NEW YORK — As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Friday morning, protesters on the streets of New York City addressed Netanyahu and the world.

The demonstrators began gathering in Times Square, across town from the United Nations building, early in the morning. A Palestinian flag flapped in the breeze as some of the protesters, most of them young, held signs reading “End All U.S. Aid to Israel,” “Arrest Netanyahu” and “Stop Starving Gaza Now!”

The crowd cheered loudly when organizers announced that heads of state had walked out of the General Assembly chamber en masse during Netanyahu’s speech. “Netanyahu you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” they chanted.

By the time the protesters began marching toward the U.N. around 10:15 a.m., after Netanyahu had finished, there were about 2,000 of them, police said. The demonstrators filled 42nd Street, the city’s marquee thoroughfare, then turned uptown and forced the closure of several blocks of Sixth Avenue.

The protesters also inveighed against continued U.S. support of Israel. Trump administration officials “don’t care about the death of brown people who are Palestinians, and they’re not considered human beings,” said David Robinson, 64, from Brooklyn. “We are watching this going on. It breaks my heart. And I don’t know why everybody isn’t here.”

Protests also greeted Netanyahu when he arrived in New York on Thursday. Shortly before midnight, 14 people were taken into custody at a “No Sleep for Netanyahu” demonstration near his hotel on the Upper East Side, the Loews Regency, and issued summonses for unreasonable noise, police said.

Demonstrations against the Israeli government and in support of Palestinian rights have become common on college campuses and in major cities across the United States during the siege of the Gaza Strip that followed Hamas’ 2023 attack on Israel. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there, and starvation has spread throughout the territory. Israel is currently leveling parts of Gaza City through near-constant bombing.

Only 26% of New York Voters Sympathized More With Israel

A poll by The New York Times and Siena University this month found that in New York City — home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel — only 26% of registered voters sympathized more with Israel than with Palestinians, while 44% sympathized more with Palestinians.

Charles Hamlin, 63, came from New Orleans to attend the march. “I just am so frustrated with the apathy of Americans — putting on blinders, choosing to be willfully ignorant to feel not complicit in the situation,” he said.

Noting that Netanyahu had been charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes, Hamlin added that the prime minister “should not be able to come to New York City and lobby the U.N., Congress or anyone else to try to stave off the two-state solution or try to stave off a ceasefire.”

Some demonstrators also protested against New York Mayor Eric Adams, who attended Netanyahu’s speech even as dozens of heads of state walked out.

Aaron Kirshenbaum, 24, of Brooklyn, said it was “absolutely egregious” that Adams had let Netanyahu land in New York. The leading candidate in November’s mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would honor the International Criminal Court’s warrant and order police to arrest Netanyahu if he set foot in the city.

At Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a park across from the U.N., a small group of pro-Israel counterprotesters waving Israeli and American flags confronted a handful of the pro-Palestine protesters as officers stood between the two groups, who shouted profanities at each other.

After the protest ended, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who proposed to the General Assembly this week that an international army form to liberate a Palestinian state, addressed the demonstrators in the plaza.

He said that last week, when the United States vetoed a resolution at the U.N. Security Council demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza for the sixth time, “diplomacy ended.”

“Human history has shown us throughout millennia that when diplomacy is finished, we must move on to another phase of the struggle,” Petro said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Andy Newman and Olivia Bensimon/Kent J. Edwards
c. 2025 The New York Times Company