Italy’s Radical Youth Are Celebrating October 7

Three years after the Hamas massacre of October 7, part of Italy’s radical youth movement has moved from relativising it to openly celebrating it.

Hamas called the attacks an “honorable historic milestone”. Meanwhile, in Italy, young activists said much the same thing in university lecture halls and then, on October 10, in marches across more than fifty cities, where banners proclaimed “October 7, day of the Resistance”. These groups are a problem in themselves, but they become a political problem because parts of Italy’s left opposition keep walking alongside them.

The main protagonist is the Giovani Palestinesi d’Italia (Young Palestinians of Italy), a network of activist collectives with chapters in Bologna, Milan, Turin, and Rome. The group has never hidden what it thinks of the Hamas attack. Last year, it called its supporters into the center of Bologna under the slogan “Long live October 7”, described the massacre as “a glorious moment” and “the greatest act of resistance of recent decades against the Zionist colonial occupation”.

This year, on the evening of October 7, the movement held a debate in a lecture hall of the University of Bologna, which had refused to authorize it. The announcement described the massacre as “one of the most important actions of the Palestinian resistance” and as “an example, and a stage, of a struggle that began ninety years ago and will continue until liberation from the river to the sea”. Hundreds of people attended, and speakers even compared October 7 to Via Rasella, the 1944 attack in which Italian partisans killed 33 German soldiers in occupied Rome, while activists outside chanted “Zionism out of the university” and “Israel out of the university”.

In Turin, the Torino per Gaza (Turin for Gaza) coordination held a debate titled “Three years of genocide, three years of resistance” on the university’s campus, again without authorization. Meanwhile, in Milan, a banner reading “October 7 with the Palestinian revolution, until victory against Zionism” appeared in the Lambrate district before the police removed it.

The national mobilization of Saturday, October 10, showed that these were not isolated provocations. It was called by the Giovani Palestinesi together with the Palestinian Students’ Movement, the Arab-Palestinian Democratic Union and the Association of Palestinians in Italy, whose president, Mohammad Hannoun, was arrested in December 2025 on charges of financing Hamas, and the call spoke of honoring the more than 70,000 “martyrs of Gaza and its fighters”. In Milan, where about 5,000 people marched and demanded the release of Palestinian detainees, protestors compared October 7 to April 25, Italy’s Liberation Day from Nazifascism, calling for the hanging of all Zionists.

Similar scenes took place also in Turin and Bologna, where chants celebrated October 7 as a day of resistance and called for the “Intifada until victory”.

I have no difficulty acknowledging that the death of so many civilians in Gaza is a tragedy, nor in defending the right of Italians to say so in the street. Nevertheless, celebrating October 7 as a day of resistance and calling for Zionists to be hanged like the fascists of 1945 means aligning unapologetically with Hamas’ propaganda and its declared objectives.

The Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement, and the Greens and Left Alliance, which together form the left coalition, have not kept their distance. On October 10, the youth section of the Five Star Movement took part in the Rome march in which the banner celebrating October 7 was displayed, and in Milan, flags of the Greens and Left Alliance were carried in the same procession as the placard about hanging Zionists. In Turin, the Young Democrats, the Democratic Party’s youth wing, had announced their support for the march organised by Torino per Gaza, and one of their leaders, Paula Voerzio, explained that “the problem with October 7 is exploiting this day to make us forget three years of genocide”.

On September 9, young activists in Rome led a sit-in outside the Chamber of Deputies against the antisemitism bill, where Hamas and Hezbollah flags appeared. The speakers included the Democratic MP Laura Boldrini, who called the bill “a gift to Netanyahu”, and the Five Star Movement’s Riccardo Ricciardi, who described it as an operation to silence those who have protested against “Netanyahu’s genocidal government”.

What connects these positions is the expectation that Israel, and by extension Jews, must first answer for the war. As a matter of fact, in Bologna, the education councillor Daniele Ara said that local Jews should speak out against Netanyahu’s policies. Asking Italian citizens to distance themselves from a foreign government because they are Jewish means holding them collectively responsible for Israel’s actions, which the working definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), adopted by Italy in 2020, lists as an example of antisemitism.

The antisemitism bill now before the Chamber of Deputies, which writes the IHRA definition into Italian law, will show whether the center-left is prepared to draw a line: in the Senate in March, the Five Star Movement and the Greens and Left Alliance voted against it, and most Democratic senators abstained, and in committee last month the Democrats did not take part in the vote. A coalition that hopes to govern Italy cannot keep marching beside people who carry banners celebrating October 7 as “the day of the Resistance” and still expect Italian Jews to regard it as a partner against antisemitism.