‘Everyone, let’s be heard for Gaza. Use those pans and ladles! ” A large crowd of people – the other has a keffiyeh or holds a Palestinian flag – starts to make a huge noise. You see the images in Gaza, the powerlessness, now disappears like snow in the sun. “
The board, as you can see, is empty. Without food. Like the Gazans have no food and starve
Kieboom and her girlfriend Clarissa Mattos (56) have no pans or ladies with them. They hold an empty white plate with a flower motif. “Because it is six o’clock in the evening: dinner time for everyone in the world, right? Only the plate, as you can see, is empty. Without food. Like the Gazans have no food and starve.”
During the demonstration, people hit their own pots and pans.
Photo Simon Lenskens
The protest at the central train station in Utrecht is part of a series that took place at the same time on Thursday evening. At 29 different train stations in the Netherlands, demonstrations were against violence and famine in Gaza. Citizens and organizations such as The Rights Forum and Doctors for Gaza called on “to stop the genocide in Gaza” and “to let humanitarian aid into the area”.
Alarm bell
The promotion comes at the end of a week in which more than one hundred aid organizations, including Save the Children, Amnesty International and Oxfam Novib, the alarm bell about the increasingly poignant situation in the Gaza Strip. In a joint letter, which was published on Wednesday, the organizations called on governments to take action: “While the Israeli government is starving the population of Gaza, care providers now join the same food rows and risk being shot, only to feed their families.”
According to the World Food Program, “more than 90,000 women and children urgently need treatment” and has nothing to eat in three days. At the same time, Israel hardly needs to fear sanctions or measures from the Netherlands or the European Union, it seems. A critical letter is the only thing that 20 of the 27 EU member states were prepared.
Earlier this week, more than one hundred aid organizations wrote a joint letter in which they called on governments to take action against Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip.
Photos Simon Lenskens
This leads to a growing sense of powerlessness among the Utrecht demonstrators. Discussion even. The 48-year-old Clarine Corstens has seen images of the famine via social media. She calls it “disgusting” and “hard to cope.” While in the background slogans as “Free, Free PalestineAnd “”From the river to the sea, Palestine Will Be Free“Corstens sound so hard to start a few sentences again, she wonders if outgoing Prime Minister Dick Schoof has access to those videos:” I really doubt it, because otherwise it can’t be that you let Israel go its own way. They are not doing anything in The Hague. Do something! ”
65,000 names
The demonstration at Central Station is not the only action in Utrecht. In two other places in the city, near the Town Hall and on Mosqueplein, volunteers have been reading the names of 65,000 Palestinian dead and of the Israeli victims of the Hamas attack on 7 October on Wednesday morning. 24 hours a day for five days. The promotion is organized by witnesses for Gaza Utrecht.
In front of the town hall, apart from some traffic in the distance, dead silence, with the only exception the voice of the reader: “… Ahmed Al Nadar, 9 years … Siraj Al Sabafir, 9 years … Baha Rajad Sakir, 5 years …”
At the Moskeeplein in Utrecht, volunteers read names of victims.
For a few days, names of victims from Gaza and Israel are read at the Stadhuisbrug in Utrecht for a few days.
Photos Simon Lenskens
For reader Marianne Houkamp (69) it is a moral duty to stand behind the wooden lectern here. For her, among others, her grandchildren are a source of inspiration. “You see images of emaciated children who balance on the edge of death. A mother can only rub her child’s face with her hand to keep her child’s face to keep it somewhat clean.” While the tears jump into her eyes, she says: “Then you soon think: it might as well have been my children or grandchildren.”
After Frank Weijers (67) has read his first page, he steps away from the Katheder and sighs: “I really feel a kind of weight, a pressure on my chest when I call those names. Really what happens there. It really gives a huge sense of powerlessness, that you can’t do anything while a genocide is committed there.”
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