CHICAGO, Illinois — Pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked a freeway leading to three Chicago O’Hare International Airport terminals Monday morning, temporarily stopping vehicle traffic into one of the US’s busiest airports and causing headaches for travelers.
Protesters linked arms and blocked lanes of Interstate 190 around 7 a.m., a demonstration they said was part of a global “economic blockade to free Palestine,” according to Rifqa Falaneh, one of the organizers.
Traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area was also snarled for hours Monday morning as pro-Palestinian demonstrators shut down both directions of the Golden Gate Bridge and stalled a 17-mile (27-kilometer) stretch of Interstate 880 in Oakland.
O’Hare warned travelers on the social platform X to take alternative forms of transportation with car travel “substantially delayed this morning due to protest activity.”
Some travelers stuck in standstill traffic left their cars and walked the final leg to the airport along the freeway, trailing their luggage behind them.
Among them was Madeline Hannan from suburban Chicago. She was headed to O’Hare for a work trip to Florida, when her and her husband’s car ended up stalled for 20 minutes. She got out and “both ran and speed walked” more than one mile. She said she made it to the gate on time, but barely.
“This was an inconvenience,” she said in a telephone interview from Florida. “But in the grand scheme of things going on overseas, it’s a minor inconvenience.”
While individual travelers may have been affected, operations at the airport appeared near normal with delays of under 15 minutes, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation.
Inbound traffic toward O’Hare resumed around 9 a.m.
On the Golden Gate Bridge in California, a small number of demonstrators stood by, as did police. Some protesters held a black banner that read “Stop the world for Gaza.” The iconic bridge was closed off to all auto traffic, bicyclists and pedestrians.
In Chicago, dozens of protesters were arrested, according to Falaneh. Chicago police said Monday that “multiple people” were taken into custody after a protest where people obstructed traffic, but they did not have a detailed count.
Protesters say they chose the location, in part, because O’Hare is one of the largest airports. Among other things, they have called for an immediate ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.
Anti-Israel protesters have demonstrated in Chicago near daily since the war in Gaza erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air, and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages, mostly civilians.
Vowing to destroy Hamas and return the hostages, Israel launched a wide-scale offensive in Gaza that the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry says has killed at least 33,729 Palestinians, mostly women and children. These figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. Israel says it has killed more than 13,000 terrorists inside Gaza and a further 1,000 in Israel on October 7.
The IDF says 260 soldiers have been killed in the ground operation in Gaza since October 7.
Times of Israel Staff contributed to this report.