Community members gathered in Philadelphia’s LOVE Park on Saturday to remember the more than 41,000 Palestinians killed in the past year by Israeli offensives in Gaza and the West Bank.

The commemoration comes a year after the Israel-Hamas war started Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 people hostage.

Families for Ceasefire Philly organized the vigil in front of the LOVE statue, where mourners hung a sign with the words “Gaza.” Adults and children left flowers, toys and shoes on reams of paper that listed the names of 34,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza.

“It’s imperative that people are allowed a space to grieve, and that’s why we organized this, because of the mass scale of death,” Jennifer Fisher, an organizer with Families for Ceasefire Philly, said. “It’s being normalized, the dehumanization of Palestinians is so widespread that you can’t even really talk about it in places anymore. So we felt that it’s important that we do this together, and we’re a community in this, we’re community grieving.”

Rabbi Alissa Wise read “The Mourner’s Kaddish,” a traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, and Reverend Tamarah Lee offered prayers. Attendees placed 710 votive candles on the ground, representing the number of children below the age of one who were killed in Gaza in the past year.

Organizer Rayya El Zein said the names and the number of candles are “entry points” to understanding the devastation in Gaza.

“There is no moving forward, there is no justice, there is no mercy without learning how to recognize this violence and this death and reckoning with it together,” she said.

Hannah Mermelstein, another organizer, said mourning the lives lost in the war is connected to protests and other actions.

“We know that all of this is happening with our tax dollars as U.S. taxpayers,” she said. “For me, personally, I’m Jewish, and so it’s also happening in my name as a Jewish person, and especially thinking about this at the time of Rosh Hashanah, of the new year, and just hoping that we can turn a new year where we can end this genocide.”

Israelis are also commemorating the lives lost in Hamas’ attacks a year ago. Fischer said those killed Oct. 7 “deserve to be grieved and acknowledged.”

“Why we’re here today specifically is that there has not been a space for Palestinian grief,” she said. “So that’s why we came together today, specifically to highlight the losses in Gaza and in the West Bank.”

In Philadelphia, as in cities throughout the world, thousands over the past year have protested the United States’ support for Israel and called for a permanent ceasefire.

In recent weeks, the conflict has escalated region-wide. Israel has targeted members of the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has been firing rockets into Israel since Oct. 7, with airstrikes in densely populated areas of Beirut and other parts of the country. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, nearly 2,000 people have been killed in the recent conflict. On Oct. 2, Iran, which backs Hezbollah, retaliated with missile strikes on Israel.