The scale is the story.
More than 200,000 people marched through Amsterdam on Sunday in the latest 'Red Line' demonstration against Israel's war on Gaza, according to the Dutch branch of Amnesty International, one of the organisers. Many in the crowd wore red, and the marchers called for tighter trade restrictions on Israel and a halt to all arms sales. Al Jazeera reports that the route along a normally busy street was closed to traffic for the day.
The scale is the story. A turnout of this size, in a country of roughly eighteen million, is a political fact that the government in The Hague cannot easily set aside. One demonstrator, Mike van Dongen, told Al Jazeera that what is happening in Gaza is inhumane and that the Dutch authorities were doing nothing, adding that they do not dare take serious steps. Such sentiments, repeated across a crowd of this size, suggest the protest is less a single march than a sustained pressure campaign. Sunday's event followed 'Red Line' demonstrations last June in The Hague and a similar protest in early October last year.
The Netherlands has not been a passive bystander. The war has strained Dutch relations with Israel. The foreign minister resigned last year after failing to secure new sanctions against Israel. A new minority coalition government took power in February and introduced an import ban on products from Israeli settlements, which the Dutch government and most of the international community consider illegal. That ban provoked a diplomatic spat with Israel.
Prime Minister Rob Jetten, who took part in a march last year but was not present on Sunday, defended his government at his weekly news conference on Friday. He said his administration does what it can every day and every week to alleviate the terrible situation, and that it is exerting greater political and diplomatic pressure on Israel to abide by its agreements on Gaza. The protesters' demand for an arms embargo goes further than anything the government has so far announced.
According to Al Jazeera, Israel's war has killed at least 74,000 Palestinians, including 21,000 children, since October 2023. The report says a ceasefire took effect in Gaza on 10 October last year, but that Israeli attacks and killings have continued on an almost daily basis since. These figures and the state of the ceasefire are as reported by the source and have not been independently verified here.
What the march does not settle is whether pressure of this kind changes policy. The Dutch government has already moved on settlement imports, and the prime minister frames his approach as diplomatic rather than punitive. Whether a crowd of this size pushes The Hague towards an arms embargo, or merely hardens the government's insistence that it is doing what it can, is not yet known. Nor is it clear how the coalition's junior partners will read the turnout. What is confirmed is the number claimed by the organisers and the demands they carried into the streets.
