Watch: Pro-Palestine protester ‘spits on Israeli flag’ at rally

Protests held in New York and across the US a year after the attack on Israel by Hamas

A pro-Palestinian protester can be seen appearing to spit on an Israeli flag in footage shared online.
In the clip, the man appears to spit twice on the flag and shouts expletives about Israel at a rally in New York, according to the footage which was posted online by an editor for the news outlet Unherd.
It comes amid protests across the US a year after the attack on Israel by Hamas, which saw 1,200 citizens killed and hundreds taken hostage.
In the short clip, the man, who is wearing a keffiyeh—a Middle Eastern scarf adopted by pro-Palestinian protesters—around his head shouts: “Dirty a— country. I spit on it.”
Grabbing his genitalia, he added: “The bottom of my b—s is better than your country.”
He is flanked by another individual wearing a dark tracksuit, and whose face is obscured by a black mask pulled up to their eyes, who shakes the Israeli flag while shouting.
A sign reading “Israel is starving Palestinian children” can be seen in the background. Israel’s military response to the October 7 massacre has killed at least 41,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.
Some 2,000 pro-Palestinian marchers met at Wall Street on Monday and made their way uptown, the New York Post reported.
A separate group of protesters at New York University apparently compared the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and New York Police Department (NYPD) to the Ku Klux Klan.
“NYPD, KKK, IDF, they’re all the same,” they said, according to the Post.
At Columbia University, the epicenter of pro-Palestinian protests and encampments earlier this year, members of the Jewish community invited people to an art exhibition to reflect on the October 7 attack.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have previously warned that the anniversary of the massacre “may be a motivating factor for violent extremists and hate crime perpetrators to engage in violence or threaten public safety.”
Elsewhere, at the University of Maryland, Students for Justice in Palestine planned to host a vigil to “honor the lives lost from the genocide.”
On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators rallied for a pro-Palestine protest in Los Angeles chanting “Free Palestine” and “Long live the intifada.” One protest leader led the crowd in a chant of “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!”
In Washington DC on Saturday, a man set himself on fire near the White House amid a gathering of some 1,000 pro-Palestine activists. He was later taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.