Por M. Reza Behnam
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Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0 |
From Gaza City in occupied Palestine to the Marble Hill neighborhood in New York, a disturbing parallel has become visible between the daily militarized violence inflicted on Palestinians and the lethal enforcement tactics deployed by federal immigration authorities on residential streets in America.
There is a credible argument to be made that the systemic violence within domestic agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is fundamentally linked to U.S policies that have enabled Israeli brutality in Palestine for decades.
When state power abandons its constraints, the geographical distance separating a distant war zone and a local neighborhood effectively dissolves, leaving vulnerable defenseless populations exposed to unchecked aggression.
The shooting in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood is the most recent example of unbridled state-sanctioned violence. On a busy street filled with families, a masked plain-clothes ICE agent fired live rounds into a vehicle, striking a father, while his five-year-old son sat terrified in the backseat.
Brazen aggression, assumed impunity and human rights violations by ICE have turned American communities into what look like military-occupied zones.
There have been 32 separate immigration agent-involved shooting incidents since the Trump administration expanded its operations in January 2025, targeting sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and New York. Nine people were killed in these encounters, with another 15 injured.
As of October 2026, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza is over 74,382 and more than 1,138 in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), since October 7, 2023. It is important to note that the health ministry counts only the numbers who die in hospitals; and today in Gaza not a single hospital is fully functional, with only 18 operating under severe limitations.
Clearly, we cannot equate the sheer level of death and destruction experienced by Gazans and New Yorkers. However, their shared reality—the unrestrained abuse of force, complete disregard of legal frameworks and indifference to basic humanity—should be recognized.
Though operating at vastly different scales and distinct legal mandates, both reflect a systemic apparatus that dehumanizes civilians, deeply traumatizes children and executes high-intensity violence with near-total impunity.
To examine these events side-by-side is not to conflate Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians with civil policing in the United States. Rather, it highlights a grim truth: when state authority lacks oversight and accountability, everyday public spaces are transformed into zones of life-altering trauma.
Civilians in Gaza and the West Bank navigate an environment dominated by a highly militarized presence, where boundaries between neighborhoods and combat zones have been intentionally and completely blurred.
Tragedies like Marble Hill illustrate a similar blurring of lines within a domestic environment. In most lower-income minority neighborhoods, poorly-trained ICE agents look and behave like an occupying force, patrolling with a warrior mentality and treating residents as if they are enemies to be subdued.
Defenseless Americans are beginning to lose their basic sense of safety and sanctuary as they come face-to-face with armed federal officers. In contrast, Palestinians have been entirely without refuge or safe haven throughout more than 87 years of forced displacement and military occupation.
Within occupied Palestine, the Israeli regime has categorized the entire population as security risks and dangerous enemies to be eliminated. While in American cities, vulnerable immigrant communities navigate an enforcement system that regards them as expendable and offers very few constitutional protections. The decision in Marble Hill to fire into an enclosed vehicle signaled an operational “logic” in which apprehension of a target to fulfill a quota was prioritized over public safety.
Living with or under the constant threat of state violence, at any level, inflicts deep psychological scars, lifelong trauma and fosters a deep distrust of institutional authority.
Growing up amidst relentless aerial bombardment, perpetual Israeli surveillance and systemic insecurity, has forced the children of Palestine to adapt to physical violence as a daily reality.
For marginalized and immigrant populations, aggressive enforcement incidents create a pervasive climate of hyper-vigilance. Consequently, routine daily activities are stripped of the essential safety they require.
The perceived lack of accountability, in both contexts, has stoked public outrage at home and abroad.
Much of the public remains unaware of the full horror of the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. Furthermore, achieving culpability has been deeply hindered by slow and complex international legal mechanisms.
In the United States, federal immigration agents working within local municipalities, operate in a jurisdictional gray area, shielded by federal immunity and insulated from local police oversight. These structural barriers ultimately deprive affected communities of the power to pursue justice through traditional legal channels.
Although the blood spattered on American streets and the toxic dust settling over the ruins of Gaza are separated by oceans, they are bound by a cycle of brutality in which human life is treated as collateral damage.
Beyond the political rhetoric and geographical divide, lies the real tragedy: the heartbreak of families devastated in a fraction of a second, leaving futures shattered and communities in mourning.
As Marble Hill reckons with its immediate calamity and Palestine endures its ongoing nightmare, these abuses and atrocities serve as a sobering reminder of humanity’s tragic failure to protect its most vulnerable. It has forced us to ask: how much more grief must be borne before the urgent value of human life finally supersedes the violence that extinguishes it?
Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics with a focus on West Asia.
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