Hundreds Join Pro-palestine Rally in Sea Point

Vivien Pluddemann and Terrence Mouton of Skating for Palestine joined hundreds of people at a pro-Palestine rally on Sea Point Promenade on Saturday. Jenna Schulze, co-founder of Skating for Palestine says that they often skate around Cape Town to raise awareness.

Hundreds of people gathered on the Sea Point Promenade on Saturday for a pro-Palestine rally.

The rally was organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and was supported by several organisations such as the Housing Assembly, Gift of the Givers, Equal Education, Women on Farms, Reclaim the City and the trade union COSATU. Members of political parties, including the ANC, EFF, PAC and GOOD, also participated.

Waving Palestinian flags, protesters chanted, “One solution, revolution” and “Gaza don’t you cry, Palestine will never die”. Others carried placards that read “Red card to apartheid Israel” and “Zionism is Racism”.

Several organisation attended the protest including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), the Housing Assembly, Gift of the Givers, Equal Education, Women on Farms, Reclaim the City and COSATU.

Reverend and anti-Apartheid activist Frank Chikane addressed the crowd. He criticised US President Donald Trump’s recent comments about “taking over Gaza”.

“[President Trump] said he wants to take over Gaza, it’s quite strange. Take over Gaza (and) throw away the Palestinians into Jordan and Egypt, and then turn it into a Riviera. You can’t plan to remove Palestinians from their homes and then expect not to be charged in terms of the 1948 genocide convention,” he told the crowd.

In a statement, the PSC condemned Trump’s plan for a “final solution” for Palestine. “Trump envisages that Gaza be remodeled under US ownership and control as an international holiday resort for the rich. But the people of Gaza want reconstruction of their homes and lives after the trauma of mass killings and starvation, bombings and the near destruction of everything needed to sustain life. In the West Bank, the Israeli military offensive against Palestinians is escalating,” read the statement.

Tohiera Sheldon, 4, joined hundreds of Palestine supporters in Sea Point on Saturday.

The PSC’s demands included sanctions divestments and boycotts against Israel; the prosecution of South African citizens who are in the Israeli armed forces; the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, ending sport, cultural and education participation and collaboration with Israel; and pass the “Apartheid Convention Bill” as law.

Meanwhile, in a statement earlier this month, The South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) condemned the government’s decision to continue with the ICJ case. “The South African government no longer speaks for all its citizens on foreign policy. We urge other parties in the Government of National Unity to exert their influence and reverse this trajectory of diplomatic and economic self-sabotage.”

On Saturday, Al Jazeera reported that six Israeli captives were being released in Gaza in exchange for 602 Palestinians who had been held in Israeli prisons. This comes after a ceasefire agreement in January.

Pro-Palestine protesters gather at the sunglasses art installation on the promenade.

© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.