New York City police arrested numerous pro-Gaza protesters outside the New York Stock Exchange on Monday after a demonstration highlighting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.
Demonstrators voiced chants such as “Let Gaza live!” and “Up up with liberation, down down with occupation!” and managed to get inside a security fence outside the exchange on Broad Street in downtown Manhattan.
They then sat down and waited for police to take them into custody, according to the Associated Press.
Jewish Voice for Peace, which organized the protest, said: “200 Jews are risking arrest risking arrest in the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of the New York Stock Exchange.”
“Stocks are rising while children are dying. As Israel drops bombs on homes, schools, and hospitals in Gaza, Wall Street booms, and all the members of Congress who invest in these companies get richer every day,” Jay Saper of Jewish Voice for Peace, said in a press release.
Video of the protest posted by independent journalist Noah Hurowitz on Twitter/X shows a large group of protesters walking briskly toward the exchange, converging in front of the entrance, and blocking it. Police reportedly told some media that there had been up to 200 arrests.
Asked to confirm the number of arrests, an NYPD spokesperson said there had been multiple, but that they did not have a final number yet. Police were also witnessed detaining a credentialed journalist and then released her shortly thereafter, Hurowitz said on X.
The demonstration came a week after the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s 7 October attack against Israel. Hamas fighters crossed into Israel from Gaza and killed 1,200 people, including more than 40 Americans, and took at least 251 hostages of whom nearly 100 remain in Gaza, according to NBC News.
Israel has since carried out a military campaign in Gaza. The Gaza ministry of health says that more than 41,000 have died, ABC News said.
The Israel-Gaza war has expanded into other parts of the region and stoked fears that military action will spread further, especially if Iran carries out larger attacks than it has done so far. Hezbollah, allied with Iran, on 8 October 2023 started launching rockets at northern Israel in support of Hamas.
The conflict deepened recently after Israel bombed southern Lebanon, the Bekaa valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs, and deployed ground troops across the border.
“At this very moment, the Israeli military is massacring family after family in North Gaza – with US-made bombs. The Biden Administration wants the public to believe that the US’s $18 billion slushfund for Israel’s genocide is for the sake of ‘Jewish safety,’” Elena Stein, director of organizing strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace, said in a press release.
“We’re here refusing to be used as the US’s moral cover and to expose its true interests: financial gain and control in the region. Weapons embargo now,” Stein also said.
