridge in case they needed to remove the cars that demonstrators were using to quickly stop traffic.
The Bay Bridge protest comes after several other demonstrations that were carried on Wednesday, but pro-Palestine supporters on Thursday gathered cause a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden was scheduled on the sidelines of the APEC summit that day.
A Reuters correspondent further reported on the incident saying that authorities halted a Honda that was moving along with the other cars after at least one lane of traffic started moving again, but the police stopped the vehicle and detained everyone inside, including the person who was a demonstrator hiding in the trunk.
Among those detained, two said they had nothing to do with the protests and shouldn’t have been detained in the first place. Lauren Tompkins, a physics professor at Stanford University, told Reuters that she was stopped in her car while en route to work and that she followed police instructions.
An estimated 200 pro-Palestine supporters gathered on the bridge on Thursday. The press release confirmed the Palestinian Youth Movement and Bay Area Palestine Solidarity were among the organisations that took part in the protest.
According to Lara Kiswani, executive of the Arab Resource and Organising Centre, protesters wanted to stop “business as usual” at the APEC meeting and pushed Biden to demand an immediate end to hostilities between Israel and Gaza.
Social media posts then revealed that ahead of the dispersal, protesters had shackled themselves together through cars with placards that said “Free Palestine” among other things.
Traffic after Arrests of Pro-Palestine Supporters
Around 10:45 a.m. local time (1845 GMT), traffic on the bridge heading into San Francisco started to roll, but the well-executed protest had a backup that lasted for several hours.
Claudia Felix, 28, a demolition remediation worker, left her inland Stockton house at 4:30 in the morning. She told the media that she was worried as she pulled over to the side of an access road. She was compelled to leave her home shortly after 10 a.m., over six hours later, after becoming caught in traffic and entering the bridge.
Vicky Hamlin, 73, a retired construction worker, claimed that the pro-Palestine supporters caused her to be ejected from the Bay Bridge, saying, “I think what’s happening to the people in Gaza is so horrific that nothing that happens to us here, nothing that we experience is worth complaining about”.
