New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubled down on calling Israel’s Gaza campaign a “genocide,” refusing to revise his October 7 remarks even as bipartisan critics accused him of victim-blaming.
Speaking to reporters Thursday at an unrelated event, Mamdani defended the written statement he issued the day before on the third anniversary of the Hamas attacks and made clear he would not change a word.
Fox News reported that the mayor repeatedly declined opportunities to walk back language that cast Israel’s military operation as a genocide and that framed the October 7 massacre as a pretext for it. The remarks landed amid anger in the Jewish community and open criticism from fellow Democrats.
On Wednesday, Mamdani had condemned Hamas’s assault as a “horrific war crime” while pivoting hard to Palestinian death tolls he attributed to Israel. His formal statement did not treat the anniversary as a day set aside for the victims of that attack alone.
“The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” Mamdani wrote. “It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children.”
"The suffering did not begin nor end that day."
He also accused the Israeli government of using the October 7 attack as “a justification for a genocide.” Israel has rejected the genocide charge, stating that its forces target Hamas and other terrorist groups while seeking to limit civilian harm.
Thursday’s exchange gave Mamdani every chance to soften the line. A reporter asked whether he believed he had made any missteps that inflamed tensions “in this very difficult moment for a lot of New Yorkers.”
He did not concede the point. Instead he widened the frame to ongoing casualties and to New Yorkers whose lives, he said, had been shattered.
“I believe that there must be room to mourn every single life,” Mamdani said. He added there must be room to mourn “the lives of the more than 1,100 that Hamas killed three years ago” and “the 74,000 Palestinians that the Israeli government has killed since,” and to reckon with damage done to New Yorkers.
"I believe that there must be room to mourn every single life."
He justified heavier emphasis on Palestinian deaths by calling the Gaza fighting “something that is ongoing, as opposed to something that simply happened three years ago.” At an October 7 vigil he attended, he later noted, testimonies covered those killed “either on the day or the genocide since.”
The pattern fits a mayor who has already drawn fire on multiple enforcement and public-safety fronts, from demands to abolish ICE to sanctuary-city litigation against federal immigration rules.
Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, did not mince words. Speaking to Politico, Goldman called the mayor’s approach egregious and insulting and said the anniversary should have stayed focused on the terror attack itself.
"There are 364 days of the year to focus on that. This is a day that should just be focused on what was by all agreement a horrific terror attack."
Goldman went further on the substance of the statement.
"What the mayor’s statement did today was to blame Israelis for the attack that they suffered three years ago. Regardless of what you actually think of the conflict and what’s happened either since or before, there’s no excuse for victim blaming."
That critique came from inside Mamdani’s own party and from a Jewish member of Congress. It underscored how the mayor’s wording landed with people who expected civic leaders to separate mourning for October 7 victims from a running indictment of Israel.
Mamdani’s foreign-policy posture has already drawn international pushback, including when Netanyahu confronted him over antisemitism and Hamas ties on the world stage.
The sequence was straightforward. Wednesday brought the formal statement and the vigil. Thursday brought the press availability and the refusal to revise. Across both days Mamdani kept the same core claims: Hamas killed more than 1,100 people three years ago; the Israeli government, in his telling, has killed 74,000 Palestinians since, including more than 21,000 children; and the military campaign amounts to genocide.
Those casualty figures and the genocide label are Mamdani’s characterizations. The Israeli government rejects the genocide accusation and describes its campaign as a war against Hamas and allied terrorist groups. The Fox News account records both the mayor’s numbers and Israel’s denial without treating the disputed framing as settled fact.
For many New Yorkers marking the anniversary, the expectation was simpler: name the massacre, honor the dead, and leave the wider war argument for another day. Goldman’s “364 days” line captured that view. Mamdani chose the opposite course and then stood on it.
Local governance fights have followed a similar stubborn streak, whether the issue is hospital access priorities for illegal immigrants or street-level disorder. The October 7 statement showed the same instinct applied to foreign conflict and communal grief.
Reporters gave him openings to say he had misspoken, overreached, or poorly timed the genocide charge. He did not take them. He would not say he would change the Wednesday statement. He would not say he would change what he voiced around the vigil. He kept returning to an equal-mourning formula that placed the Hamas death toll and his Gaza figures in the same breath, then accused Israel of converting its own dead into a rationale for genocide.
That is the record of the two days. A mayor used the third anniversary of a mass terror attack to advance a genocide indictment against the state that was struck, then told the press he saw no reason to revise it. Democratic criticism followed. Jewish community anger followed. Mamdani held the line.
Other controversies in his file, including a sanctuary-city suit against a Trump public-charge rule and sharp drops in prostitution enforcement in Queens, already had taxpayers measuring rhetoric against results. The October 7 episode added a different test: whether city leadership can mark a terror anniversary without turning it into a brief against the victims’ country.
When a mayor treats the anniversary of a massacre as the moment to indict the murdered side’s government, and then refuses to revisit a single sentence, voters learn exactly whose grief he centers, and whose he will not.
