200 held as Jewish group shuts NYC’s Grand Central calling for Gaza ceasefire
Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, protests Israeli strikes on Hamas with banners and slogans saying ‘not in our name,’ and ‘Palestinians should be free’
Hundreds of people were arrested Friday when police broke up a large demonstration of mostly Jewish New Yorkers who had taken over the main hall of Grand Central station in protest of Israel’s war with Hamas, police and organizers said.
Wearing black T-shirts saying “Jews say cease-fire now” and “Not in our name,” at least 200 of the demonstrators were detained by New York Police Department officers and led out of the train station, their hands zip-tied behind their backs. The NYPD said the protesters were taken briefly into custody, issued summonses and released, and that a more exact number of detentions would be available Saturday morning.
The massive sit-in was called by the group Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City, an anti-Zionist group, which said thousands of its members had attended the protest, blocking the main concourse of the city’s central rail station.
Pictures showed the terminal packed with protesters who held up banners reading “Palestinians should be free” and “Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.”
Organizers called the peaceful sit-in “the largest civil disobedience New York City has seen in 20 years.”
Rabbis launched the event by lighting Shabbat candles and reciting the Jewish prayer for the dead.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the October 7 assault. On that Saturday morning, some 2,500 terrorists streamed into Israel by land, sea, and air, killing over 1,400 people, a majority of them civilians in their homes and at an outdoor music festival in border communities across southern Israel. Hamas and allied terrorist factions also dragged over 220 hostages — including some 30 children — into the Gaza Strip where they remain captive.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says the Israeli strikes have killed over 7,000 people, many of them children. The figures issued by the terror group cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include its own terrorists and gunmen killed in Israel and in Gaza, and the victims of what Israel says are hundreds of errant Palestinian rockets that have landed in the Strip since the war began. Israel says it killed 1,500 Hamas terrorists inside Israel on and after October 7.
