Several hundred New Yorkers held a rally and march on Monday evening at Columbus Circle to protest US joining Israel to start an illegal war against Iran, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and without Congressional authorization. Its first act of aggression was to bomb a Iranian girls' school leaving 165 dead - a war crime. Those children are being buried today.
Protesters marched from Columbus Circle through the streets of Manhattan for a rally on the steps of New York Public Library holding signs reading "Hands of Iran" and chanting "No Boots on the Ground, No Bombs in the Air." At 7pm that night, a further meeting took place at the People’s Form on 37th St.
The protest is the second since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Saturday, March 1, targeting Iran’s missile infrastructure and killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his Tehran compound.
In a briefing to reporters earlier on Monday, Defense Secretary said 49 top Iranian officials were also killed stated that the US “didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we will end it.”
Since then, a joint US-Israeli airstrike brings the total death toll to over 500 people. The US nor Israel have claimed responsibility for the attack or confirmed its credibility. Operation Epic Fury is expected to last “four or five weeks” with the possibility of it going “far longer” according to President Trump on a country he deems “the number one state for terror” in his address on Saturday. Iran, in retaliation, has launched missiles and drones across the region, targeting most of its Arab neighbouring countries who house US military bases, as well as Israel, immobilizing the gulf’s tourism industry and pushing offline some gas and oil stations. Six American soldiers have been killed as well as three US fighter jets being mistakenly shot down by Kuwait air defenses in the chaos that ensued, however those crew members were mostly uninjured. Furthermore, dozens of civilians have been injured, and as US allies remain the target of attacks, US embassies have been closed in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with Americans in many countries warned to leave.
Details are emerging that as of Friday there was an agreement with the Iranians on new conditions over enriching uranium, announced on CBS News by one of the Qatari negotiators, overriding likely messages being relayed by the US negotiations Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
“It was Trump that walked away from the agreement with Iran, and it was Trump that decided to bomb the people that he's negotiating with in the middle of negotiation," Layan Fuleiham, the Edcuation Director at The People’ s Form told me at the rally. “[Pete] Hegseth thinks that the American people have no memory. He thinks that the American people cannot read for themselves, and understand the world for themselves, but he's wrong. The majority of people in this country do not want this war. No one wants to relive what happened in Iraq.”
Also protesting was Gabriella Silva from the Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL). She said the American people who lived through “the U.S. War in Iraq, the U.S. War in Afghanistan, on Syria, on Libya, and saw the death, destruction, and destabilization that that caused […] remember the lies that we were told then to justify these wars, the illegal wars and genocides on the people of the Middle East.” Silva added “They are scrambling to try to keep up the lies and justifications. They keep putting forward to assure and appease the people of the United States that this is being done for security, human rights, democracy, and every other lie they have said over the past several months and year, really,” when in reality, as she puts it: “there is no toll too great for the United States government to pay in order to assert their domination on the world. And that means human life.”
On Tuesday, Trump administration officials will brief lawmakers on the US war on Iran, as Congress is due to vote this week on bipartisan war powers resolutions aimed to restrict President Trump’s military operations in the country. There are more marches planned for this Saturday in towns and cities around the country to oppose the war in Iran, organized by American anti-war group Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER).
WBAI will continue to monitor the story in the coming days.
