On June 21, 2025, Haifa Palestinian rights activists were planning a demonstration against the Gaza Genocide and Israel’s war on all fronts. The demonstration was planned for 6pm, at a place known to activists as “The Prisoner’s Square” in the German Colony in downtown Haifa.
Roughly 20 minutes before the scheduled beginning of the demonstration, police forces were already on site, approximately 40 strong, including uniformed police officers, “detectives” in plain clothes and the semi-military “border guards” (“Mishmar Hagvul”).
At around 6pm, the officers started harassing anybody that they suspected as a prospective protester. Here are some of the measures taken by police officers at the scene:
1. They required identification and searched personal belongings of people around the square without cause, including some who were not even in the vicinity of the planned demonstration.
2. When some protesters laid on the ground posters for the demonstration, they fined them for “littering”.
3. Some officers spat at protesters.
4. They performed humiliating physical searches.
5. They confiscated a banner saying “Stop the Continuing Nakba” from the bag of a protester.
6. Violence and threats: two protesters were isolated from the group, taken to nearby streets by plain clothes “detectives”, and pushed, each one separately, to hidden corners, out of sight of the other protesters.
7. The officers threatened one of them that, had he dared to participate in the demonstration, he would be immediately arrested, and, once at the police station, they would break every bone in his body.
8. The officers threatened the other protester with choking, then beat him (actual beating, not threats) while spreading threats and insults.
9. In both cases, the officers managed to hide the victims from the group, preventing any chance of filming these events.
10. One protester was detained and taken to the station. After interrogation for “insulting a policeman,” she was sent to three days of house arrest. While she was detained, an officer told her that from now on, he would detain her on every demonstration, “just because it is fun”.
11. They were tracking suspected would-be protesters before, during and after the demonstration.
12. A lone protester who stood in a nearby location (Emil Habibi square, in the predominantly Palestinian Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood) with a poster stating that “Starving Gaza is a crime against humanity” was attacked by the Haifa police chief who tore the poster and removed him from the square, shoving and threatening him.
From this overwhelming effort with all kinds of methods used by the Haifa police, we conclude that it has declared war on the right to protest in the city. The active, violent role taken by the Haifa police chief himself, along with the similar practices and pronouncements by different officers, indicate that this is not a local initiative, but rather execution of policy that is directed from above.
June 22, 2025