A New York man has been charged with federal hate crimes in three assaults on Jewish protesters at demonstrations over the war in Gaza, according to an indictment released on Wednesday.
The man, Tarek Bazrouk, 20, was arrested at three separate protests in Manhattan over roughly nine months after he kicked and punched Jewish protesters who were wearing religious attire or carrying Israeli flags, federal prosecutors said.
“Despite being arrested after each incident, Bazrouk allegedly remained undeterred and quickly returned to using violence to target Jews in New York City,” Jay Clayton, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news release on Wednesday.
Mr. Clayton said his office was “dedicated to seeking justice for victims of hate crimes and will aggressively prosecute those who spread bigotry and discrimination through violence.”
Mr. Bazrouk was charged with three hate crime counts, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. It was not immediately clear whether he had a lawyer.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Bazrouk was arrested in April 2024 at a protest outside the New York Stock Exchange after he “lunged” at a group of pro-Israel demonstrators and then, as he was being taken to a police vehicle, kicked one protester in the stomach.
He was arrested again in December at a protest in Upper Manhattan after punching a Jewish student who was draped in an Israeli flag and stealing another flag from the student’s brother, prosecutors said. Mr. Bazrouk was arrested a third time in January, prosecutors said, after he punched a protester wearing an Israeli flag at a demonstration near First Avenue and East 18th Street in Manhattan.
In the release, Christopher G. Raia, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York field office, accused Mr. Bazrouk of “demonstrating a pattern of supporting antisemitic terrorist organizations.” A search of his cellphone after his arrest revealed pro-Hamas propaganda and text messages in which he identified himself as a “Jew hater,” prosecutors said. The two-page indictment does not address those allegations.
The charges come at a time when the Trump administration has taken an aggressive posture toward pro-Palestinian demonstrations, accusing them of antisemitism and seeking to deport some protesters.
Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, who were both active in protests at Columbia University, were detained by immigration authorities earlier this year, as was a Tufts graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who had criticized Israel in an opinion essay for a student newspaper. Mr. Mahdawi was released last week; Mr. Khalil and Ms. Ozturk remain in federal detention in Louisiana.
Protests in New York City over the war in Gaza, once a near-daily occurrence, have become less frequent. Dozens of people were taken into police custody on Wednesday evening after pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied part of Columbia’s main library for several hours in an effort to rekindle the movement that swept the campus last spring.
