Pro-Israel demonstrators accused of assaulting woman in New York
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling on the New York Police Department (NYPD) to pursue hate crime charges against “members of a pro-Israel mob” who were seen chasing and attacking a woman, whom they thought was Arab-American.
The incident, which was caught on video and posted online, occurred after protesters gathered outside an event where Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was speaking in Brooklyn, New York.
Drop Site News, which posted the video, said the mob threw a traffic cone into her head and a garbage can at her legs, and taunted her “with explicit threats of rape”.
The video showed a single police officer escorting the woman as dozens of men, many of whom appeared to be Orthodox Jewish, followed and harassed her.
CAIR’s national deputy director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, denounced the men’s actions.
“We strongly condemn the violent mob of pro-Israel racists who chased and attacked a woman down a New York City street while shouting ‘Death to Arabs’ and other vile slurs, such as calling her a ‘waste of semen’,” he said.
“We call on elected officials across New York to condemn these hate actions, and we call on law enforcement to identify and prosecute those responsible for hate crimes,” Mitchell added.
"If a huge mob of men surrounding a woman and threatening her security fails to shake our conscience, then we are a lost people. The NYPD must investigate this shocking incident as a hate crime and bring the perpetrators..." @CAIRNewYork #Gaza
READ MORE: https://t.co/BYtAA7EToI https://t.co/l6F3b1GSKR
— CAIR National (@CAIRNational) April 26, 2025
US says UNRWA is not immune from lawsuits
The Trump administration has reversed the US government’s longstanding position that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) was protected from civil liability. The new position was unveiled in a letter the Justice Department filed in federal court in New York on Thursday as part of a lawsuit that aims to hold the agency accountable for the Hamas-led attacks of October 7.
The lawsuit, filed by families of some of the victims of the massacre, alleges that UNRWA had aided Hamas by, among other things, permitting weapons storage and deployment centres in its schools and medical clinics and by employing Hamas members.
Lawyers for UNRWA have called the lawsuit “absurd” and have said in court filings that the agency was immune from liability as a “subsidiary organ” of the UN.
UNRWA provides aid and services – including health and education – to some 2.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, as well as 3 million more in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Since the Israel-Hamas war, it has been the main lifeline for a population reliant on humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Israel has banned UNRWA from operating in territory it controls, alleging that some 19 out of its 13,000 staff in Gaza took part in the Hamas attack. UNRWA said it fired nine staffers after an internal UN investigation concluded that they could have been involved, although the evidence was not authenticated or corroborated.
