An Israeli airstrike Saturday destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza city that housed offices of the Associated Press and other media outlets.
Israel claimed Hamas was operating inside and it accused the militant group of using journalists as human shields.
Cell phone video from the scene showed journalists scrambling to grab equipment and documents before escaping their office, less than an hour later a horrifying scene in Gaza City as the Israeli military strikes a multi-story building containing the Gaza bureaus of the Associated Press, Al Jazeera and a number of other international media outlets.
Pro-Palestinian protesters took to the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta and other U.S. cities on Saturday to demand an end to Israeli airstrikes over the Gaza Strip.
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Thousands of people shut down traffic on a major thoroughfare in west Los Angeles as they marched two miles from outside the federal building to the Israeli consulate. The protesters waved signs that said “free Palestine” and shouted “long live intifada,” or uprising.
In San Francisco, a raucous crowd banged drums and yelled “Palestine will be free” as they marched across the Mission District to Dolores Park.
“We are here to support the resistance of a country that is facing oppression,” said Arash Jalali.
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Protesters who attended the San Francisco rally said that they fear more violence.
A protest that started in a neighborhood in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, which has a large Arabic-speaking community, continued through the streets for several hours on Saturday afternoon. Footage on social media showed people had climbed up the poles of street lights to wave flags while others set off fireworks. As the sun set, some protesters walked onto the Interstate 278 shutting down traffic in at least on direction, according to video posted online.
Bella Hadid, a well-known Palestinian-American model, participated in the Brooklyn protest.
The marches coincided with Nakba Day, which commemorate the 1948 displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians amid Israel’s declaration of independence.
In Atlanta, hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including grandparents, teenagers and mothers and fathers with youngsters in tow, assembled downtown to wave signs and chant slogans, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.
One sign read, “We can’t breathe since 1948” — a nod to the racial injustice and police brutality protests in the U.S. during the past year in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody after he couldn’t breathe, the newspaper reported.
The air strike that demolished a 12-story building is just one of several that Israel has carried out in the last 24 hours.
Now, nearly 40 kids are dead in Gaza with nearly 140 people killed in total.
On the Israeli side, nine people are dead.
