New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre on Wednesday with a statement that gave the Hamas attack four sentences and spent the rest accusing Israel of genocide, drawing condemnation from Jewish leaders, Israeli officials and members of his own party. He had company. In the days around the anniversary, the top Democrat in the House called for a Palestinian state, a European lawmaker threw an Israeli flag to the floor at a memorial for the victims, the BBC opened its anniversary coverage with a genocide charge, and CNN published a report blaming Israel for the deaths of hostages Hamas had kidnapped.
“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote. “It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.”
The official Israeli death toll is more than 1,200. Mamdani used the lower figure for the second year in a row.
The next sentence set the tone for everything that followed. “The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he wrote. “It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children.”
The mayor went on to accuse Israel of dropping bombs “on ambulances waiting outside hospitals,” of drone strikes “targeting a residential building or journalist,” and of turning away food aid. He made no distinction between civilians and Hamas terrorists. Then he brought the accusation home to New York.
“Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them, all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes,” he wrote. “Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
The word “Jew” appears nowhere in the statement. Neither does the word “terrorism.”
“Not once do you say Jews”
The response was immediate and came from every direction.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, called the statement “an attempt to hijack the anniversary of October 7 and turn it into yet another propaganda attack against Israel.” “It is like turning September 11 into a day of mourning for al-Qaeda terrorists,” Danon said. “We will not let this happen. We will remember those who were murdered, and we will never forget who was behind this massacre.”
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee reached for the same comparison. “There is no apartheid, and there is no occupation. The man knows that what he is saying is not true,” Huckabee said. “It would be as if on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 he were to stand up and say, ‘Yes, it was tragic that those planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, but America overreacted, America went beyond what it should have, and America must be condemned for its response to the massacre of its own people.'”
Israel’s Consul General in New York, Ofir Akunis, called the mayor “a disgrace, source of shame, and an insult to the memory of the murdered victims.” Akunis noted that the massacre came on a holiday, when “human monsters invaded the State of Israel, murdering, kidnapping, beheading hundreds, and raping hundreds of women.” He invited Mamdani to a screening of Hamas’s own footage of the attack that evening, “to witness with your own eyes, for the first time, the kind of human monsters you support.”
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt went straight to the missing word. “Not once do you say ‘Jews,'” he wrote. In a separate statement, Greenblatt added, “On Oct. 7, Hamas-led attackers murdered civilians, committed sexual violence, mutilated bodies and took hostages. You are weaponizing a day meant for mourning the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust to recycle your usual anti-Zionist talking points. The city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel deserves a mayor who can honor the dead without exploiting them.”
New York City Council member Inna Vernikov did the arithmetic. “Mamdani gave the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust one sentence, then spent paragraphs falsely accusing Israel of genocide. Zero mention of terrorism,” she told JNS. “Hamas raped women. Burned families alive. Dragged babies into tunnels and slaughtered them. Mamdani buried all that and instead defames the very same people who stopped it. Mamdani could not even give us one day to mourn without defaming the Jewish people and giving cover to our enemies.”
UJA-Federation of New York, the city’s largest Jewish organization, said the statement put “Jewish New Yorkers at risk.” “Today should have been a day for New York to stand with the victims of October 7,” UJA said. “Instead, Mayor Mamdani chose to respond to the grief of Jewish New Yorkers by advancing false and inflammatory attacks against Israel.”
Even the head of the Reform movement, who has spoken with the mayor directly, lost patience. “I’ve told Mayor Mamdani directly that his words matter. But he once again found an opportunity to be callous toward Jewish pain,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “You cannot proclaim empathy and care for the Jewish community and then fail to show basic humanity toward us in our grief. Turning this anniversary into an indictment of the Jewish state is not only hurtful, and deeply offensive, but it also makes Jewish New Yorkers less safe.”
Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman of New York called it “a reprehensible statement.” “In the guise of ‘grieving’ with those mourning that day, Mayor Mamdani asserts as fact hotly disputed allegations that he knows full well will offend and further upset those same people he pretends to grieve with,” Goldman said.
Goldman, who is Jewish and lost his seat in this summer’s primary to Mamdani ally Brad Lander, went further in an interview with Politico, calling the statement “egregious and insulting.” “There are 364 days of the year to focus on that. This is a day that should just be focused on what was by all agreement a horrific terror attack,” Goldman said. “What the mayor’s statement did today was to blame Israelis for the attack that they suffered three years ago. Regardless of what you actually think of the conflict and what’s happened either since or before, there’s no excuse for victim blaming.”
Victoria Coates, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Davis Center for National Security and Foreign Policy, told the Daily Signal the statement was “this disgusting attempt to draw a moral equivalency between the Hamas terrorist attackers and their Jewish victims.”
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, called the statement “morally perverse” and “like sticking a knife into the pain of the Jewish community in New York and in America.” “It is so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is,” Hirsch told Politico. “And it exacerbated the feeling that American Jews and New York Jews have had since he first came to prominence, which is that he has a problem with collective Jewish empowerment and he hates the state of Israel.”
Mamdani’s office declined to comment.
Commentator Ben Shapiro counted the words: 49 in tribute to the Jews murdered on October 7, and 141 blaming Israel.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Mamdani defeated for mayor, wrote that “October 7 should be sacred,” a day for the dead, the hostages and the Jewish community. “There are 364 other days for politics,” Cuomo wrote. “Yet even today, NYC’s Mayor cannot put aside his ideological obsession with Israel long enough to simply let Jews mourn.”
An op-ed in the New York Daily News called the mayor “callow and immature” for “insulting the Jews of New York with his smearing of Israel even when he was memorializing the atrocity.” Of the 211-word statement, the op-ed noted, the first 49 words were appropriate, but “he didn’t stop there.” The statement had been viewed more than 20 million times on X. “So classless, but not unexpected,” the op-ed said.
The op-ed pointed out that the same morning, Mamdani managed to show respect for the dead at the annual FDNY Memorial Day on Riverside Drive, where he stood in silence as thousands of firefighters marched past honoring their fallen. “He should have shown some respect for the dead, just for a day,” it said. It also noted that his October 7 statement “doesn’t even mention Jews or terror, just like his antisemitism report from last week doesn’t mention Israel.”
“It’s not the Netanyahu cabinet he’s against,” the op-ed argued. “His problem is with Israel itself. He opposes the very fact of the state.”
Evan Bernstein, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, put the statement in the context of the streets Mamdani governs. “That choice is particularly reckless in a city where anti-Jewish incidents have accounted for 52.9 percent of all confirmed hate crimes so far in 2026, though Jews make up roughly 10 percent of the city’s population,” he said. “A mayor cannot credibly claim to fight antisemitism and terrorism while using the anniversary of a terror attack to promote disinformation.”
The Israeli-American Council said the pattern was the point. “This is not a one-time lapse,” the IAC said. “Every year, on the anniversary of the day our community buries its dead, the mayor reaches for the same blood libel against the Jewish state. Rhetoric like this doesn’t stay online. It is exactly the kind of messaging that has fueled a documented rise in antisemitic incidents across New York City.”
The contrast with New York’s governor was hard to miss. “It’s hard to fathom that it has been three years since the October 7 Hamas massacre,” Governor Kathy Hochul wrote. “Three years since the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Today, we remember the innocent lives stolen, stand with the survivors and the families forever changed, and pray for a lasting peace.”
The same statement, every year
The IAC had the record on its side. On the second anniversary in 2025, when he was still a candidate, Mamdani issued a statement built on the same frame: one paragraph calling the massacre a “horrific war crime,” followed by accusations that Israel was waging a “genocidal war” with American complicity. Israel’s Foreign Ministry answered at the time that Mamdani had “chosen to act as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda.” In his first statement after the attack in 2023, Mamdani did not condemn Hamas at all.
He repeated the frame on camera. In an interview with Errol Louis of NY1 that aired on October 7, Louis asked the mayor what lessons he drew from “the worst massacre of Jews since the Second World War.”
“We’re talking about the third anniversary of a horrific war crime, where Hamas killed more than 1,000 people, kidnapped hundreds more,” Mamdani answered. “We’re also talking about the anniversary of when the Israeli government responded to that by initiating a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza that has continued to this day.”
“And the lesson of that is?” Louis pressed. “I mean, that’s a description of what happened.”
In the interview, the death toll Mamdani cited dropped again, from “more than 1,100” to “more than 1,000.”
“We sent your people to hell”
That evening, the mayor went to a vigil in Union Square organized by Israelis for Peace, a left-wing group that billed the event as mourning both the dead of October 7 and its “bloody aftermath.” Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters overran the site, and organizers had to move the vigil behind police barricades.
The protesters had marched to Union Square from a rally at City Hall, where they chanted “Globalize the intifada” and “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.” One carried a sign reading “Liberation in action October 7.” Marchers carried a Hamas flag and a poster of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the massacre the vigil was supposed to mourn. Protesters grabbed attendees’ electric candles and mockingly sang “Hava Nagila.”
The genocide accusations did nothing to satisfy the movement that helped put Mamdani in City Hall. The afternoon rally outside City Hall was organized by Within Our Lifetime, Students for Justice in Palestine and Pal-Awda, with several chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s political home, listed as sponsors. The crowd chanted, “Mayor Mamdani, pick a side, justice or genocide” and “Muslim mayor, we know you, you’re a normalizer too.” Protesters attacked him for keeping NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, in office. One sign showed the mayor with a name tag reading “Ziohran” and a Star of David.
At Union Square they chanted, “Zohran, you can’t hide, you support genocide,” “Traitor, traitor, come on out, you sold all your people out,” and “Mamdani, your hands are red.” A woman who said she had interned for Mamdani led the crowd in calling him “a sellout.” “You cannot tokenize being Muslim anymore. You cannot weaponize being brown anymore,” she said. Another protester shouted, “He’s 100% Muslim but as of now, he stands as an ambassador of Zionism and US imperialism.” For the crowd waving Sinwar’s picture, a mayor who calls Israel genocidal every chance he gets is still a traitor for standing at a vigil where Kaddish was said.
Several of the City Hall protesters told Politico they had voted for Mamdani last year and would not back him for reelection, because he has kept Tisch, a self-described Zionist, and has not stopped New York synagogues from hosting real estate fairs for homes in Judea and Samaria.
One protester shouted at the organizers, “We don’t want peace with Israelis, bro! We sent your people to hell on October 7.”
The crowd chanted “Long live Hamas” and “Death, death to the IDF” at the Israelis inside the barricade, and shouted at them to “Go to Poland.” When Brad Lander, the Jewish congressional nominee and a Mamdani ally, joined the mourners, protesters shouted at him to kill himself and called him a Nazi. The Times of Israel recorded one protester remarking that he found it ironic to call Jews Nazis. “That gets under their skin the most,” another answered. “That’s why you got to use it.”
The mayor, who arrived with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, stood for more than an hour holding an electric candle and never addressed the crowd or answered the protesters. The vigil included testimonies of Palestinians killed by the IDF and a Muslim prayer, and closed with the Mourner’s Kaddish. As attendees filed out, the protesters shouted “Death to the IDF!”
The next day, Mamdani defended all of it. “I was proud to attend last night’s vigil, as I did last year, to listen to testimonies of family members of those who were killed,” he told reporters at City Hall, according to The Times of Israel. “As for those protesting me, I am the mayor of New York City and this is what I signed up for.”
He accused Israel of genocide six times at the press conference. “There must be room to mourn the lives of the more than 1,100 Israelis that Hamas killed three years ago. There must be room to mourn the 74,000 Palestinians the Israeli government has killed since,” he said. Asked why the City Hall press office has produced videos for Nakba Day and other Palestinian causes but none for October 7, he answered, “It is critically important to be able to mourn for all of those who were killed and have been killed since, given that we know this is ongoing as opposed to something simply that was three years ago.” He declined to say whether he would change a word of his statement.
The numbers on the ground tell what that rhetoric costs. Jews make up about 10 percent of New York’s population and are the victims of more than half its hate crimes. According to official city statistics reported by JNS, antisemitic hate crimes jumped 182 percent in Mamdani’s first month in office. Days before the anniversary, UJA-Federation of New York, the JCRC, AJC New York and the New York Board of Rabbis warned in a joint statement about the mayor’s new antisemitism strategy that rhetoric that “demonizes and delegitimizes Israel” leads to the targeting of Jewish New Yorkers.
Not only Mamdani
Mamdani was the loudest voice to turn the anniversary against Israel. He had company in Washington, in the European Parliament and in the newsrooms.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also of New York, opened his October 7 statement by calling the attack an “unthinkable massacre” and calling for Hamas to be removed from power for good. Then he used the anniversary to push for a Palestinian state. “American policy in the region must change dramatically,” Jeffries declared. “We must commit to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.” He also condemned “settler violence” and the destruction in Gaza, according to World Israel News. In July, Jeffries called for a “major reset” in US-Israel relations, and he has said Democrats will pursue a substantially different Middle East policy if they win the House in next month’s midterm elections. When Republican Rep. Thomas Massie proposed cutting about $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel, Jeffries voted against it, but 103 House Democrats voted for it.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a close adviser to the mayor, put out his own anniversary statement with the same structure. “Like any country facing a terrorist attack, Israel had the right to defend itself and go after Hamas,” Sanders said. “Tragically, the Netanyahu government in Israel did not wage a war against Hamas alone. It waged a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
The accusation now wins elections. This year, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a veteran New York Democrat, lost his primary to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Mamdani-endorsed member of the Democratic Socialists of America, in a race where candidates on the left made Israel a litmus test. Lander, who unseated Goldman, made embracing the Palestinian cause a key plank of his campaign.
In Strasbourg, two days before the anniversary, French lawmaker Rima Hassan of the far-left France Unbowed party was filmed at a European Parliament exhibition honoring the victims and hostages of October 7. “The person concerned was seen allegedly throwing the flag of Israel to the ground, dropped a flagpole and the European Union flag was knocked down,” Parliament President Roberta Metsola told lawmakers. “Both flags were left lying on the ground before the member left the scene.” Hassan’s office said the act “was part of denouncing the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli government.” Hassan told the Parliament it was possible “to commemorate the victims of October 7 without associating ourselves with the genocidal Israeli state.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called it “shameful, outrageous, but sadly not surprising.”
The news media did its share of blurring. Al Jazeera marked the day as three years “since Israel launched its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” The Associated Press headlined its anniversary story, “Israelis mourn Oct. 7 attack as Palestinians in Gaza languish in ruins of the war it sparked,” and called the men who gunned down revelers at the Nova festival “Hamas-led militants.” Newsweek chose the anniversary to run a feature titled “How Hamas Won the War Despite Losing Everything.”
CNN went further. On October 8, the day after the anniversary, the network published “Netanyahu says he brought all the October 7 hostages home. These are the stories of those who didn’t come back alive.” The article opens with the deaths of Bedouin-Israeli hostages Youssef and Hamza Ziyadne, blaming an Israeli airstrike in Rafah on the word of anonymous sources, even though the IDF had reported they were killed in captivity. Hamas’s abduction of 251 people, the reason the IDF was in Gaza at all, is relegated to a subordinate clause. The network paired the article with a video report by correspondent Jeremy Diamond investigating how many of the hostage deaths may be linked to Israeli military action in Gaza. Both drew sharp backlash.
The media watchdog HonestReporting tallied the damage. CNN confirms that 16 hostages were murdered directly by their captors, then attributes a total of 24 hostage deaths to Israeli military activity, including cases where the cause of death was never confirmed and cases where Hamas executed the hostages, such as the six young hostages shot in a Rafah tunnel in August 2024, including American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The eight hostages the IDF rescued alive get a single line in parentheses. The 52 bodies the IDF recovered from Gaza, ending with Ran Gvili in January, barely appear.
“Publishing this story on October 8, 2026, in the anniversary week of the October 7 massacre, is not an editing error, but a choice,” wrote HonestReporting’s Sharon Levy. “The hostages were taken by Hamas, held by Hamas, and in too many cases murdered by Hamas – and that should have been CNN’s focus.”
The BBC opened its coverage of the anniversary with the genocide charge. Within the first hour of October 7, among the first things the British public broadcaster told its audience was this: “Last year, the world’s leading association of genocide scholars declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.”
“There is something rotten in that editorial decision. Something distinctly sick,” wrote journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Jewish Chronicle. “To use that date as an opportunity to reinsert a disputed, politically charged accusation of genocide against Israel is grotesque.”
Sacerdoti laid out what the BBC left out. Only 28% of the roughly 500 members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars voted on the resolution. About 110 people, under a quarter of the membership, endorsed it. The ballot was anonymous, and membership is open to activists, students, artists and NGOs for as little as $30. “At $30 per membership, 108 members would represent a mere $3,240 investment to smear a country in the international media,” Sacerdoti wrote. The three-page resolution repeated the claim that the International Court of Justice found it “plausible that Israel is committing genocide,” an error the court’s own former president, Joan Donoghue, corrected on the BBC’s HARDtalk, and which the BBC itself later acknowledged. A counter-statement rejecting the resolution drew 537 signatories, including genocide and Holocaust scholars and former war-crimes prosecutors. The BBC mentioned none of it.
“This is how reputational warfare operates,” Sacerdoti wrote. “Repetition becomes authority, and authority hardens into common knowledge.”
The BBC has form. On the second anniversary last year, it was forced to apologize after an internal staff email marked “the two-year anniversary of the escalations in the Israel-Gaza conflict” with a photo of rubble in Gaza. “To call the 7 October terrorist massacre an ‘escalation’ is deeply offensive,” said Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC Television. “It is the kind of language Hamas might use.”
One day
The Jews of New York asked their mayor for one day. Cuomo said it plainly: there are 364 others for politics. Mamdani had a full year to make his case against Israel, and he makes it at every opportunity. On the one morning set aside for the 1,200 murdered and the 251 dragged into Gaza, he could not stop himself from making it again.
What they got instead was a genocide charge from City Hall, a call for a Palestinian state from the top Democrat in the House, an Israeli flag on the floor of the European Parliament, and a wire-service headline about Gaza languishing in the ruins of “the war it sparked.” Three years on, the people who refuse to let the Jews mourn sit in City Hall, in Congress and in the editors’ chairs, alongside the mobs in the street.
The mayor says his job on October 7 is to keep New Yorkers safe. He has the hate-crime figures on his desk: Jews, one in ten New Yorkers, are the targets of more than half the city’s hate crimes. Every year on the anniversary, his statement casts the Jews as the villains of the day they were murdered.
Mamdani has made his choice about what October 7 means, and he makes it again every year. Three years after the massacre, New York’s Jews know exactly where their mayor stands.
