"Shame on you": Trudeau swarmed by pro-Palestine protesters inside Canadian restaurant
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was swarmed by pro-Palestine protesters inside a Canadian restaurant on Tuesday night.
A video posted to @palsolidaritycad on Instagram shows a crowd of protesters converging on Trudeau, who was about to leave his table at Vij’s, an Indian restaurant in Vancouver.
“Ceasefire now!” they chant as the prime minister gets up from his seat.
“Shame on you! You have blood on your hands!” someone yells in the background.
“How many children have to die?” adds another person.
Trudeau weaves his way through the restaurant, saying goodbye to diners sitting silently at their tables.
He hugs a man who appears to be Vikram Vij, the chef and owner of the restaurant, before exiting.
Outside, the prime minister is met with even more protesters. They line the sidewalk holding up posters, chanting “ceasefire now!”
He waves to the protesters and takes photos with restaurant staff before getting into a car.
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Later that evening, protesters descended on a second restaurant the Prime Minister was inside on Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown. There, Vancouver police say a female officer had her eyes gouged and was punched in the face by a protester.
This comes after Trudeau called on Israel to end the “killing of women, of children, of babies,” at a press conference in Maple Ridge, BC, earlier that day.
“I urge the government of Israel to exercise maximum restraint. The world is watching, on TV, on social media — we’re hearing the testimonies of doctors, family members, survivors, kids who have lost their parents.”
The prime minister did not explicitly call for a ceasefire.
The federal government has maintained that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas, which it classifies as a “radical Islamist-nationalist terrorist organization,” after the Gaza Strip’s governing militant group attacked an Israeli music festival last month.
The attack killed 1,400 people, most of whom were Israeli civilians.
UN experts have described the Israeli government’s bombardment as a “mass ethnic cleansing.”
As of November 13, over 11,100 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.