A small crowd of pro-Palestine demonstrators gathered in Nicosia’s central Eleftheria square on Monday evening.
The group had gathered to mark the first anniversary of October 7, when insurgent group Hamas attacked Israeli settlements near Gaza, in a move which preceded a year of Israeli military attacks on the strip, including a ground invasion, and subsequent incursions and missile attacks on Lebanon.
Monday’s protest began with activist Hulya Efeturk making a speech, saying “it didn’t start on the seventh”.
“Everyone is condemning the resistance, but we all know that if you oppress a people, steal their land, kick them out of their houses, murder them, apply an apartheid regime in their own land, forbid them from collecting rainwater, then I think this is [a case of] ‘you reap what you sow’,” she said of the October 7 attacks.
She added, “it is only a matter of time before people explode.”
“Remember 365 days later, October 7 was natives breaking free, and what followed was settlers unleashing genocide so the natives would never try to break free ever again,” she said, later adding that “what Palestinians did on this day was nothing more than natives reclaiming their land from a militarised Israeli settler force”.
There was then a form of role-play, in which activists read the stories of Palestinians who have been killed or displaced by the State of Israel since the country was founded in 1948, before the crowd began to chant.
Tasos Kosteas of the Cyprus Peace Council later spoke of the Middle East being “on the brink of war” and of “tens of thousands dead, millions displaced, and entire peoples without the prospect of peace or stability”.
“What is happening in Gaza is nothing other than a genocide. People without water and food, children without homes and medicine. After a year of continuous bombing, the international community is doing nothing in the face of the murderous mania of the Israeli army and the far-right government of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” he said.
The chants erupted again at the end of Kosteas’ speech, which was then followed by several other speeches read by a number of other activists, while the role players from earlier in the protest remained prone on the ground.
At the end of the protest, demonstrators made their way up Ledra Street, continuing to chant as they went, holding aloft Palestinian flags and banners with messages calling for an end to the conflict.
