Professor Tahrir Hamdi, Arab Open University, Jordan

Co-founder of ActforPal

Israeli Occupation Forces illegally stormed Birzeit University’s campus in the occupied West Bank early on Tuesday, firing live ammunition, tear gas, and stun grenades at students. More than 11 students were injured and medical teams were prevented from immediately providing first aid, according to The Palestine Chronicle. As has become common practice, Israeli  Occupation Forces used violent means to disperse a peaceful student event held in support of Palestinian prisoners within the confines of the university campus. This incident additionally coincided with a screening of the film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, which documents the cold-blooded killing of five-year-old Hind and her cousins by the Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza.

Israel’s continued illegal actions seek to impose fear and enforce silence through such extreme and brutal tactics. The Zionist state, which continues to commit genocide, deliberately starving the population of Gaza and denying them access to clean water and medicine, is quietly employing the same tactics in the occupied West Bank. These include demolishing homes, uprooting millions of olive trees, raiding villages, and now violating the sanctity of university campuses with live fire, all in an effort to put an end to Palestinian lifeworlds.

It is of the utmost importance that all morally conscious people around the world stand against the unlawful and illegal actions of this brutal Zionist entity. Israel is supported by the world’s most thuggish imperialist power, the United States, which has emboldened and empowered this apartheid and genocidal state to act with complete impunity against the indigenous people of historic Palestine—the Palestinians. The global Palestine solidarity movement must unite to stand against Israel’s continued practices to destroy Palestinian education and institutions, denying Palestinian students the right to knowledge and knowledge production. ActforPal stands against such practices which are part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid nature. We need to work to dismantle this system.

Featured image credit: Birzeit Universität by Oromiya321, CC BY-SA 3.0., via Wikimedia Commons.