D.C. police assaulted Gaza war protesters and strangled them with their own keffiyehs, a lawsuit alleges.
It’s been nine months since police brutalized protesters demonstrating against the war in Gaza outside the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Now, as tens of thousands of protesters are set to march next week on the party’s national convention in Chicago, protesters attacked during the D.C. crackdown are suing the police.
Nine plaintiffs are named in the suit against Metropolitan Police and U.S. Capitol Police, brought by the nonprofit civil rights legal group Civil Rights Corps. (Neither the D.C. police nor the Capitol Police immediately responded to requests for comment.)
At the November 15 protest last year, hundreds of protesters, including a coalition of multiracial and interfaith groups, held a candlelight vigil with one candle representing every person killed in Gaza at the time. Demonstrators projected messages calling for peace on the building housing the DNC headquarters.
The suit alleges that police responded by strangling protesters with their own keffiyehs, physically and sexually assaulting protesters, including throwing at least one person down a set of stairs, and using carcinogenic chemical weapons.
Israeli forces have trained Metropolitan Police Department cops and Capitol Police, and the tactics police used against protesters in D.C. were not unlike the violence waged by Israeli forces against Palestinian-led protest movements, said Sumayya Saleh, senior attorney at the Civil Rights Corps.
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Akela Lacy is a Politics Reporter at The Intercept. She was previously The Intercept’s inaugural Ady Barkan Reporting Fellow; prior to that, she was a Politics Fellow in the D.C. Bureau.
