Large protests erupted in cities and towns across the United States following US President Donald Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran and Israel’s large-scale bombing of Beirut this week.
In dozens of cities on Wednesday, thousands of protesters marched through the streets carrying Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese flags. Demonstrators held signs reading "Hands Off Iran", "Stop Bombing Lebanon Now", "Stop Arming Israel Now", and "Trump Must Go Now", with one of the most common slogans being "Money for People’s Needs, Not War with Iran".
The nationwide demonstrations were announced just hours earlier, largely in response to Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilisation, drawing hundreds in each of the major cities where they took place.
"A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday.
The protests come after more than six weeks of joint US-Israeli military operations against Iran, which have killed more than 2,000 people, alongside an Israeli assault and ground invasion of Lebanon that has killed at least 1,800 and displaced more than a million.
“Trump has needlessly killed thousands in his war of choice, caused economic suffering the world over, and he must be held accountable,” the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) said in a statement calling for protests on Wednesday evening.
“We’ve seen a lot of escalation from Israel in the last few weeks. They’re really cementing this decades-long system of apartheid,” said Sara, an organiser with the Palestinian Youth Movement in Washington, DC, who spoke on condition of using only her first name.
She was referring to Israel’s large-scale attack on Lebanon on Wednesday that killed around 300 people within minutes, an escalation some have compared to tactics used in Gaza.
“Over the past two and a half years, we’ve seen so many mobilisations in support of Palestine. It’s not something that’s going away. There’s energy and momentum,” she added.
A man who grew up in Lebanon and attended a demonstration in San Francisco said the majority of those killed in the airstrikes were civilians.
“Each house is a universe, each martyr is a big deal. We reduce these people down to numbers and statistics,” he said.
“We’re here to remind people that Lebanon exists. The Lebanese people want to live. We want to live without constant ceasefire breaches and without aggression from the people who live south of us.”