“I am a Jew, I am a proud Jew, I’m a Jew of 3,700 years,” Village of Great Neck mayor Padram Bral told an audience of hundreds at the Great Neck Village Green Park Sunday.

“I’m a Jew that Egypt and Egyptians tried to kill,” he yelled, “I am a Jew that Philistines tried to kill. I’m the same Jew that the Syrians tried to kill, Babylonians, ancient Greek, Romans, Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, Nazis. And where are they now? They’re deep under the ground. They’re part of their history. Israel has been chosen by God. We have been chosen to stay. No one. No one. The big empires could not get rid of us. Not Hamas. Hamas? A piece of little cockroach.”

The hundreds he spoke to were rallying in solidarity with Israel on Sunday, surrounded by heavily guarded police officers, as they listened to a series of speeches, songs, prayers, and international organizations participating over Zoom.

They gathered more than a week after the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli territory by terrorist organization Hamas, which killed at least 1,400 people. It was the worst one-day loss of life since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel retaliated with airstrikes in Gaza.

At least 2,778 Palestinians have been killed and 9,700 wounded in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip since the surprise attack on Oct. 7, AP reported Tuesday. The situation in Gaza continues to worsen as humanitarian organizations are unable to bring aid into the sealed-off enclave.

Bral said elitist professors in schools who side with the Palestinians are supporting Hamas and that they need to understand it’s because of the elitists that Hamas has been given a sense of legitimacy, not because of Israel.

“Because Hamas knows these elitist take sides with them,” Bral said, “all these kids that are dying in Palestine, in Gaza, their blood is on these elitist hands.”

As the clock struck 7 p.m., a reminder of the attack that took place on Oct. 7, in the park, the Great Neck Fire Department sounded a siren throughout the town to pay tribute to those who have lost their lives and to express solidarity with the Israel Defense Force, the nation’s military.

An IDF paratrooper unit spoke to the Great Neck audience over Zoom saying they can feel the support. They said they are currently defending their borders, but they don’t want to talk about operations, but instead “our nation’s heart, our Jewish heart that beats in the hearts of all of us.”

“We literally feel you; we can literally feel you guys supporting us and hugging us,” they said. “Our entire ideology was attacked and that’s what we’re defending right now. The morality of the world. The right of every person to be whatever he wants to be.”

They thanked Bral, legislator Mazi Pilip, who was in the IDF before moving to the United States and currently has a sister in Israel, and the entire Great Neck community for their support, which “helps us fight this virus that attacked us. Your support is enabling us to defend Israel and to fight this terrorist group that attacked us and God willing we will prevail.”

“It’s not so much what we do today,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman told the crowd. “It’s what are we going to do three weeks from now when there will be people standing up and saying that Israel should stop the war against Hamas. There will be no stopping, they are baby killers and rapists, and we are going to root them out and destroy them.”

Dan Levy, the mayor of the Village of Saddle Rock who fought in the Yom Kippur War in the Israeli army against Egyptian and Syrian forces, spoke about his past.

“About 50 years ago, I was just Danny,” he said, “I was a young artillery officer in the Suez Canal. And I thought I’ve seen hell then; little did I know hell can duplicate itself. We lost 800 soldiers that day…What I saw happening last Saturday shook me to the core.”

Levy said he is not out for revenge, but that the IDF “has to go and finish the job.”

Hamas as an entity “cannot exist,” he said. “They have no legitimacy and have no reason to exist.”

He said his son came to him asking: “‘As a Jew, how can you allow so many children to die in Gaza?’ And I said to him very simply, we did not set out to kill children. They came to kill our children, we set out to basically kill the terrorist, but the terrorists are using their children as a human shield. And we cannot stop. We have to get to the evil, eradicate it at its core and not stop one second before the end.”

Or Isacar, head of the research department in Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, said he could feel the energy radiating from Great Neck in Jerusalem over Zoom.

“I think that what Hamas did, backed by Iran, is an act of barbarism,” he said, “And we got to repeat this word every way we go. When people say it’s an act of militants, it’s an act of, you know, an oppressed people. What would you do? And I say to people, honestly, when they tell me these things, think about the slain elderly, and toddlers, and you think to yourself, my goodness, this is barbarism. This has nothing to do with legitimate claims or dispute or anything like that. We are dealing with barbaric people.”