A man was arrested with a loaded semi-automatic handgun on Wednesday morning while driving around the heavily Jewish community of White Plains, New York, in a car bearing anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans.

Hani Saleh, 47, from nearby Elmsford, was also found to have a forged license plate on his vehicle, as well as several Arizona license plates and a New York license plate in his possession, according to White Plains Public Safety.

Mr. Saleh told authorities that he was attempting “to educate the public to the true events in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas,” the New York Post reported.

Officers had received several reports of a suspicious vehicle “covered with hate speech.” The offensive messages included “a reference to murdered Palestinian children,” the phrase “USA=ISIS=ISRAEL,” and both American and Israeli flags with swastikas superimposed over them, Patch reported. 

The arrest came shortly before a planned rally nearby for the release of Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in its attack on southern Israel on October 7, Lohud reported. More than 100 people attended the event at the Westchester Holocaust memorial. 

Chief Joseph Castelli of the White Plains police said there was no indication that Mr. Saleh was in White Plains because of the rally or that he even knew about it, Lohud reported. The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI Westchester Safe Streets Task Force have joined local police in the ongoing investigation.

“The authorities really need to ensure that this is not a Kahane type situation, where they presumed it was a lone gunman and it turned out to be a conspiracy,” the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Steven Emerson, tells the Sun. 

Mr. Emerson is referring to the 1990 assassination of an Israeli-American rabbi, Meir Kahane, by El Sayyid Nosair, who was presumed at the time to be a lone gunman. Nosair was in fact part of the cell that planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

While it is not illegal to drive around in a car displaying offensive speech, the Jewish community is on high alert. The deputy national director for a Jewish security group, Community Security Services, Richard Priem, tells the Sun there has been an “uptick in incidents” and threats to the synagogues that his group helps protect. 

“Even though the full details are not immediately clear, and they often find that the first reports are not always accurate, and it turns out to be more nuanced,” Mr. Priem says. “I don’t know how much nuance there’s going to be when there’s a car with a swastika on it driving around in Westchester.”

Mr. Saleh was booked on Thursday and charged with second-degree criminal possession of a weapon and second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument.

The weapon, according to Patch, was a Taurus 940 and held 10 .40 caliber rounds in the loaded magazine. The gun was found under the driver’s seat.