Thousands of people from New York’s Jewish community gathered in Times Square on Thursday evening to demand the release of an estimated 203 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
Throughout the event, billed as the “Bring Them Home Now” rally, faces of the missing were flashed across 15 Times Square billboards.
“I don’t think anyone is stressing the hostages,” said Eva Fogelman, a psychiatrist who specializes in groups for generations of the Holocaust. “Normally, when a hostage gets taken in Iran or somewhere it gets a lot of coverage.” Instead, Fogelman said, attention had shifted to the bombing of the Al Ahli hospital, where an explosion killed hundreds of Palestinians this week.
“The hostages should be on the front page,” said Tani Foger, a school psychiatrist who was attending the rally. “Hostages are hostages, and if the world shone a light on that, Hamas would be under more pressure to negotiate.”
The rally comes as Israel appears ready to launch a ground invasion of Gaza following the attack by Hamas that killed at least 1,400 Israelis. More than 3,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza over the past 12 days.
Hamas said on Thursday not all of the hostages that were taken to Gaza are being held by the group and no one knows the exact number. In an interview with the New York Times, Osama Hamdan, a member of Hamas’s political bureau in Lebanon, specified Palestinian Islamic Jihad as one of the groups holding hostages.
Eden Zinger, 23, a flight attendant who had just arrived from Israel, drew attention to the character and timing of the Hamas attack on a rave nearly two weeks ago. Palestinians, she said, should fear Israel’s response. “Imagine … the people did their drugs, it’s the happiest moment of your life … and then someone is shooting at you.”
Zinger’s colleague Lidya Bell, 24, said it was not normal to see people of her age being buried “for doing absolutely nothing”. But the fear that gripped Israel in the days after the attacks, she added, had been alleviated by the response of the US. “When the US president spoke, and said he stands with us, it really helped. We felt, finally, we’re not alone.”
The rally, organized by Israeli-American Council, drew attendance from political figures including the Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, Israel’s permanent representative to the UN, Gilad Erdan, and Eric Adams, the New York mayor. There are about 1.6 million adherents to Judaism in the city, greater than the combined totals of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Schumer, who visited Israel during the weekend, vowed the US “would fight with you side by side until the threat of Hamas is totally eliminated and every hostage brought home”. By taking hostages, he said, Hamas had made US resolve to stand with Israel “stronger and closer”.
But Erdan accused the UN of “looking away from our pain”. He vowed to remind the body that it was “established in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent tragedies like this” and criticized the UN secretary general, António Guterres, for his plan to visit the Gaza’s Rafah crossing to Egypt on Friday.
“Tragically it seems his top priority is giving aid to the terrorists who abducted our loved ones,” Erdan said. “If the secretary general truly cares about humanitarian needs, our hostages must be his top priority.”
Erdan vowed that neither the UN security council, nor Gaza, would have a moment of quiet “until we welcome [the hostages] home”.
Adams described the taking of the hostages as an “Emmet Till moment”, referring to the 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted and killed by white separatists in Mississippi in 1955. “Let me be clear, New York stands for humanity both here and abroad … and we call for the safe return of our Jewish brothers and sisters.”
The remarks came shortly before a televised address in which Joe Biden called on Congress for a $14bn security package that, he said, would “sharpen Israel’s military edge”.
David Morris, a litigation lawyer who was at the Times Square event, said while he was opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the taking of hostages by Hamas was not the right way to correct that wrong. “Taking babies and old people is not the way to seek justice, and while people are being held hostage, I can’t think about the other issues,” he said.
