HK activists stage protest, reading names of Palestinians killed since US-brokered ceasefire
A group of Hong Kong anti-war activists has staged a protest, reading from a list of 1,400 names of Palestinians said to have been killed in Gaza despite a US-brokered ceasefire that took effect last October.
Activist group HK Anti-war Mobilization held the protest in Causeway Bay, one of Hong Kong’s busiest shopping districts, which was even more densely packed during China’s weeklong National Day holiday.
Tourists and residents alike stopped to take photos of the booth and pick up copies of zines the group had prepared. Members of the group took turns writing down the names of the dead on a whiteboard, erasing the board when it filled up, and continuing down the list.
The Sunday protest, involving just four members of the group, marked nearly three years since the latest flare-up in the Middle East conflict was sparked when militant group Hamas crossed the border into Israel on October 7, 2023, taking around 250 hostages and killing over 1,200 people.
Since the 2023 escalation, the death toll in Gaza has risen to 74,237, according to the Gaza health ministry, while 1,454 have been killed and 5,090 injured since the US-brokered ceasefire took effect in October 2025.
“This is a hell of Israel’s making,” the activist group’s statement stated.
“We hope to remember the deceased by writing down their names to the best of our ability. They are not mere numbers, but individuals with names and surnames, of flesh and blood,” they read out loud.
The group also slammed the “so-called ceasefire agreement” that the US helped draft last October.
“The ‘Board of Peace,’ led by US President Trump and ostensibly tasked with overseeing the peacemaking process in Gaza, actually accelerate the collusion between the US and Israel to invade Gaza,” the statement read.
Chaired by Trump and with no Palestinian representatives, the board describes itself as a “more nimble and effective international peace-building body,” but groups critical of Trump’s board, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have questioned the US president’s sweeping authority and the body’s lack of oversight mechanisms.
The Hong Kong activists also called out artificial intelligence (AI) firms such as Palantir for their involvement in what the group called Israel’s “indiscriminate killing.”
It cited the documentary NAZA, which features interviews with Israeli military insiders alleging that Israel uses AI systems to identify and bomb potential Hamas targets in Gaza, often knowing that civilians would likely be killed in those attacks.
About an hour into the action, men who appeared to be plainclothes police officers approached activist Yu Wai-pan, a former member of the now-disbanded League of Social Democrats political party. They then looked through the group’s zines before standing off to the side.
A member of the group told HKFP that the officers did not order the group to stop the action. In total, the protest lasted for a little over two hours before coming to an end.
The group managed to write down some 300 names and read out almost half of the list by the time the protest ended. “In terms of sending out the message to the public and filming our ‘performance’, our goals were complete,” he said.
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James Lee is a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press with an interest in culture and social issues. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he witnessed the institution’s transformation over the course of the 2019 extradition bill protests and after the passing of the Beijing-imposed security law.
Since joining HKFP in 2023, he has covered local politics, the city’s housing crisis, as well as landmark court cases including the 47 democrats national security trial. He was previously a reporter at The Standard where he interviewed pro-establishment heavyweights and extensively covered the Covid-19 pandemic and Hong Kong’s political overhauls under the national security law.
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