Hundreds marched from the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum through Little Rock's River Market District on Saturday afternoon, expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and condemning Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza a week after Hamas attacks kicked off the latest round of open warfare in the region.
The marchers, many of whom were Palestinian or Palestinian-American, chanted and carried signs calling Israel's actions last week and in years past against Palestinians a genocide and apartheid. Others demanded the U.S. cease giving aid to Israel's military.
Saturday's march came roughly a week after attacks by fighters from Hamas, the group in de facto control of Gaza, struck locations in southern Israel, including a music festival and Israeli communities. The attacks and rocket strikes killed an estimated 1,300 people, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Israel responded with bombing strikes on Gaza, a city of about 2 million people, that have killed about 2,200 and wounded 8,700 more, Palestinian officials told the Times.
PHOTO GALLERY: Israeli-Hamas war since Oct. 7
The Israeli government on Thursday said it cut off power to Gaza and will not allow water or fuel to reach the territory until Hamas releases hostages taken in the incursions, according to Amnesty International. On Friday, Israel ordered people in the northern half of Gaza to leave, giving them a 24-hour deadline. At least 70 people were killed by Israeli airstrikes during the evacuation, according to Hamas' media office.
A U.N. Commission of Inquiry last week was collecting evidence of war crimes committed by combatants on both sides.
The marchers viewed the situation in Gaza as the latest step in a humanitarian crisis that has gone on for decades. Many decried it as genocide.
"We're here for peace, we're not here to hate or fight. We're here for our rights," said Hadeel Abu Elhaja, one of the march's organizers, as she set the tone for the day's march outside the Clinton library.
That peace will only come when the international community, especially the U.S., stops supporting Israel's war crimes and encouraging its discrimination and violence against Palestinians, Abu Elhaja said.
She showed the crowd a key that belonged to her 97-year-old grandfather's home in Palestine, a home that she said was taken by Israeli settlers.
Abu Elhaja pinned the blame for the violence that has been going on for decades on the British government, which began to divvy up the region in the 1920s when it was under their colonial control, and the government of Israel, which expanded aggressively into traditional Palestinian territory.
Many at the march on Friday flew or displayed the black, white, green and red flag of Palestine adopted by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964.
Raybhi, a young man who marched on Saturday and like several other protesters declined to give his last name, said he had little hope that the international community would start to condemn Israeli violence against Palestinians, even if Israeli ground troops entered Gaza in the coming days. He said he's seen the western world ignore Palestinian suffering countless times.
The situation in Gaza is dire, Raybhi said, with no water or electricity permitted.
"Those people aren't just going to die from bombs, they'll die by starving," Raybhi said.
To worsen the situation, what international aid is coming in has been halted at the southern border between Egypt and Gaza, said Nabel, another man who marched Saturday and carried a bullhorn to chant.
The Gaza-Egypt border crossing remained closed most of last week, the Times reported. Egypt has denied passage to refugees from Gaza, and Hamas leaders have said that Palestinians should not leave the embattled enclave.
The U.N. is trying to help, Nabel said Saturday, but without backing from any major powers, it can do little. Last week, the U.N. said 11 of its personnel, including teachers and doctors, had been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7.
Nabel thinks Israel intends to occupy all of the land Palestinians live on, he said. Hamas fighters struck military targets in Israel last weekend, he contended saying media reports of Israeli children killed in attacks on civilian communities were more propaganda than truth.
Richard, a Palestinian-American who moved to Little Rock from Chicago and said he'd visited the West Bank, condemned explicitly the killing of children, but pointed out that Israeli bombs and guns have killed Palestinian children as well.
Palestinians should not be branded terrorists for wanting to live on their native lands and not wanting to be harassed and blockaded by the expansionist Israeli government, Richard said.
One of the march's organizers, Jeff Hood, said Saturday that he was disgusted to see so few fellow Christians speaking out against the violence done against the mostly-Muslim Palestinians.
"It's not that they're not Christian, they're not human," Hood said of people who won't speak against the killing.
Many southern Christians associate Zionism, the movement to establish a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine, with the conditions necessary to bring about the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ, Hood said.
Hood thinks that Zionism, like racism and colonialism, is evil and from the Devil, he told the crowd Saturday.
As the marchers went from the Clinton library into the River Market, where Abu Elhaja, Hood and other speakers addressed the crowd, they mostly attracted only curious looks and raised cellphone cameras. A few people clapped, one man booed.
The biggest disruption came from a group of men who, based on the terms used on their posters, appeared to be Black Hebrew Israelites, a group that asserts that African-Americans are the descendants of the Biblical Israelites.
One of these men told the pro-Palestinian marchers in a flood of words that God had brought nuclear war to Palestine. Some marchers stepped up to direct attention away from the men and back toward the speakers, while Little Rock police formed a physical barricade between the two groups when they passed close.
By about 4 p.m., the marchers had retraced their steps back to Clinton Presidential Center, where high schoolers in tuxedos and dresses were arriving for a prom. The teenagers and their parents watched from a short distance away as the protesters waved flags, beat drums and chanted against the destruction wrought by the conflict.
CORRECTION: Jeff Hood was one of the march's organizers. His last name was misspelled in an earlier version of this article.