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500 Jewish New Yorkers take over Statue of Liberty demanding a ceasefire
500 Jewish New Yorkers and allies held sit-in at the iconic symbol of hope and freedom to call attention to the escalating death toll in Gaza and demand a ceasefire now
Five hundred Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City members and allies took over the Statue of Liberty on Monday calling for an immediate ceasefire. The protesters, who included the acclaimed artist Nan Goldin, actor Tavi Gevinson, and RuPaul's Drag Race winner Sasha Velour, as well as State Assembly Members Zohran Mamdani, staged the largest sit-in in Liberty Island history, unfurling banners from the iconic symbol of peace and freedom that read “Ceasefire Now” and “Let Gaza Live.”
“The famous words of our Jewish ancestor Emma Lazarus etched into this very monument compel us to take action supporting the Palestinians of Gaza yearning to breathe free,” said Jay Saper of Jewish Voice for Peace.
The protest occurred after a weekend of historic demonstrations that saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets around the globe to call for a ceasefire as the death toll in Gaza pushes past 10,000. The unprecedented surge in international outcry has led President Biden to caution Israel that it will become increasingly difficult for its military to continue to aggravate the humanitarian crisis.
“As long as the people of Gaza are screaming, we need to yell louder, no matter who attempts to silence us,” said acclaimed artist Nan Goldin.
Rabbis led those gathered on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in songs, chants, and prayer. Those gathered wore T-shirts that read “Not in My Name,” which were seen around the world when Jewish protesters shut down Grand Central Terminal on Friday, October 27, calling for a ceasefire.
“My ancestors were greeted by the Statue of Liberty while escaping pogroms. While it is a symbol of refuge for my family, I am hauntingly aware that the US denied entry to Jewish refugees throughout the entirety of the Holocaust. From Ellis Island to Gaza, never again means never again — for anyone,” said Sarah Koshar of Jewish Voice for Peace.
In the last month, over 10,000 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis have been killed. Every bomb dropped on Gaza threatens the lives of 2.2 million Palestinians blockaded in Gaza and 200 Israeli hostages.
While Congress approved a bill pledging $14.3 billion in additional military funding to Israel last Thursday, polling shows the majority of Americans want a ceasefire.
Jewish Voice for Peace is a national, grassroots organization inspired by Jewish tradition to work for a just and lasting peace according to principles of human rights, equality, and international law for all the people of Israel and Palestine. JVP has over 200,000 online supporters, over 70 chapters, a youth wing, a Rabbinic Council, an Artist Council, an Academic Advisory Council, and an Advisory Board made up of leading U.S. intellectuals and artists.
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Lancet Study Shows Over 3 Million Years of Human Life Lost in Israeli Assault on Gaza
"To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out," said the head of a US advocacy group.
Nov 03, 2025
As Israeli forces continued to violate a fragile ceasefire agreement with Hamas, killing more people in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States renewed calls for cutting off military aid to Israel, citing a new study in The Lancet.
"This new Lancet study offers more evidence of the catastrophic human cost of Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people," Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
The correspondence published Friday by the famed British medical journal was submitted by Colorado State University professor Sammy Zahran, an expert in health economics, and Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon teaching at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Zahran and Abu-Sittah provided an estimate of the number of years of life lost, based on an official death toll list published by the Gaza Ministry of Health at the end of July, which included the age and sex of 60,199 Palestinians. They noted that the list is "restricted to deaths linked explicitly to actions by the Israeli military, excluding indirect deaths resulting from the ruin of infrastructure and medical facilities, restriction of food and water, and the loss of medical personnel that support life."
The pair calculated life expectancies in the state of Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem—by sex for all ages, using mortality and population data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs for 2022. They estimated that a total of 3,082,363 life-years were lost in Gaza as a result of the Israeli assault since October 7, 2023.
"We find that most life-years lost are among civilians, even under the relaxed definition of a supposed combatant involving all men and boys of possible conscription age (15–44 years)," the paper states. "More than 1 million life-years involving children under the age of 15 years... have been lost."
CAIR's Awad said, "To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out. It is a deliberate effort to destroy a people."
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
"The United States and the international community must end their complicity by halting all military aid to Israel and supporting full accountability for these crimes under international law," Awad argued.
A report published last month by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the Biden and Trump administrations provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since the start of the war.
Federal law prohibits the US government from providing security assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of human rights abuses. The Washington Post last week reported on a classified State Department document detailing "many hundreds" of alleged violations by Israeli forces in Gaza that are expected to take "multiple years" to review.
With President Donald Trump seeking a Nobel Peace Prize, the US helped negotiate the current ceasefire, which began on October 10, after over two years of devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. The head of Gaza's Government Media Office said Monday that Israeli forces have committed at least 194 violations of the agreement.
As of Sunday, the ministry's death count was at 68,865, with at least 170,670 people wounded. Previously published research, including multiple studies in The Lancet, has concluded that the official tally is likely a significant undercount.
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Advocates Demand 'Immediate Ceasefire' in War-Torn Sudan as Famine Spreads to 2 More Regions
About 375,000 people have been pushed into famine after 30 months of civil war, said the world's top hunger monitor.
Nov 03, 2025
The world's top authority on hunger said Monday that a ceasefire in Sudan is needed to "contain the extreme levels of acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition" that have taken hold in the war-ravaged African country as it declared famine has spread to two regions there.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a United Nations-backed partnership, said it has detected famine in el-Fasher, the city in North Darfur State that the government's former allied militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), seized last week, and Kadugli town in South Kordofan.
The IPC said at least 20 other areas in Darfur and Kordofan are at risk of famine, but fighting between the RSF and Sudanese government forces has impeded the group's assessments in places like the besieged town of Dilling, where the situation is likely "similar" to that of Kadugli.
"Urgent steps should be taken to allow full humanitarian access and assessment in this area," said the IPC.
In the towns where experts have been able to take stock of the humanitarian disaster—now one of the worst in the world, according to the United Nations—hundreds of thousands of people are facing “a total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition, and death.”
The IPC, which rates hunger on a scale of 1-5, determines that famine has taken hold in places where malnutrition has caused at least two deaths per 10,000 people, or four deaths per 10,000 children under the age of 5; at least 1 in 5 households severely lack food; and at least 30% of children have been found to suffer from acute malnutrition.
In the two regions included in the IPC report Monday, about 375,000 people have been pushed into famine (IPC Phase 5), and another 6.3 million people across the country face are in IPC Phase 4, classified as an "emergency" hunger crisis.
More than 21 million people face acute levels of food insecurity.
Towns near el-Fasher are also at risk of famine, including Tawila, Melit, and Tawisha.
Food supplies have been largely cut off in el-Fasher over the last 18 months as it has been under siege by the RSF, which killed more than 1,500 people in massacres last week as it took over the city.
Nearly 10 million people have been internally displaced by the civil war—the world's largest displacement crisis—with many sheltering in overcrowded public buildings with inadequate access to food as well as sanitation.
More than 19 million people in Sudan are expected to experience acute food insecurity by January 2026 as humanitarian aid groups continue to be blocked from getting supplies to starving households and harvests in Darfur and Kordofan are expected to be "well below average due to insecurity, despite favorable agroclimatic conditions."
Food prices are also expected to remain high and ultimately rise in the first half of next year as stocks decline.
"An immediate ceasefire and humanitarian access are a must to prevent further deterioration and save lives!" said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization.
The IPC said only 21% of people in need currently have access to humanitarian aid, and in Kadugli, the aid group Save the Children said that its food supplies ran out in September as fighting there escalated.
Tens of thousands of people in the town are trapped there as the RSF—which is backed by the United Arab Emirates, whose government has received military support from the US—tries to seize more territory.
The IPC previously declared famine in three refugee camps near el-Fasher and in part of South and West Kordofan provinces, since fighting began in April 2023.
The UN has estimated more than 40,000 people have been killed, but aid groups warn the true death toll is likely much higher.
The International Court of Justice said Monday that it is "taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in el-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions."
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Mamdani Taunts Cuomo For Getting Last-Minute Trump Endorsement as NYC Early Voting Breaks Record
The final days of early voting saw a surge in youth turnout, according to numbers released by the NYC Board of Elections.
Nov 03, 2025
Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Monday taunted top rival Andrew Cuomo for receiving a decidedly backhanded endorsement from President Donald Trump.
During an interview on CBS News' "60 Minutes" that aired on Sunday, Trump criticized both Cuomo and Mamdani, but said that he would pick the former New York governor to be New York City's next mayor if forced to choose.
“I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other," the president said. "But if it's gonna be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you."
Trump again says that he prefers that Cuomo wins the NYC mayoral race.
“I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s gonna be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you.”pic.twitter.com/pGpdMSvotf
— bryan metzger (@metzgov) November 3, 2025
Mamdani, a Democratic state Assembly member who has represented District 36 since 2021, immediately pounced on Trump's remarks and sarcastically congratulated his rival for winning the endorsement of a president who is deeply unpopular in New York City.
"Congratulations, Andrew Cuomo!" he wrote in a social media post. "I know how hard you worked for this."
A leaked audio recording from a Cuomo fundraiser in the Hamptons in August included comments from the former governor about help he expected to receive from Trump as he ran as an independent in the mayoral race, following his loss to Mamdani in the Democratic primary. Cuomo and Trump have reportedly spoken about the race.
The former governor has also suggested that protests against Trump's deployment of federal immigration agents are an "overreaction," and has declined to forcefully condemn the president's weaponization of the justice system against his political opponents.
The New York City mayoral election will conclude on Tuesday night, and polls currently show Mamdani with a commanding lead over Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that New Yorkers cast 735,000 early ballots this year, which the paper notes is "the highest early in-person turnout ever for a non-presidential election in New York."
The Times also noted that more than 150,000 early ballots were cast on the final day of early voting, driven by a surge in young voters flocking to the polls.
"Turnout among younger age groups lagged early in the week, with about 80,000 people under 35 voting from Sunday to Thursday," the Times explained. "That number jumped from Friday to Sunday, with over 100,000 voters under the age of 35 casting ballots, including more than 45,000 on Sunday."
Laura Tamman, a political scientist at Pace University, told Gothamist on Monday that the surge in youth turnout in the last days of early voting was a "meaningful shift," and likely good news for Mamdani's chances on Tuesday.
In the closing days of the campaign, Cuomo has been accused of employing racist tactics as he has tried portraying Mamdani as an outsider who does not share New York's cultural values, and he pointed to the fact that Mamdani has dual citizenship with the US and Uganda as evidence.
“His parents own a mansion in Uganda, he spent a lot of time there,” Cuomo said during an interview on Fox Business. “He just doesn’t understand the New York culture, the New York values, what 9/11 meant, what entrepreneurial growth means, what opportunity means, why people came here.”
Cuomo also appeared to agree with a recent comment from radio host Sid Rosenberg, who said Mamdani would "be cheering" if "another 9/11" took place.
“This is Andrew Cuomo’a final moments in public life," said Mamdani in response to the remark, "and he’s choosing to spend them making racist attacks.”
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