Major US cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC stepped up security for residents, especially around Jewish and Muslim places of worship, ahead of protests on Friday and against any threats of violence over the escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East.
Leave was canceled for police officers in several of the cities, with security heightened around sites such as synagogues, schools and the Israeli embassy in Washington.
A heavy law enforcement presence greeted protesters gathering in New York City’s Times Square on Friday for a rally in support of the Palestinian people. The late-afternoon event was peaceful. But earlier in the day, a city council member was arrested for bringing a handgun to a student demonstration supporting Palestinians near Brooklyn College.
Inna Vernikov, a Republican who is Jewish, described pro-Palestinian protesters as “terrorists” while accusing them of making Jewish students feel unsafe. She was seen at the event with a pistol in her waistband, police said.
American college campuses have become a flashpoint in recent days with groups of pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters confronting each other.
Protests were also expected in the Middle East and elsewhere in the US on Friday after Khaled Mashal, Hamas’s former leader, called for a global day of “anger” to send a “message of rage to Zionists and to America”.
The increased state of alert follows the deadly attack by Hamas on southern Israel last Saturday and the subsequent retaliatory destruction of parts of Gaza by Israeli forces that has killed several thousand Israeli and Palestinian civilians.
Israel’s military has ordered the population of northern Gaza, numbering more than 1 million people, to evacuate before an expected ground invasion, a task that the United Nations has said would be “impossible without devastating humanitarian consequences”. Hamas has told people to stay put in defiance, in a desperately dangerous and tense situation.
The conflict has raised tensions in the US, with both Jewish and Muslim groups reporting an increase in abuse and threats directed at their communities. The expected protests have raised concerns of possible violence.
“The FBI is aware of open-source reports about calls for global action on Friday, October 13th, that may lead to demonstrations in communities throughout the United States,” the agency said in a statement. “The FBI encourages members of the public to remain vigilant.”
“Every member of the New York Police Department will be ready and be in uniform tomorrow,” John Chell, the department’s chief of patrol, said. “We will not tolerate any hate, any acts of disorder. It will be quelled quickly and we will be ready.”
Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, said that police were ready to safeguard communities across the state but that there were no credible threats people should be concerned about. “There’s no reason to feel afraid,” she said. “No one should feel they have to alter their normal lives.”
Police leave has also been canceled in Los Angeles, with officers set to be deployed at expected protests. In Chicago, the police department said it was “paying special attention to synagogues and mosques so that all of our residents are safe”, following a bomb threat that prompted evacuation of a synagogue in the Chicago area on Thursday.
There have been other such threats – a separate synagogue in Salt Lake City, Utah, also reported being told it would be bombed – that Jewish groups say is part of an uptick in menacing behavior in the US.
Generalized calls for violence against “Jews, Israelis and Zionists” via the Telegram platform increased 400% in the 18 hours after Hamas attacked Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s center on extremism, which said it was tracking reports of antisemitic assaults and vandalism.
“It’s coming from all angles,” Oren Segal, the vice-president of the center on extremism at the ADL, told CBS. “We know what happens online doesn’t stay online.”
There has also been a spike in Islamaphobic acts, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The group said that it has received “growing reports of Muslim and Arab students experiencing harassment and intimidation in public high schools and on college and university campuses”.
Muslim groups have warned that certain communities are being unjustly singled out by authorities. The FBI has visited certain mosques and people with Palestinian roots, according to the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, which noted “a troubling trend”.
“We have received multiple calls today regarding Palestinian nationals detained by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and/or visited by the FBI,” tweeted Abed Ayoub, the national executive director of the committee.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
