Independent journalist Talia Ben-Ora was penned in a police kettle while covering a protest in New York, New York, on May 5, 2026.
The protest was taking place near a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was holding an event to promote real estate sales in Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the latter of which are widely believed to violate international law.
The New York City Police Department formed a buffer zone around the synagogue, prohibiting access to the block it was located on and directing pro-Palestinian and a smaller group of pro-Israel protesters, as well as press, onto surrounding avenues, according to news reports and journalists who spoke to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Ben-Ora told the Tracker that at one point, NYPD officers suddenly barricaded a sidewalk on nearby Third Avenue, pushing metal barricades into protesters and using chemical irritants to prevent them from accessing an area that had previously been open.
Members of the press were standing behind the officers, documenting the police actions. Then, “NYPD flooded that space and closed us in, not allowing press to move away, resulting in a strange press-only kettle,” Ben-Ora said.
In a video Ben-Ora posted on Bluesky, uniformed police and plainclothes public information officers can be seen telling press to back up from the protest, then surrounding them with metal barricades, penning them in.
“They prevented us from leaving by not moving from in front of where the barricades were up against the wall, ignoring us, as other cops were pushing into the crowd,” Ben-Ora said, adding, “I didn’t get the sense that we would be arrested, just that they were freezing our movement in any direction, including away from where they were fighting protesters.”
Ben-Ora said that members of the press were allowed to leave the kettle after a few minutes, but were “still separated by a police line and barricades from the protest.”
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.
This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.
U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database | Radio Free (2026-05-15T20:07:38+00:00) Journalist kettled while covering protest near NYC synagogue. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/05/15/journalist-kettled-while-covering-protest-near-nyc-synagogue/
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