Approximate reading time: 2 minutes, 19 seconds
Thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of central Madrid to express their “support for the struggle of the Palestinian people” and to demand international sanctions against the State of Israel, which they accused of perpetrating a “genocide” through “terrorist” actions. . Up to six ministers of the Spanish government joined the march, called by the Madrid Assembly for Palestine, including the second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, and a leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), Óscar Puente, head of the portfolio of Transport.
More than 40 civil organizations, the two main unions in the country, the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) and the General Union of Workers (UGT), and the four main left-wing parties in the region, the PSOE, Sumar, Más Madrid and Podemos, join forces. They demonstrated against the “massacre” of the State of Israel on the Palestinian people, especially in the Gaza Strip, and which has already left more than “27 thousand fatalities.” Hence, during the demonstration he insisted on two clear messages: “End the massacre” and “No to impunity.”
The march traveled through the center of Madrid, starting from the Atocha roundabout, next to the train station, to reach Puerta del Sol, which was where the common manifesto was read in which they insisted that “the figures are sometimes like rain from a distance, under cover, they do not wet us and we become so accustomed to their incessant noise that in the end we do not hear them fall. The Israeli massacre in Palestine is not the rain falling outside the window. It is a downpour that has been echoing for four months in the conscience of humanity – the most recent and atrocious of those that the Palestinian people have suffered for 75 years.”
And so they listed that in the last four months more than 27 thousand Gazans have died under Israeli bombs, including 12 thousand minors; another eight thousand are missing. There are also more than 66 thousand injured and about a thousand minors with amputated limbs. In addition to denouncing that “health personnel and journalists are systematically murdered or kidnapped. More than half of the buildings have been destroyed and one million seven hundred thousand Palestinians have been displaced from their homes and are living poorly as refugees in southern Gaza, also subjected to Israeli attacks.
That’s why his complaint was mixed with anger and frustration: “It’s not rain. It’s not a downpour. It’s a massacre. We know these figures and these data, fatally renewed every day. We can also know, if we look for them, the names of the murdered children. A provisional list was recently published headed by Abd al-Jawad Mizar Yamal, murdered before he turned one year old, and whose last name is Ziad Youssef Yunis Abu Assi, a seventeen-year-old teenager. It is good that we do not reduce them to a number, that we pronounce their names out loud, that through the name we reach the mother who gave it to them, but we are talking, in any case, about a list of the dead.
This demonstration, significantly smaller than the one last January, in which more than 20 million people gathered, brought together six ministers of the Spanish government, including Óscar Puente, the first leader of the PSOE to join as a member of the government and leader of the party to these mobilizations in favor of the Palestinian people. The minister himself explained his presence at the protest is because “we have to ensure that the deaths and attacks on the innocent stop, we have to achieve the release of all the hostages and we have to achieve that a process of dialogue is opened through of a conference in which an agreement is reached so that Israel and Palestine can live in peace. In addition to Puente, the ministers of the Spanish government who come from the left-wing Sumar coalition were also present, led by its leader and vice president of the government, Yolanda Díaz, and by those responsible for the Health, Culture, Social Law and Childhood portfolios, Monica García, Ernesto Urtasun, Pablo Bustinduy and Sira Rego, respectively.
By Armando G. Tejeda (Correspondent of La Jornada in Madrid)
