Faith leaders protest and pray for Gaza’s dead outside U.S. Sen. Bob Casey’s office

Hundreds assembled in Center City on Thursday evening outside U.S. Sen. Bob Casey’s office to hold a protest and recite a funereal prayer for those killed in Gaza.

It was the latest in a string of demonstrations in Philadelphia, urging local elected officials to support a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war. But it was also a gesture of grief, as imams recited the janazah, a traditional Islamic prayer said at funerals, to mourn over 11,400 people killed in Gaza since the war began.

For Omar Mussa, a speaker at the rally who said he was a Philadelphia resident, the prayer was also a call to unite and keep speaking out against the bloodshed.

“This janazah is a departure for the deceased and a lesson for the living,” he told the crowd, standing on the bed of a pickup truck at 20th and Market Streets. “I beg this is a call to action — that we put to rest and we bury every single thing that keeps us separated.”

Mussa said Casey met with Pennsylvanians whose family members had been killed in Gaza. They implored him to support a cease-fire, he said, but the senator declined to do so. A spokesperson for Casey declined comment on the demonstration and referred to the senator’s Oct. 29 statements, in which he reaffirmed the U.S. position to “stand with Israel and its right to protect itself from terrorists while also protecting innocent civilian lives in Gaza.”

Like most of his Senate colleagues, Casey has shown near-unconditional backing for Israel and its military siege in the Gaza Strip since the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7. But the prayerful protest on Thursday was the first demonstration to specifically target the Pennsylvania Democrat, while protesters have spent weeks pressuring U.S. Sen. John Fetterman outside his Philadelphia office to back a cease-fire. Fetterman’s position has not changed.

Organizers noted that thousands more civilians are killed in the blockaded Gaza Strip each week as Israel expands its ground siege and airstrike campaign.

“It’s a catastrophe,” said Nicolas O’Rourke, a pastor and member of the progressive Working Families Party who was elected to Philadelphia City Council this month.

Flanked by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith leaders, O’Rourke led chants of “Free Palestine” as the crowd marched down Chestnut Street toward Casey’s office, while demonstrators processed like pallbearers holding up a wooden casket. A nearby resident waved a white keffiyeh from a third-story window as the crowd passed.

Outside of Casey’s office, located at 2000 Market St., demonstrators placed a symbolic dead body in the casket at the door of the building. The crowd spread across the intersection as imams recited the invocation in Arabic. People bowed their heads and crossed their arms as the prayer echoed off the high-rise office buildings. In lulls between the prayer’s phases, the rush-hour street fell almost silent, save for the distant hum of rerouted traffic and a news helicopter whirring overhead.

Those who could read Arabic took turns with the microphone and read aloud the names of children reportedly killed by the Israeli military. (Gaza’s Ministry of Health published the names of over 6,700 Gazans it said had been killed as of late October, after President Joe Biden questioned the reliability of the casualty figures coming from the war.)

For more than half an hour, speakers listed the names. At one point, a woman choked while reading and wept loudly into the microphone. Organizers said the names they read represented only a fraction of the slain children.

Mohammad Elshinawy, a Muslim community leader in Allentown, drove to Philadelphia with his 13-year-old son for the prayerful protest. During a speech, he criticized elected officials for their failure to intervene as the Palestinian death toll climbed, and urged people of all faiths to stand on the side of those suffering in Gaza.

Elshinawy said he has relatives in Gaza. He said public events such as this kept him focused on taking action, but as the names were being read aloud, he remembered the paralyzing pain and the fear that has become a daily reality for so many touched by the war.

“When I’m home, in the dark, it’s difficult,” he said. “I can’t keep it together.”