WASHINGTON: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday marked the third anniversary of Hamas’s Oct 7, 2023, raid on Israel by condemning the killings and abductions that day while describing Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza as an “ongoing genocide”.

“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers,” Mamdani said in a statement. “It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of Oct 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others.”

“We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbours who still carry that unthinkable loss,” he said. But Mamdani said the suffering had continued beyond the Oct 7 raid, accusing the Israeli government of carrying out a “devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza”.

According to his statement, more than 74,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children, have been killed in Gaza. He also said more than 1,400 Palestinians had been killed even since the “so-called ceasefire”.

Mamdani said the suffering had intensified with Israeli attacks on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, drone strikes targeting residential buildings or journalists, and the rejection of food-aid shipments at border crossings.

“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 said.

The mayor also criticised the US government for what he described as complicity in the violence, saying that “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

Three years after the Oct 7 raid, Mamdani said there should be a rejection of what he described as a world in which “occupation and apartheid continue” and “war crimes are met with impunity”.

“To honour the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity,” he said.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2026