US law enforcement agencies have escalated security measures to safeguard Jewish and Muslim communities ahead of global pro-Palestinian protests expected on Friday but urged members of the public to go about their daily routines.
Police in the two most populous US cities – New York and Los Angeles – said they would step up patrols, especially around synagogues and Jewish community centers, though authorities insisted they were unaware of any specific, or credible threats.
“There’s no reason to feel afraid. No one should feel they have to alter their normal lives,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said at a news briefing on Thursday.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said his office had directed city police to “surge additional resources to schools and houses of worship to ensure they are safe and that our city remains a place of peace.”
Adams said extra police patrols were being deployed in Jewish and Muslim communities alike.
Heightened US security concerns, particularly over a possible flare-up of antisemitic and Islamophobic violence, were spurred by the recent wave of bloodshed after Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip on Saturday rampaged through parts of southern Israel in the deadliest Palestinian attack in Israel’s history. More than 1,300 Israelis were killed and scores were taken captive.
Heavy aerial bombardment of Gaza by Israeli armed forces in response has killed at least 1,500 people and injured 6,600 others in the crowded Palestinian coastal enclave, according to health officials there.
Former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal called for protests across the Muslim world on Friday in support of Palestinians, a message amplified on social media by calls for a day of resistance on behalf of the people of Gaza.
Times square protest expected
New York City officials said they were bracing for at least one major demonstration planned for Times Square on Friday.
“Every member of the New York Police Department will be ready and be in uniform tomorrow,” NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell told reporters. “We will not tolerate any hate, any acts of disorder, it will be quelled quickly and we will be ready.”
Hochul said the New York National Guard had already been ordered to patrol vital transportation hubs.
Across the country, the Los Angeles Police Department issued a statement saying its officers would assume a higher profile around Jewish and Muslim communities “during this unimaginable time.”
Federal law enforcement agencies were also on alert.
“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.”
At least one Arab-American advocacy group pointed to a more hostile posture taken by US law enforcement toward Muslim groups than Jews.
The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee said on Thursday that FBI agents had paid visits to a number of mosques in different states and individual US residents with Palestinian roots, calling it a “troubling trend.”
“We have received multiple calls today regarding Palestinian nationals detained by ICE, and/or visited by the FBI,” the national executive director of organization, Abed Ayoub, said on X, formerly called Twitter.
Rabbi Yoni Fein, who heads a large Jewish day school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the Brauser Maimonides Academy, said “higher alerts of operations are definitely in place” in anticipation of global protests on Friday.
He said the FBI, US homeland security officials and other federal authorities had held online security “webinars” with Jewish institutions around the country.
But Fein said the school was seeking to reassure students they are safe and to go about with their lives.
Rather than give in to the heightened anxiety Fein acknowledged was gripping the Jewish community, he said the academy’s message to its students and their families was to reassure them that “their homes are safe, their schools are safe and that their trusted adults are keeping them safe.”
US colleges become flashpoints for protests on both sides of Israel-Hamas war
At Columbia University on Thursday, two groups of hundreds of students tensely faced each other in dueling pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while university officials blocked public access to the New York City campus as a safety measure.
Supporters of Palestinians, many of whom wore face masks to hide their identities, held signs in a grassy area near a library that read “Free Palestine” and “To Exist is to Resist.” About 100 feet (30 meters) away, students backing Israel silently held up posters with the faces of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.
After the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ weekend attack on Israel, Israel has bombarded and laid siege to the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, and plans a ground invasion. The Israeli death toll had risen to more than 1,300, according to public broadcaster Kan. Gaza authorities said more than 1,500 Palestinians had been killed.
Amid the growing conflict, tensions between students on opposite sides of the issue have boiled over on some US college campuses.
Statements by student groups supporting Palestinians have prompted outrage and fear among Jews and, in some cases, wider rebuke from public officials and corporations. There have been reports of harassment and assaults of both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students, deepening grief and putting students of all political stripes on high alert.
“Jewish students are afraid,” said David Hidary, a 20-year-old physics major, who attended the Columbia protest with an Israeli flag draped over his shoulders.
In a sign of the tensions, some counter-protesters at Columbia shouted angrily at the pro-Palestinian group. During a moment of silence for Palestinian victims, an opposing protester yelled out that they should be honoring children murdered by Hamas.
Several masked speakers at the pro-Palestine rally declined to reveal their full names, with one saying they did not feel safe enough on campus to disclose their identity. Many faulted the university for not expressing more support for Palestinian students and the people of Gaza.
The campus climate may only become more tense in coming days. Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas in retribution for the deadliest attack by Palestinian terrorists in Israeli history.
Meanwhile, college administrators are grappling with how to keep campuses secure and denounce the violence in the Middle East without wading too deeply into a supercharged political and historical dispute that affects Jewish and Palestinian students personally.
‘Day of Resistance’
A controversy at Harvard University on Monday was one of the first to make headlines. Prominent alumni lambasted a joint student group statement calling Israel “entirely responsible” for the war. The university president later clarified that the groups did not represent the school’s position.
On Tuesday, the names and personal information of students allegedly involved were posted online and on Wednesday a billboard truck displaying that information was driven around campus, the Harvard Crimson newspaper reported. Some critics of the pro-Palestinian letter responded by denouncing the intimidation of students, the newspaper said.
Tensions sparked anew at campuses on Thursday as the national group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) declared a “day of resistance,” with demonstrations by its 200 chapters at colleges across North America.
The national group, which advocates for an independent Palestine and says on its website that it promotes “an agenda grounded in freedom, solidarity, equality, safety and historical justice,” called the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization fighting antisemitism, wrote a letter to college presidents warning that Students for Justice in Palestine was “condoning terrorism by Hamas by repackaging it as justified acts of ‘resistance'” with its planned day of action.
The University of Arizona, Tucson chapter of SJP canceled a protest on Thursday, citing safety concerns after the school’s president called the gathering “antithetical to our university’s values.”
Dozens of students from the University of California Los Angeles chapter of SJP held a march for Palestine on Thursday, despite the group’s report that its student members had been harassed and assaulted over the last several days, including while counter-protesting a pro-Israel rally.
At Georgetown University in Washington, DC, the SJP chapter chose to host a vigil on Thursday night but declined to allow media access “due to increased harassment and threats of violence against Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and anti-Zionist students across the country.”
Australian police consider special search powers ahead of pro-Palestinian protest
Australian police are considering applying special stop-and-search powers for the first time in almost two decades to attendees at a pro-Palestinian rally on Sunday, as tensions rise in the country after Hamas’ bloody incursion into Israel.
New South Wales state police said on Friday they had sought legal advice about special powers not used since race riots in 2005 that would allow police to search and demand the identity without cause of those attending a pro-Palestinian protest in Sydney.
“If they fail to do so it is an offence, these are extraordinary powers,” Acting Commissioner Dave Hudson told a news conference.
Police expect more than four hundred people to attend the protest in Sydney’s Hyde Park.
The planned demonstration has touched off nationwide debate after footage from a Monday rally by the same group showed people chanting “gas the jews”. Organisers claim a fringe group of “vile” antisemites attended and were told to leave.
Protest organiser Palestine Action Group Sydney have said Sunday’s rally will go ahead without police authorisation, and defended the right to demonstrate after calls from politicians across the political spectrum to cancel the event.
Countries across the developed world are curbing pro-Palestinian protests out of concern the Israel-Hamas conflict could trigger violence at home. France banned pro-Palestinian protests on Thursday saying they were likely to “generate disturbances to public order”.
Germany banned a pro-Palestinian group after it posted photos on Instagram of activists handing out sweets celebrating the Hamas attacks.
Australia’s intelligence chief warned on Thursday about the potential for opportunistic violence and called for people to tone down rhetoric that could inflame tensions in the community.
France uses teargas on banned pro-Palestinian rally as Macron calls for calm
French police used teargas and water cannon to break up a banned rally in support of the Palestinian people in Paris on Thursday, as President Emmanuel Macron urged the French to remain united and refrain from bringing the Israel-Hamas conflict home.
Macron’s interior minister had earlier banned pro-Palestinian protests, saying they were “likely to generate disturbances to public order.”
France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities. The Middle East conflict has often stoked domestic tensions in the past.
“This event is an earthquake for Israel, the Middle East and beyond,” Macron said in a solemn TV address. “Let’s not pursue at home ideological adventures by imitating or projecting.”
“Let’s not add, through illusions or calculations, domestic divides to international divides,” he said. “The shield of unity will protect us from hatred and excesses.”
Macron said the government had acted to boost police protection of Jewish sites, including schools and synagogues, and that there could be no justification for atrocities.
“There is no ‘Yes, but’. Those who confuse the Palestinian cause with the justification of terrorism are making a moral, political and strategic mistake.”
Before he spoke, the far-left France Unbowed party faced criticism for refusing to call the Hamas attack an act of terrorism, causing tension with its Socialist and Green opposition partners.
Banning some rallies
Despite the ban, several hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered in central Paris in separate groups that police forces sought to keep from merging.
Demonstrators chanted “Israel murderer” and “Macron accomplice.” Macron has previously condemned the deadly attack by the Palestinian terrorist Hamas group and voiced solidarity with Israel.
“We live in a country of civil law, a country where we have the right to take a stand and to demonstrate. (It is unfair) to forbid for one side and to authorize for the other,” said Charlotte Vautier, 29, an employee at a non-profit who took part in the rally.
Earlier this week, Hamas called for protests across the Muslim world on Friday to support Palestinians.
Two pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris had already been banned on Thursday for fear of outbursts when interior minister Gerald Darmanin told prefects to ban all pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country.
Since the Hamas cross-border attack from Gaza on Saturday, French police have arrested more than 20 people in dozens of antisemitic acts, including harassment of Jewish children by fellow pupils at school, the government said on Wednesday.
