Port Authority Police officers were on guard at John F. Kennedy Airport on New Year’s Day in anticipation of pro-Palestinian protestors.

“We mean to bring attention to the Palestinian struggle, whatever it takes, and we achieved that yesterday,” Nerdeen Kiswani, chair of Within Our Lifetime, a group that has been protesting for the Palestinian cause since 2015, told NY1.

“It’s important for our response to be proportional to this mass death and killing, so it’s important for us to raise the stakes,” she said.

As of Dec. 26, City Hall officials counted 483 protests related to the war since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants targeted Israeli civilians for massacre.

The protests like the one that targeted JFK have led to closures of the Manhattan Bridge and Grand Central Terminal, as well as targeting events like the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Rockefeller Center Tree lighting.

One protest left the New York Public Library vandalized.

“The Police Department [has] to be extremely more hesitant in actions that they would have carried out in the past to keep the peace,” Mayor Eric Adams said during a Dec. 26 news conference.

The mayor blames this hesitancy on the city’s proposed settlement of a lawsuit over the Black Lives Matters protests that ends the NYPD’s use of “kettling” to cordon off demonstrators and creates a tiered system that details when and how officers respond.

“They’re just babysitting, they’re just watching this happening,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College for Criminal Justice. “You look what happened yesterday at JFK Airport. They shut down the entire Belt Parkway, the conduit, everything else. They’re sitting in streets, they’re attacking the World Trade Center, breaking glass at Grand Central station - this is far from peaceable.”

Rachel Fish, a co-founder of Boundless Israel, has been monitoring protests in the organization’s mission to combat antisemitism.

“Ultimately, these are protests that are emotionally based and stoking a lot of Jew-hatred throughout the cities of New York,” Fish said. “It’s important that security forces, police in particular, security guards for different institutions who often encounter these protests know how to implement their own policies to ensure that those disruptions are minimized and individuals are not harmed.”