Moroccan youths to take to streets for 7th day of protests

The organisers of Morocco's youth-led protests called for a seventh straight day of rallies on Friday demanding reforms to public healthcare and education.

"We reaffirm that these demonstrations will be entirely peaceful and reject any form of violence, rioting, or destruction of public and private property," the group, a youth collective known as GenZ 212, said on the Discord online messaging platform.

GenZ 212 also urged protesters to wear black "as a sign of mourning for the injured and the dead" after three people were killed Wednesday.

Authorities claimed the three had attempted to storm a law enforcement station near Agadir.

The rallies across the usually stable country have been fuelled by anger over social inequality, particularly following reports last month of the deaths of eight pregnant women at a public hospital in the city of Agadir.

Some cities have seen violence and vandalism, but protests Thursday were largely peaceful, according to an AFP journalist and media reports.

GenZ 212 was founded on Discord in mid-September, its name a reference to people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, and to Morocco's telephone country code, 212.

It is not clear who leads the group, which had reached nearly 170,000 users on Discord as of Friday.

Friday's demonstrations were set to take place at 1700 GMT.

In a post addressed to King Mohammed VI earlier Friday, the group had called for the government's dismissal, but in a later statement it said the message had not been issued in its "final" form, without elaborating.

The European Union said Friday that it recognised "the importance of youth participation in public life" and called on "all parties involved to keep calm".