Gaza Protest Pictures (10/01/2009) pt 4

By the time I was taking these, I'd managed to escape the main crush outside of the Israeli embassy, so I had a better overview of some of the things that were happening.

There was a game of cat and mouse going on between police and protestors, with the riot police coming along in waves, sending in large blocks of 'troops' on foot, as well as mounted police and vans.

There would be extended periods of stalemate, where protestors blocked the police's advance and retreat with the steel barriers that had been used for lining the route, some of them staging impromptu sit ins in front of vans, then the police would surge foward a few yards (usually accompanied by a hail of objects at the vans), slowly herding people away from the Embassy and back up the road. When the police did their surge there would suddenly be several hundred people running back up the road, like a stampede - you didn't want to be in the way when this happened.

Then the whole process would start again, with barriers being moved to block the cops, and more police being sent in as reinforcements.

I saw a lot of 'good cop bad cop' behaviour going on as well, with being amped ready for action, and others in full riot gear leaning over the Hyde Park railings and giving people directions!

There were also vans inside Hyde Park, effectively blocking off that escape route.

It was also interesting to note that Ambulances wre in place, to patch up the casualties of the riot cops, and it turns out some of the cops themselves - thought of everything, didn't they?

No expense spared.

I haven't seen this many cops on the streets of London at a public event for a long time - not even at Notting Hill Carnival do you see this level of manpower deployed.

There were quite literally van and police as far as you could see.

Not bad public sector expenditure for a country that's supposed to be in a recession, is it?

It's just a shame some of that public money couldn't be used to send some peace negotiators to the Middle East and sort out the mess in Israel and Gaza.

And what's more incredible, given the high level of policing is how few arrests there were.

However, none of this need have happened if a symbolic act of shoe throwing had not been used as an excuse to baton charge unarmed civilians.