Pro-Palestinian protesters on Monday chanted at a cancer hospital in New York City, yelling "shame" at the treatment center.
"We will continue to march as we talk about another complicit institution, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Center. Make sure they hear you. They're in the windows," one organizer told a crowd of marching demonstrators as they shouted, "Shame!"
The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is a renowned hospital in Manhattan founded in 1884. Rankings have named it one of the top cancer treatment centers in the country. It also houses a pediatric department, and video on social media showed at least one child in a window of the hospital watching the protesters.
The protesters were part of a demonstration called "Flood Manhattan for Gaza: MLK Day March for Healthcare" that a group called Within Our Lifetime organized. They did so to "stand with the Palestinian people amid a grave healthcare crisis amidst the genocide in Gaza," the group said on Instagram. The marchers took to the streets "to demand an end to the genocide, to end all U.S. aid to Israel, to lift the siege and blockade on Gaza in order to prevent the healthcare system’s total collapse and hundreds of thousands of more deaths from illnesses if the bombs do not kill them first."
"MSK shame on you, you support genocide too," the crowd chanted at the protest. Nerdeen Kiswani, an organizer for Within Our Lifetime, attempted to explain the targeting of the hospital in response to criticism on X, formerly Twitter.
"We called out hospitals supporting the genocide in Gaza as Palestinian cancer patients are going to DIE w/ no treatment if not killed by bombs first. These facts ARE disgusting," she wrote. "Sloan Kettering accepted a *400 million dollar donation* from billionaire Zionist Ken Griffin, the largest in their history. This was *after* he threatened pro-Palestine student activists at Harvard with revoked job offers. Our medical institutions are not innocent bystanders," she added in a separate post.
The protesters also accused Mt. Sinai Medical Center, another renowned hospital in the city, of supporting genocide, according to the New York Post.
Their actions come just over a week after a group of pro-Palestinian hecklers interrupted President Joe Biden, calling for a ceasefire as he gave a campaign speech at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., the site of a 2015 white supremacist mass shooting. That day, protesters for the same cause also blocked bridges in New York City.