Police Harming Student Protestors In The Hague

After becoming aware of the student protest movement here in Den Haag, I’ve learned quite a bit. While Dutch universities do by and large seem to be a little more open to hearing out the demands of student organizations than those in Germany or the US, there are a lot of perfectly fucking valid reasons the students aren’t satisfied.

Yesterday, here in The Hague, student protestors took to the streets (as they have been for months) for their universities' involvement with Israel and grievances ties to the atrocities in Gaza.

This isn’t going to be a detailed reporting of what’s going on. I’ve made in-roads to make such a piece more possible in the coming weeks, as this movement doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down at all.

Oh yeah, and the police seem to get more and more comfortable with hurting them. It’s not great.

CW: Screaming, Non-gore violence

Two videos were floating around social media of some of the most egregious examples, and kept getting taken down. Here are two screen captures before that happened:
At least one female protestor getting hit over the head by a police officer. (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)

Same incident from another angle. (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)

From my phone:

Video of another protestor being hit by police. (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)

I first approached the demonstration when I saw a police line formed down the block a little after 1400. It seemed… suspicious? I know different countries have different rules for where protestors can hold demonstrations, and everything I’d personally seen had been pretty peaceful (on the protestor’s end).

Video of the Protest being Re-located (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) and potentially starting to get boxed in.

You might personally want to criticize and nitpick the protests all you want for imagery, word choices, whatever. Now's not the time to do it. These students and protestors are clearly on the right side of this. Don't be a piss baby. People are dying, and they're actually trying to do something about it.

The formal demands of the student movement in the Netherlands are presented calmly and reasonably. Things get heated at protests, for sure, but everything I've seen since the beginning of May with the attack on the Amsterdam encampment shows that the escalation clearly comes from the police.

I try to be skeptical of some discourse because of the nature of social media, but yesterday, I saw it with my own eyes.