People gathered across Manhattan on Tuesday to observe the second anniversary of Hamas’s deadly attack against Israel with a mixture of grief, anger and muted hope as the two sides negotiated a potential end to the ensuing war that has ravaged Gaza.
Some saw the day as an occasion to mourn the more than 1,200 people killed in the attack and to remember those that Hamas held hostage. Others sought to draw focus to the plight of Gaza — where more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed and those who remain face severe hunger — and to condemn Israel and those who have supported its actions there. Speakers at one vigil emphasized peace and empathy for both sides.
In Central Park on Tuesday afternoon, several hundred people assembled near the Great Lawn to pray for the captives and recite several psalms before marching while holding Israeli flags and pictures of hostages and those killed in the attack.
“I know that every one of us here still carries scars and grief from what occurred two years ago,” Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, the senior rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, said to the crowd. “But we are not here to talk about grief or about scars. We are here to say that we are still standing.”
David Kaplan was among those in the crowd, Mr. Kaplan, 53, lives in Israel and was in New York City to visit his mother. “Any opportunity that we have to show strength in unity in the face of evil is something that needs to be done,” he said.
Referring to the peace proposal now being negotiated, Mr. Kaplan, who works in the financial industry, said it was “a deal that I think we should all be willing to accept, on all sides.” He expressed skepticism about Hamas’s willingness to agree to elements of the plan, saying he believed the group wants to “lead us back to war.”
The remembrances of the attack had begun before the anniversary itself.
On Sunday at Temple Emanu-El on the East Side, Iair Horn, who was taken hostage by Hamas and held for 498 days before being released, talked of his younger brother Eitan, who was still in captivity.
Since his return, Mr. Horn said, “I have carried the weight of freedom and the heavy weight of separation; I cannot be truly free when Eitan is still underground.”
At the event, organized by Jewish nonprofits and a group representing hostages’ families, Mr. Horn expressed hope that the peace negotiations would result in freedom for his brother and the other hostages.
“This must be the moment when families are reunited, when the nation begins to heal, when the nightmare ends,” he said.
The focus was somewhat different on Tuesday outside a City University of New York building in Midtown, where several dozen protesters, many wearing kaffiyehs and carrying banners, chanted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans at passers-by. Their anger was chiefly directed at the university, which they demanded divest itself of any financial ties to Israel.
Alice Sturmsutter, a retired nurse practitioner who is Jewish and graduated from City College in 1968, said she felt “sorrow” and “horror” that her tax dollars were financing Israel’s bombing of Gaza. She also took a dim view of the peace plan’s prospects.
“I don’t trust any of the people involved,” said Ms. Sturmsutter, 77, adding, “They’re forcing the peace plan on people who are starving.”
The group she was part of eventually marched north to join a protest organized by Within Our Lifetime and other pro-Palestinian groups outside News Corp headquarters on Sixth Avenue. As they walked, the driver of a truck going the opposite way honked and pumped his fist.
Media coverage of the war, including by The New York Times, was the focus of some of the chants. People held two large banners that said: “Fox News Lies” and “Gaza Dies.” The protesters paused briefly at 5:15 p.m. for a Muslim prayer. A phalanx of police officers watched from nearby.
Mariama Kane, a barista, said that it was her first protest and that she had been inspired to join it after a recent discussion at her regular halaqa, or religious study circle.
“I had a wake-up call last week,” Ms. Kane, 24, said. “We as American-born, Muslim Americans, we don’t do enough.”
She realized her fears about attending a protest felt insignificant compared with what Palestinians have endured for two years. “What am I really scared of?” she said.
New York City, which has the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel and hundreds of thousands of Muslim residents, has been the site of frequent demonstrations over the war, and residents have expressed anxiety about rising antisemitic and anti-Muslim violence and harassment.
Public opinion about the war, locally and nationally, has shifted over time: A survey published by The Times last month found that New Yorkers now sympathize broadly with Palestinians over Israel.
At the Tuesday demonstration, Michele Scrimenti, a technology consultant who lives in Manhattan, was standing at the crowd’s edge with a kaffiyeh draped across his shoulders. He said he had attended a couple of pro-Palestinian protests each month.
Mr. Scrimenti, 39, said he was “glad to show solidarity” with “people who have been under constant bombardment for two years and starvation for six months.”
“Israel could not be carrying out this genocide without the U.S. taxpayers funding it, so it’s an extra responsibility for our citizens to speak up and try to stop it,” he added.
Mr. Scrimenti said he had followed an 11-year-old Palestinian influencer, Yaqeen Hammad, on Instagram until, according to reporting by the Guardian, she was killed in an Israeli bombing in May. “She was this happy girl,” he said. “She’s gone now.”
Shortly after 6 p.m., the crowd had swelled to hundreds and began to march north on Sixth Avenue, causing traffic to pause intermittently as it moved. Some people beat drums while others chanted. A small group toward the front waved a huge Palestinian flag on a long pole. A police drone hovered above.
The marchers paused briefly outside the Trump International Hotel, with some people kneeling to pray, and then proceeded to Times Square and then to Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s Far West Side. The crowd remained largely peaceful, and no arrests were made.
Later, at a rally at Union Square organized by the group Israelis for Peace and attended by hundreds of people, there were no signs and no flags — by design. The group’s animating idea is to promote what Tamar Glezerman, one of the founders, called the “need for humanistic discourse that honors human life and objects to war crimes and attacks.”
“Trauma is not a zero-sum game,” Ms. Glezerman said in an interview before the rally. “Empathy is not a zero-sum game.”
The speakers included Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Jumaane Williams, the public advocate; and various Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, sat in a chair toward the front of the crowd, holding a lit candle. He did not speak.
Mr. Lander, who is Jewish, told the crowd, “It should not be this difficult to find a place where we can demand that Hamas return the hostages to their families and also demand that Israel stop imposing famine on Gaza.”
And so, he added, “we pray fervently” for “the deal to take hold, for the bombing to stop, for humanitarian aid to flow in, for people to stop starving, for all of the hostages to return home to their family.”
Reporting was contributed by Cassidy Jensen, Olivia Bensimon, Talya Minsberg and Camille Baker.
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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