Ninety people were arrested on the streets of midtown Manhattan on Monday, including Chelsea Manning, as antiwar demonstrators converged on the offices of two Democratic senators to demand that Washington stop arming Israel and end its military partnership with a government whose wars are now running simultaneously across three fronts.
The arrests came during protests organised in part by Jewish Voice for Peace, which put the detention figure at around 90. The NYPD confirmed multiple arrests without specifying a number. Manning — the former Army intelligence analyst whose leak of classified military documents to WikiLeaks made her one of the most recognisable names in American whistleblower history — was among those taken into custody.
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The choice of location was pointed. Demonstrators gathered not outside the White House or a Republican Party office but near the midtown Manhattan offices of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his Democratic colleague Kirsten Gillibrand — two members of a party whose voters have been among the most vocal opponents of the Iran war and the Gaza offensive, and whose senators have nonetheless declined to break with the administration’s military posture in any meaningful way. The crowd chanted “stop the bombs,” “end the killings” and “let Gaza live, let Iran live, let Lebanon live” as police moved through the demonstration making arrests.
What the protesters were responding to is not a single conflict but a convergence of three. The US-Israeli strikes on Iran began February 28 and have now entered their seventh week, killing more than 2,000 Iranians and drawing the region into the worst military crisis in a generation. Israel’s parallel offensive in Lebanon has killed more than 1,300 people. And the Gaza war, which began after Hamas-led militants killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages on October 7, 2023, has now killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, internally displaced the territory’s entire population and generated genocide findings from United Nations investigators and international legal scholars. Israel characterises all three campaigns as acts of self-defence.
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The Trump administration has not treated protest as a neutral civic act. It has moved to deport foreign students involved in demonstrations, threatened universities with funding freezes over campus protests, and ordered the screening of immigrants’ social media posts for political content. Those measures have generated legal challenges and been blocked in several courts, but the deterrence intent has been unmistakable. Monday’s turnout in Manhattan — and the willingness of participants to be arrested — suggests the chilling effect has its limits.
The weekend’s collapse of ceasefire negotiations in Islamabad gave the protests additional urgency. The two-week pause in US-Iranian hostilities that had briefly opened a diplomatic window ended without a memorandum of understanding, with Iran’s foreign minister saying the sides had been “inches away” before American negotiators shifted their demands. Trump responded by threatening a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and saying he did not particularly care whether Iran returned to the table. Oil jumped eight percent. Stock futures fell. The war’s next phase is being assembled even as its current phase has not ended.
Schumer and Gillibrand did not respond publicly to the protest outside their offices on Monday.