Thousands of residents took to the streets in southern Tunisia’s city of Gabes on Wednesday, demanding the closure of an ageing chemical factory they blame for widespread health problems and pollution.
The protesters marched toward the large Tunisian Chemical Group facility, a state-run enterprise, where tensions rose as police fired heavy tear gas to disperse the crowd. Many demonstrators fled the scene, while groups of young people remained shouting in anger. Several participants reportedly fainted amid the chaos, according to AFP reporters at the site.
Recent weeks have seen dozens of hospitalizations in Gabes, with locals accusing the nearby phosphate processing plant of releasing toxic and cancer-causing waste. “This must stop. My three children and I suffer from asthma, and my husband and mother both died of cancer because of this plant,” said 52-year-old protester Lamia Ben Mohamed.
Chanting “We want to breathe, demonstrators rode motorcycles, honking their horns as the rally expanded from around 2,000 participants to several thousand, according to local journalists and police sources. The protest was organised by the “Stop Pollution” group, which continues to push for the closure of the fertiliser plant whose waste has long polluted Gabes’s coastline and the Mediterranean Sea.
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