A whiteboard in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay became a memorial on Sunday as anti war activists wrote and read the names of Palestinians they said had been killed in Gaza since the October 2025 ceasefire.
The names came one after another. When the whiteboard filled, activists erased it and started again. They had brought a list of about 1,400 names, but with only four people taking part, they knew they could not finish it in a single afternoon.
By the time the protest ended after more than two hours, the group had written down around 300 names and read almost half of its list aloud.
The unusual demonstration, organised by HK Anti war Mobilization, took place in Causeway Bay during China's weeklong National Day holiday, when the normally crowded shopping district was even busier with tourists and residents.
People stopped.
Some photographed the protest booth. Others picked up zines prepared by the activists. A few stood and watched as the names were written, erased and replaced.
For the organisers, that process was the point.
"We hope to remember the deceased by writing down their names to the best of our ability. They are not mere numbers, but individuals with names and surnames, of flesh and blood," the group said in its statement.
Why Hong Kong activists chose to read the names
The protest was not built around a large crowd or a long series of speeches. Instead, the activists chose something much simpler: names.
The group said the list represented Palestinians who had been killed since a US-brokered ceasefire took effect in October 2025. It cited Gaza's health ministry as reporting 1,454 deaths and 5,090 injuries since the ceasefire began.
The same source puts the overall Palestinian death toll in Gaza since the conflict escalated in October 2023 at 74,237.
The figures are those cited by the activists and Gaza's health ministry. They formed the basis of the group's protest message and its decision to hold a public reading of the names.
Rather than displaying one large casualty figure on a banner, the activists wanted passersby to encounter individual names.
That made the protest slow.
It also made it difficult to ignore.
Every time the board filled, the names disappeared from view. Another activist then began writing again. The process continued throughout the demonstration.
The group described the action as an attempt to remember those killed and to draw attention to deaths it believes have continued despite the ceasefire.
Causeway Bay protest draws attention during holiday
The location was carefully suited to a public demonstration.
Causeway Bay is among Hong Kong's busiest commercial areas, with shopping centres, restaurants and transport links drawing large numbers of people. During the National Day holiday, the area attracted even more visitors.
The four activists therefore did not need a large organised crowd to reach members of the public.
Tourists and residents stopped at the booth, where they could look at the names, take photographs and collect zines produced by HK Anti-war Mobilization.
Two women holding Palestinian flags were also photographed watching the demonstration.
The scene stood out against the commercial surroundings of Causeway Bay. People were shopping, walking through the district and taking holiday photographs while, only a few steps away, activists were recording names associated with a war thousands of kilometres from Hong Kong.
That contrast helped shape the protest.
The activists were bringing an international conflict into one of the city's most recognisable public spaces, asking people passing by to pause and consider the human cost behind casualty statistics.
Three years after the Gaza war began
The demonstration came almost three years after the latest major escalation in the Israel-Gaza conflict.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas crossed into Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostages, according to figures cited in the original report.
Israel subsequently launched its military campaign in Gaza.
The conflict has since produced a massive death toll and repeated international efforts to stop the fighting.
The Hong Kong activists focused specifically on what they said had happened after the October 2025 ceasefire.
Their argument was direct: a ceasefire did not, in their view, mean that Palestinians had stopped dying.
That claim formed the central reason for the name-reading exercise.
"This is a hell of Israel's making," the activists said in their statement.
The wording reflects the group's position on Israel's conduct during the war and was not presented as an independent assessment.
Activists attack US-backed Gaza peace efforts
The activists also criticised the political arrangements surrounding the ceasefire and Gaza's future.
They referred to the agreement as the "so-called ceasefire agreement" and attacked the role played by the United States in negotiating and overseeing the process.
Particular criticism was directed at the Board of Peace, chaired by US President Donald Trump.
The board describes itself as an international peace-building body intended to help address Gaza's future. The activists, however, argued that the structure did not represent a genuine path to peace.
They claimed the board had instead strengthened cooperation between the United States and Israel.
The group also pointed to the absence of Palestinian representatives from the board.
That criticism reflects a broader dispute over who should have authority over Gaza's reconstruction and political future. Critics of the board have also questioned the concentration of power under Trump's leadership and the lack of strong oversight mechanisms.
For the Hong Kong activists, the issue was connected to the names being read at their protest.
They argued that political agreements should be judged not only by what they promise on paper, but also by what happens to people living through the conflict.
AI and Palantir become part of the protest message
The activists also brought artificial intelligence into their criticism of the Gaza war.
They singled out technology companies including Palantir and accused them of contributing to systems involved in what the group described as Israel's "indiscriminate killing."
The group cited the documentary NAZA, which examines Israel's use of artificial intelligence in military operations.
The documentary features interviews with Israeli military insiders and examines claims that AI systems are used to identify potential Hamas targets in Gaza.
The activists argued that the use of such systems raises serious questions when military planners know civilians could be killed in an attack.
These allegations remain part of a wider and contested debate over the use of AI in warfare. The activists presented the documentary as supporting their concerns about technology's role in military targeting.
For the group, however, the issue was not separate from the names on its whiteboard.
The activists were attempting to connect decisions made by governments, military forces and technology companies with the human consequences represented by the names they were reading.
Plainclothes police watch Hong Kong Gaza protest
About an hour into the protest, several men who appeared to be plainclothes police officers approached activist Yu Wai-pan.
Yu is a former member of the now-disbanded League of Social Democrats.
The men looked through the group's zines before moving to the side of the booth and observing the demonstration.
Photographs taken during the protest showed plainclothes officers standing near the activists and examining their printed material.
A member of HK Anti-war Mobilization told Hong Kong Free Press that the officers did not order the activists to stop.
The protest continued for more than another hour.
There was no reported confrontation between the officers and the group.
The presence of plainclothes officers nevertheless added another layer to a demonstration that was already drawing attention in one of Hong Kong's busiest public areas.
The activists continued writing names and reading from their list until they decided to end the action.
Only 300 names were written. The activists say that was enough.
The group had prepared about 1,400 names.
It managed to write around 300 on the whiteboard and read almost half of its list before the protest ended.
That meant most of the names remained unread.
But the activists did not regard the incomplete list as a failure.
"In terms of sending out the message to the public and filming our 'performance', our goals were complete," one member told Hong Kong Free Press.
The statement reveals what made the protest different from a conventional political rally.
The group was not trying to gather thousands of supporters. It was not attempting to complete a 1,400-name reading in record time.
It wanted people walking through Causeway Bay to stop.
It wanted them to see names instead of a number.
And it wanted the images of those names being written on a whiteboard to travel beyond the small group gathered around the booth.
That strategy gave the protest its strongest visual element. A name appeared, stayed on the board for a moment, then disappeared as the activists made space for another.
The cycle continued.
For the organisers, each erased name represented another person whose story could easily disappear behind the scale of the wider conflict.
The demonstration ended after more than two hours, but the activists left with their central message intact: the people represented by casualty figures had names, families and individual lives.
In a crowded Causeway Bay, they chose to make those names the story.
Do you think public name-reading protests can help people better understand the human cost of the Gaza war?