33 Pro-Palestinian Protesters Arrested During Demonstration: Niles PD

NILES, IL — A protest led by young Palestinian activists shut down streets for several hours Wednesday morning outside a Niles business that they accuse of "aiding the ongoing genocide in Gaza."

About 100 people reportedly blocked all intersections leading to Woodward's manufacturing facility at 6300 W. Howard St. starting shortly after 6 a.m.

Niles police said several protestors bound themselves together using duct tape, plastic pipes and chicken wire and sat on the roadway.

"Several other participants remained mobile while verbally agitating law enforcement officers and first responders," police said in a statement.

Traffic on Howard Street and Croname Road were closed for the duration of the incident, and access to several parking lots of local businesses was also restricted "during the investigation," police said.

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Demonstrators accuse Woodward of making bomb control systems for Boeing that are used in munitions that the Israeli military has used in Gaza.

Organizer Rifqa Falaneh told Patch three dozen protestors were detained and taken to the Niles Police Department before they were released within a couple of hours.

"Protestors were met with riot police fully armed, bringing police dogs and threatening protestors with chemical weapons," Falaneh told Patch.

"This specific Woodward facility, in Niles, is responsible for manufacturing the Control Actuation System (CAS) for Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions — bomb kits that are consistently used in the slaughter of over 27,000 Gazans in the past 4 months, and the destruction of at least 70% of Gaza's infrastructure ([according to the] UN)," she said in a statement.

"We demand for Woodward to end their complicity in this genocide through the immediate termination of their weapons sales to the Israeli military and to end their contract with Boeing," she said. "We also encourage workers of Woodward [Manufacturing] to question what type of company they are working for and join us in challenging Woodward."

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Another protestor, Mahmoud Abe, said companies that have contracts with Israel are complicit in the deaths of more than 27,000 Palestinians, among them 11,000 children, during the three months of Israeli retaliatory strikes that followed the Oct. 7 Hamas cross-border attacks.

"We just want our demands to be met," Abe told WLS. "We want Woodward to end its contract with Boeing. We want Woodward to end its contract with Israel. We want an immediate and unconditional cease-fire now."

Police called in the mobile field force of the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System, the task force of suburban police departments that operates a SWAT team and crowd control force.

Officers were able to remove all the restraints from the linked protestors before taking them into custody. There were no injuries reported and both roads were re-opened around 12:30 p.m., police said.

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Woodward, which was founded in Illinois in 1870 and maintains facilities in Rockford, Loves Park and Niles, manufactures components for tactical missiles and guided weapons.

A photograph shared widely on social media in October purports to show a Woodward logo on a piece of military equipment dropped in Gaza. The authenticity of the photo could not be verified.

Spokespeople for Woodwardhave not responded to a request for comment after the Niles protest.

However, in response to previous protests over Israel's war in Gaza, representatives of the company have said it are not involved in policy decisions involving the use of the weapons it makes but "a small portion of our business involves indirectly supplying the U.S. government with subsystems that go into military equipment."