New Orleans, Oct. 17, 2026 – On Saturday evening, several hundred people marched for Palestine downtown, commemorating three years of resistance to the United States-Israeli genocide that intensified after Oct. 7, 2023. The march had originally been planned for the previous Saturday, but was moved over concerns about Hurricane Isaias. The one-week delay did not dissipate the movement’s energy.
The action was led by the New Orleans chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), New Orleans Stop Helping Israel’s Ports (NOSHIP), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and other groups.
It began with a rally at historic Congo Square in present-day Armstrong Park. The square was one of the only communal spaces in the U.S. available to African people during slavery. This space is still a touchstone for the city’s Black community and other oppressed peoples. Following the rally, the march went down Rampart Street and then down Canal Street to the heart of tourism and business in the city.
There, the crowd stopped, taking up one side of Canal for an entire block at the intersection with Bourbon Street, one of the city’s busiest tourist corridors. The protesters held the block for over one hour. For a city that brought in 19.46 million visitors in 2025 who spent $10.8 billion, tourism is important and gives workers in the industry leverage: if masses of New Orleans’ low-wage hospitality workers were to go on strike, they could shut down a major part of the economy.
Speakers denounced the United States government’s funding of the genocide – enriching banks and weapons manufacturers – while working-class people here struggle to make ends meet. They denounced the use of New Orleans’ ports to send weapons to the Israeli Zionist forces.
During the hour-plus blockade, organizers led a prayer for all the murdered Palestinians who died with no one to pray for them. One PYM organizer who took to the mic said:
“If we were to stay here for one second for every single martyr just in the last three years, we’d have to be here for multiple days. So, we’ll hold it as long as we can because we have the power. We have the streets.”
Various studies support his claim. The post-Oct. 7 death counts in Gaza and the West Bank cited by capitalist media are probably undercounts, as it is difficult to verify given the ongoing crisis conditions and the Zionist government’s control of access to these places.
A 2026 study published in the Lancet – one of the world’s leading medical journals – puts the count of violent deaths in Gaza at 75,200 between Oct. 7, 2023 and Jan. 5, 2025. For the same period, they estimate 16,300 non-violent deaths, or 8,540 excess deaths compared with the pre-2023 death rate. The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that 1,493 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Oct. 10, 2025 “ceasefire.” A recent UN report estimates that Zionist forces and settlers killed 1,122 Palestinians in the West Bank between Oct. 7, 2023 and July 24, 2026. A 2026 study by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED), in contrast to the Lancet study, estimated over 100,000 conflict-related deaths in Gaza between Oct. 7, 2023 and and the end of 2024.
At one point during the street blockage, the protest’s security team came to the rescue of a bystander. The young man was walking down the sidewalk with a group of young people in evening dinner wear. For whatever reason, he went into anaphylactic shock and collapsed to the ground. Word quickly spread through the crowd and a PYM organizer on the mic called for anyone with an EpiPen to come forward. In under two minutes the security team administered the injection. They stayed with him, holding him upright and comforting him until an ambulance arrived. Their quick action may have saved his life, and showed both the deep humanism of the Palestine movement and how organized the movement has become since the start of the genocide.
The action on Saturday night shows the working class’ power in miniature. Working people keep society running and can shut everything down if we get organized. It is the organized working class that can stop the genocide and force governments to provide for people’s needs here. These things are connected, and Trump’s war on Iran has made that clearer than ever. Workers pay for imperialist war at the gas pump and the grocery store. Meanwhile, imperialist governments like those of the U.S. and Western Europe rack up record debt to carry off this mass murder, paying interest to the ultra rich who lend the money. This is a transfer of wealth from the working class to the billionaires who in turn buy elections.
Minneapolis showed how powerful the working class really is. At the beginning of 2026, during Trump’s ICE surge, the people of Minneapolis shut the city down, and within weeks the Trump administration was forced to end the surge. This was a political general strike, a mass work stoppage across industries, forcing the capitalists and their bought-and-paid-for politicians to make concessions. In July of 2026, students and workers in India shook that country with massive protests, forcing corrupt Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan to resign. And right now, students and workers in France and Belgium are in the streets, fighting war-mongering governments that have sold their futures. These youth and workers say no more. Youth and workers in the U.S. can do the same, including in New Orleans.
Fund the people, not genocide!
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