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Released hostage and families of those still captive join thousands at rally marking 100 days since Oct. 7
(New York Jewish Week) – An Israeli child who was freed from Hamas captivity and relatives of those still held hostage addressed a crowd of thousands outside the United Nations at a rally marking 100 days since the terror group’s Oct. 7 invasion of Israel.
The rally featured Israeli and American flags and the singing of Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah.” Speeches mentioned Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza. But most speakers — including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Chuck Schumer — focused their remarks on the plight of the hostages.
Hila Rotem Shoshani, 13, who was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri, implored the crowd to keep pushing for the hostages’ release. Shoshani was taken captive along with her mother and a friend, and was released in an exchange deal in late November that saw more than 100 hostages go free. Organizers said her speech was the first by a former Israeli captive in the U.S.
“Life as a hostage in Gaza is not life, it is hell. I came all the way here to ask the whole world to help us bring back all of the hostages,” she said. “We can’t leave them there. Their families are waiting for them. Bring them home, please.”
In addition to carrying flags, attendees wore stickers saying, “Today is day 100,” and pins showing photos of the captives. Signs in Hebrew said, “100 days of hell,” and in English, “Let my people go.” At the start of the rally, participants held a moment of silence for the hostages for 100 seconds.
Volunteers in Midtown East’s Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza sold sweatshirts and beanies that said “Bring them home” to raise money for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, one of the central groups advocating for the captives and an organizer of the rally. Organizers estimated that the demonstration drew 2,500 people.
Yair Moses, whose father, Gadi Moses, 79, is held hostage, described his anguish, saying he had been unable to eat or sleep since his father was taken. His voice broke at times during his speech.
“There are other elderly men there, like my father. No one knows if they will be able to recover from this, physically or mentally,” Moses said. “There are young women there. We have already heard witness accounts that tell of the horrors they have gone through and are still going through.”
He added, “Time is running out, and the longer they stay there the greater the risk to their lives.”
Demonstrators rally in support of Hamas hostages near the U.N., Jan. 12, 2024. (Luke Tress)
The demonstration was held in place of weekly Friday morning gatherings outside the home of U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres on behalf of the hostages. The rally kicked off a series of events in support of the hostages that will be held throughout the city over the weekend.
From Friday afternoon through Saturday night, an hourglass installation will sit in Times Square symbolizing that “time is running out” — a replica of a display in Tel Aviv.
On Sunday morning, the 100th day since Oct. 7, a “100 Days March” will take place in Central Park. Activists have been holding weekly Sunday running sessions in the park, part of a campaign in New York and other cities dubbed “Run For Their Lives.” Participants in the events will hold photos of the hostages and wear yellow ribbons, a symbol of the captives. The New York run will begin at Central Park West and 90th Street.
Also on Sunday, a separate event lasting most of the day in Washington Square Park will feature musicians playing songs at a yellow piano open to the public in honor of Alon Ohel, a 22-year-old pianist who is being held hostage.
In addition to Hochul and Schumer, a range of public officials, rabbis and Jewish organizational leaders from across the city attended Friday’s rally. The event was co-sponsored by a wide array of U.S. Jewish groups.
Hochul said she had been devastated during a visit to Kfar Aza, one of the communities hardest hit in Hamas’ attack, shortly after Oct. 7. She voiced support for Israel’s campaign against Hamas and decried the lack of attention to hostages in the public sphere.
“Why are not people across this world demanding the freedom of these hostages?” Hochul asked. “Where is the outrage? Where’s the daily coverage of the suffering of the hostages and their families?”
She continued, “I want them brought home now and I want the rest of the world to start saying the same thing because it is barbaric and inhumane to hold them one day longer.”
Demonstrators rally in support of Hamas hostages near the U.N., Jan. 12, 2024. (Luke Tress)
The crowd was composed largely of American Jews and included delegations from local Jewish high schools. Some attendees cried and embraced during the speeches. Jewish-Israeli singer Shimon Smith performed the song “Nigmar” (Hebrew for “It’s over”) by Israeli star Idan Amedi, the “Fauda” singer and actor who was badly injured in combat in Gaza this week. Amedi rose to prominence in 2010 with the song “Warrior’s Pain,” about a combat soldier struggling with PTSD.
Ellen Muss and Laura Green attended the rally holding milk cartons with images of the Hamas captives, part of an awareness campaign recalling efforts to locate missing persons. Muss’ carton bore the image of Kfir Bibas, the redheaded baby taken by Hamas who remains held in Gaza and who has become a symbol of the captives.
“We felt a very strong attachment to the hostages and it’s just keeping the awareness alive for everybody that it’s almost 100 days,” Muss said. She was in Israel several weeks ago and visited “Hostages Square” in Tel Aviv, an installation in support of the captives next to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where she met the sister of hostage Omri Miran and showed her photos of the milk carton campaign in New York.
“She was so touched to know that we’re still thinking about them,” Muss said. “This could have been you, your sister, your grandmother, and that’s what we have to tell people.”
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The post Released hostage and families of those still captive join thousands at rally marking 100 days since Oct. 7 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Hits Israel With 17 Percent Tariffs; Israeli Officials Express Shock, Frustration
US President Donald Trump waves as he walks before departing for Florida from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, US, March 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The United States will impose 17 percent tariffs on goods imported from Israel under a major new trade initiative that US President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday, sending shockwaves throughout the Jewish state as Israeli officials expressed frustration with the decision.
The duty on Israel is part of Trump’s newly unveiled sweeping set of tariffs in which the US will impose a 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports to the US and higher duties on some countries with which it has larger trade deficits. Washington decided on the 17-percent figure for Israel because it is half of the 33 percent tariffs that the White House says the Jewish state has put in place for some American products.
Israel sends over $22 billion worth of commodities to the US annually, including diamonds, medications, and electronic devices. Israeli officials reportedly expect the country’s robust high-tech sector to be spared because they believe the US tariffs will not be applied to services.
However, if the tariffs do apply to the high-tech sector, the implications could be profound.
“If the tariffs apply to software products as well, particularly Software as a Service (SaaS) – the main area of activity for many Israeli high-tech companies – this move could fundamentally alter how Israeli companies approach the American market and even discourage potential investors and customers,” Karin Mayer Rubinstein, CEO of Israel Advanced Technology Industries, told The Jerusalem Post.
“We are all going to feel this in our pockets,” Ron Tomer, president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, told Israeli radio on Thursday, claiming that the American tariffs against the Jewish state are tantamount to “abandonment by a friend.”
Trump’s announcement came one day after Israel removed all tariffs on US goods. Israeli officials had hoped that dropping the tariffs would prevent the White House from placing its own tariffs on the Jewish state.
“The removal of tariffs on American goods is another step … to open the market to competition, to diversify the economy, and to lower the cost of living,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a joint statement with Economy Minister Nir Barkat and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Jerusalem will reportedly launch efforts to convince the Trump administration to reverse its decision.
Smotrich said that the finance ministry is still “analyzing” the expected and potential impact of the impending tariffs on the country and will be starting “discussions” with key figures across various Israeli industries.
Israel and the United States — the Jewish state’s largest trading partner — completed $34 billion in bilateral trade in 2024. Of that, about $22 billion came from exports from Israel to the US.
Trump announced his so-called “Liberation Day” on Wednesday, in which his administration unveiled an expansive slate of tariffs on international trade partners, citing a “lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships” that is “indicated by large and persistent annual US goods trade deficits.”
Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a US group advocating pro-Israel policies within the Democratic Party, slammed the Trump administration’s decision to levy tariffs against the Jewish state, arguing that the White House has fractured America’s relationship with arguably its closest ally.
“President Trump made a grave error in slapping a higher tariff on Israel than on Turkey and even Iran, especially given the fact that Israel eliminated all tariffs on American goods,” DMFI President and CEO Mark Mellman said in a statement.
Mellman argued that White House inadvertently helped the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement (BDS) against Israel advance some of its major goals.
“The president’s action helps the BDS movement achieve one of its key goals — damaging the US-Israeli economic relationship,” he said. “This action undermines the longstanding and robust economic relationship between the United States and Israel, a relationship that has been built on trust, mutual benefit, and a commitment to free and fair trade.”
The post Trump Hits Israel With 17 Percent Tariffs; Israeli Officials Express Shock, Frustration first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children
Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas take part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Hamas has quietly removed thousands of names from its official casualty reports in Gaza, prompting fresh scrutiny of the accuracy of the death toll figures that have been widely cited by media and international organizations since the start of the Palestinian terrorist group’s war with Israel.
An analysis, conducted by Salo Aizenberg of the US-based nonprofit Honest Reporting and first reported on by the Telegraph, revealed that 3,400 individuals listed as killed in earlier updates released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health in August and October 2024 no longer appear in the March 2025 report. Among those missing from the latest list are 1,080 children.
“Hamas has manipulated the number of fatalities they report since the start of the war, overcounting civilian deaths and concealing combatant losses,” Aizenberg told The Algemeiner.
“I took all the unique deaths and ID numbers from the August and October lists. I combined them. I removed duplicates and then compared it to the March list. And there were 3,400 names that didn’t appear,” he said. “In my mind, the 1,080 children are particularly notable.”
Aizenberg said the systematic inflation of civilian death tolls by Hamas is not a new phenomenon. “They have done this in every round of conflict. For example, in 2009’s Cast Lead, Hamas initially claimed that 1,300 Palestinians died and only about 50 were combatants. Months later Hamas admitted that in fact 600-700 were their fighters,” he said.
The casualty lists compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health are distributed as downloadable PDFs and include personal details such as names, identification numbers, and dates of death. These lists have been widely cited by international media and relied upon by humanitarian groups and United Nations agencies monitoring the toll of the war. The health ministry is under the control of Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip.
The discrepancy in figures has raised questions about the continued reliance on these data sets, especially given mounting evidence of inconsistencies.
“The evidence is now all out there in the public domain,” Andrew Fox, a former British paratrooper who has worked with Aizenberg on data-verification projects in the past, told The Algemeiner. “These Hamas numbers are error-strewn and clearly manipulated.”
Aizenberg built databases by converting the PDF lists into spreadsheets, allowing for comparative analysis across different time points. That process revealed the March 2025 report included significantly fewer names than earlier versions. The findings cast doubt on previously unchallenged casualty estimates.
Hamas has claimed that more than 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it has killed 20,000 Hamas combatants during that time and maintains that it takes extensive precautions to avoid civilian casualties. “The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the IDF said in a statement.
According to a December report authored by Fox and published by the Henry Jackson Society, nearly half of those killed in Gaza are combatants, directly contradicting claims that the vast majority of casualties are civilians. The report also pointed to demographic inconsistencies, including the repeated listing of women and children to support allegations of indiscriminate attacks, and the lowering of adult men’s ages to inflate the number of minors reported killed.
“You can’t say it’s a genocide when half the people that have died are combatants who are still fighting,” Fox told The Algemeiner at the time.
The debate over casualty figures was intensified by a February 2025 article published in the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that Gaza’s true death toll could be as high as 64,000. That estimate was based on a statistical extrapolation using “capture-recapture” methods applied to a subset of the ministry’s data. The researchers behind the study said they only used what they called “hospital-recorded deaths” from June 2024 and asserted that these records were the most verified.
But Aizenberg said that claim does not hold up to scrutiny. He reviewed the same June dataset used by the Lancet study and found that 881 names in that core group were later removed in the March update. In his view, this undermines the foundation of the statistical model used to estimate excess mortality.
“They do this very careful statistical analysis, taking three lists and doing capture, recapture from vetted lists of hospital recorded deaths,” Aizenberg said. “And then I took their June list that they used again [in the February report] and I found 881 were also removed from the March list. So even after a really careful study [its] core data sources are not valid.”
Past reports have noted that the casualty forms used to populate the lists could be submitted online by anyone with access to a Google Form, raising concerns about verification protocols.
Despite these issues, some international entities, including the United Nations, and news outlets have continued to cite the figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, occasionally with the disclaimer that the numbers could not be independently confirmed.
Fox said such caveats are insufficient and that the deletions from Hamas’s own published records have, in his view, stripped away any plausible justification for continuing to rely on the ministry’s figures. “It is malpractice and deeply irresponsible on the part of any media organization still using them. There is simply no excuse for repeating them as credible,” he said.
The post ‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds
Mahmoud Khalil speaks to members of media about the Revolt for Rafah encampment at Columbia University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, in New York City, US, June 1, 2024. Photo: Jeenah Moon via Reuters Connect
About two-thirds of the American people support the deportation of non-citizen students, such as Mahmoud Khalil, who indicate support for internationally recognized terrorist groups, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.
The poll — conducted from March 26-27 among registered US voters — was released amid ongoing furor over the Trump administration’s sweeping arrests and detainments of non-citizen students who have allegedly expressed support for terrorist organizations, primarily Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in many cases participated in raucous, often destructive and unsanctioned anti-Israel demonstrations on university campuses.
According to the newly released data, most Americans, 63 percent, believe that the Trump administration should “deport” foreign students who “voice support” for terrorist groups like Hamas, while a slightly higher 67 percent want such deportations for non-citizens on campuses who “actively support” such terrorist groups. About one-third of voters in each case said they believe the students should stay in the US.
Meanwhile, the data showed that 63 percent of Americans believe the Trump administration should revoke permanent resident status for “pro-Hamas activists like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University,” compared to 37 percent who indicated the government should not be able to revoke one’s green card in such circumstances.
Khalil, who was born in Syria and came to the US in 2022, was one of the leaders of the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University last year, when activists illegally seized parts of the campus and refused to leave unless the school boycotted the world’s lone Jewish state. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him early last month for what the Department of Homeland Security alleged to be leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Khalil, who became a permanent US resident last year, is fighting his deportation in court and arguing the government is violating his civil rights.
However, a striking 69 percent of respondents in the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll said the federal government should “have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if it can prove that such a person actively supported a terrorist organization like Hamas.” By comparison, 31 percent said the government should not have such authority.
Republicans overwhelmingly support the deportation of non-citizens who indicate support for terrorist groups, with 83 percent claiming that those who “voice support” for terrorist groups should be removed from the country and 84 percent responding that non-citizen students who “actively support” terrorist groups should be deported.
In contrast, only 42 percent of Democrats said they endorse deportation for foreign students who voice support for terrorist groups, compared to 58 percent who want them to stay on US spoil. Meanwhile, a slight majority, 51 percent, indicated the government should deport those who “actively support” such extremist organizations, while 49 percent oppose deportation in such circumstances.
As for green card holders such as Khalil who allegedly support Hamas, 82 percent of Republicans said the Trump administration should be able to revoke their permanent resident status, compared to just 48 percent of Democrats. Only 18 percent of Republicans oppose the revocation of green cards in these cases, just a fraction of the 52 percent of Democrats who feel the same way.
More broadly, a striking 86 percent of Republicans believe the government should have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if they actively supported a terrorist group like Hamas, while 14 percent oppose such a measure.
By comparison, just 55 percent of Democrats support deportation and the taking away a green card in such a situation, compared to 45 percent who oppose it.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has detained several non-citizen anti-Israel activists on university campuses for participating in often destructive demonstrations while allegedly supporting Hamas, the US-designated terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007. Some of these arrests, particularly of Khalil, have sparked significant backlash, with critics accusing the White House of undermining free speech rights.
During the 2024 US presidential election, as part of a broader effort to entice Jewish voters, Trump vowed to deport foreign supporters of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas if elected to office.
“We will deport the foreign jihad sympathizers, and we will deport them very quickly. And Hamas supporters will be gone,” Trump said during a “Stop Antisemitism” event in August. “If you hate America, if you want to eliminate Israel, then we don’t want you in our country. We really don’t want you in our country.”
The post Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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