Italian police arrested a 30-year-old pro-Palestinian activist on Saturday. The suspect allegedly organized the stormy protests across the country and incited violence and terrorism during the demonstrations. According to Italian media, the suspect was known to the country's domestic intelligence service after founding an organization that spread propaganda identified with Hamas. The arrest came as thousands of young people took to the streets in many Italian cities and clashed with police. Protests have also continued in France, where clashes were recorded in several cities, and in Barcelona, where hundreds of young people rioted and looted stores.
The suspect, Yousef Sihar, is an Italian citizen of Moroccan descent. According to Italy's Interior Ministry, Sihar created the chat group that gave rise to the October 17 Movement and also wrote its manifesto. The movement takes its name from the date of the previous Saturday, when the protest in France spiraled out of control.
According to La Repubblica, Sihar was located at a friend's apartment in Milan and taken in for questioning shortly before the time the movement was supposed to announce the protest locations. Cyber police had tracked him for several days together with the counterterrorism unit, and Meta gave investigators the IP address of the movement's Instagram page. That evening, the Milan prosecutor's office ordered his arrest. ANSA reported that he is suspected of incitement to commit offenses under aggravated circumstances with terrorist aims, and of organized violence at the protests. His wife is also suspected of the same offenses but was not arrested.
Sihar was also known to Italy's domestic intelligence service. The service flagged him as early as 2024, after he founded an organization called Rising Dawn. According to the report, the group spread propaganda identified with Hamas and with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Muslim communities across Europe.
Sihar studied communications and political science at the University of Milan, and his thesis examined Islamist movements in Morocco. While a student, he headed the university's Muslim students' association. In 2024, he completed an internship at the international research institute ISPI, which hurried to clarify on Saturday that he has not worked with it since. He has also written in the past for the Il Fatto Quotidiano website about Tunisia, the Palestinians and the war in Iran.
According to ANSA, Sihar is a longtime pro-Palestinian activist. On October 7, 2023, he responded to a tweet by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, who had expressed support for Israel, with the words "Allahu Akbar." On his profile, he wrote, "We will not stop fighting until we recover every inch of our land." In posts he published around pro-Palestinian demonstrations, he added, "We will not surrender, we will win or die."
On Saturday morning, before the protests, police also conducted more than 150 home searches in Milan and 20 other cities, most of them in the north of the country. The searches followed a WhatsApp group discovered on the phone of one of the suspects in the previous week's riots. "Bro, calm down, we are all against the police," read one of the messages. The group also contained messages about plans to attack police officers, steal their weapons and set buildings on fire.
According to La Repubblica, it remains unclear who is behind the movement. The calls for the first protests were spread online by an anonymous group called Italy in the Streets, which called for protests over the cost of living and "starvation wages." Anti-vaccine activists, students and even far-right groups came to the protests, but teenagers took center stage, many of them from poor neighborhoods and children of immigrants. After the riots, an Instagram page called the October 17 Movement appeared and tried to unify the protests in the various cities.
In Milan, where the government sent 500 soldiers, more than 10,000 people marched, according to La Repubblica, and about 2,000 marched in Florence. Most protests passed quietly, but clashes with police erupted in Rome, Turin, Bologna and Florence. Police said nine people were arrested across Italy and 371 were detained, 110 of them minors.
The heaviest clashes were recorded in Turin and Bologna. In Turin, masked youths hurled stones and bottles at police, who responded with volleys of tear gas and water cannons. Several young people were reportedly injured.
Alongside the protest over fuel prices, leftist slogans against the rise in the defense budget were also heard. In Turin, protesters chanted in French the slogan widespread at the demonstrations in France, "Everyone hates the police." In Rome, protesters tried to reach government buildings, and police pushed them back with water cannons. Another group entered the Colosseum.
According to La Repubblica, neo-fascist groups and extremist soccer fans have also expressed readiness to take to the streets and confront the protesters. The same report said a group of about 30 young people marched in Milan and shouted insults against Muslims.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni thanked the security forces, who "worked to ensure the safety of citizens and the right to protest peacefully, despite attempts by some violent individuals to provoke clashes and riots." She said the measures the government approved in recent days were meant to give the country more effective tools and "prevent criminals and troublemakers from setting whole cities on fire." Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi warned, "the strength of the state sooner or later presents the bill."
In Barcelona, at least 100 people were also arrested, 27 of them minors. According to the Catalan news site La Vanguardia, the protest was organized on social media, inspired by the wave of protest in France.
The protest was reportedly called Angry High Schoolers, after the movement leading the student protests in France, and eyewitnesses told La Vanguardia that some of the rioters spoke French among themselves. The young people hurled fireworks at police and smashed bus stops, and when police charged them, they scattered through nearby streets. Dozens of them tried to break into stores, and hundreds of shoppers were trapped in stores that closed their doors.
The newspaper's reporter on the scene described the rioters as "teenagers, some under 14, and many girls as well," moving in groups of about 10. The reporter said, "Most of them seem confused, but there are a few older guys coordinating the looting." Salvador Illa, head of Catalonia's autonomous government, wrote on social media that violence has "no place in Catalonia" and thanked the police.
In France, hundreds of thousands of people continued to protest on Saturday against the cost of living, a week after riots in the country spiraled out of control. According to the Interior Ministry, 410,000 people took part in the protests, while the CGT labor union estimated the number at 800,000.
In Paris and a series of other cities, police fired tear gas at protesters, and according to Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, nearly 1,000 people were arrested. Two people were seriously injured, one of them a young man in Toulouse who was hit in the hand. In Marseille and Grenoble, stores were looted, and in Cannes and Montpellier, far-right activists took to the streets to confront far-left activists.
Nuñez described the outcome as more "positive" than the previous week's, thanks to a larger police presence. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who marched in Paris, said of President Emmanuel Macron, "He will understand that this will happen again every week." The Yellow Vests, a French grassroots protest movement, have already called for another protest on October 31.
Tensions in France rose even further after a racist shooting attack on Friday in Trappes, in the Paris area. According to Le Monde, the 39-year-old suspect boasted to the police officers who arrested him that he "avenged the merchants" whose stores were looted on October 17, when he shot at "Blacks and Arabs." Initial findings indicate he fired bursts from a submachine gun from inside his car and hit only people who were not white. A 26-year-old man was killed and five were wounded, including a 12-year-old girl who was hit by several bullets. A copy of "Mein Kampf" was found at the suspect's home, and his apartment was booby-trapped.
