Protesters demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip blocked traffic near Los Angeles International Airport on Friday afternoon, continuing demonstrations that earlier this week saw the 110 Freeway shut down during peak commute time.
Around 4:30 p.m., about 200 demonstrators gathered at South Sepulveda Boulevard and Westchester Parkway, just north of the airport entrance, and began to march toward the airport. They chanted “Let Gaza live” and carried a 30-foot banner bearing those three words as they made their way to the Sky Way bridge.
Two police cars followed as traffic began to back up.
The group shut down all lanes of the bridge that feeds into the airport. Some motorists tried to turn around but were blocked by police. Others crept past demonstrators, trying to make their way into the airport.
Protesters were carrying out their plan to create what spokesperson Harp Mann described prior to the event as “some sort of disruption.”
“The goal of Friday’s action is to stop business as usual for the systems facilitating the current war and the long-running occupation,” organizers said in a news release Thursday.
As the protesters gathered, about a dozen wore yellow safety vests and were acting in the role of safety marshals to aid in “deescalation in case other people intervene” or police become aggressive, Mann said.
A young man shouted into a megaphone: “Shut everything down that’s funding genocide! We have to say stop. Let Gaza live!”
Among the attendees was graduate student Oliver Solares, 25, who has been to several similar cease-fire protests in L.A. and Orange counties over the last couple of months. He said he understood why protests that impeded traffic flow were angering drivers across L.A. but said the problem was insignificant compared with the horrors people were experiencing in the Gaza Strip.
“That anger is marginal to what’s happening to people across the world,” he said. “They’re being bombed, killed. Being mad at traffic for two hours is marginal. It comes from a place of privilege.”
Friday’s disruption comes two days after dozens of protesters sat across the southbound 110 Freeway, blocking traffic during morning rush hour. Angered drivers were seen exiting their vehicles and skirmishing with the demonstrators at Wednesday’s action, a scene still fresh in protesters’ minds Friday.
“Safety is absolutely the No. 1 priority for this action,” said Camilo Rafaèl Caridad Pineda, an organizer of the LAX protest. “There is definitely a lot of lessons that we’ve been learning from these demonstrations that have been taking place all over Los Angeles.”
More than two months have passed since Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing over 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostage. The ongoing conflict has killed over 18,700 Palestinians trapped in Gaza in airstrikes and ground attacks by Israeli forces, according to Gaza health authorities. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes.
Maria Penntock joined Friday’s protest after taking three hours to arrive at the airplane-spotting park outside LAX.
“I took three different buses,” she said as she applied makeup. Around her neck was a Palestinian flag.
Penntock said she hoped the demonstration would have a ripple effect that would cause Americans to pay attention to what has been happening in Palestine and demand a ceasefire.
“My heart is broken for the Palestinian people,” she said.
In major cities across the country, demonstrators calling for a cease-fire have taken to the streets and grown more disruptive. As President Biden and other world leaders were in the Bay Area for an economic summit last month, protesters blocked off traffic on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for hours. A group called Jewish Voice for Peace shut down the Manhattan Bridge on Thanksgiving weekend, and on Thursday, that group and allies shut down major roads and bridges in Philadelphia and Washington.
