Over the past few days, various universities across the United States have made headlines over protests.
These protests saw some universities closed while others were forced to cancel planned important occasions like graduation ceremonies.
In-person learning has also been suspended in most of these institutions with hundreds of students arrested across the US.
While the student gatherings started soon after the Hamas-led gunmen carried out an unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people, most of whom were civilians and taking 253 hostages to Gaza, the encampment began Thursday, April 17, 2024.
They were led by Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
In response to the Hamas attack, Israeli forces have had at least 34,180 people, most of them children and women, killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
The student protests have previously been in the form of rallies, sit-ins, and hunger strikes.
They demand an end to the war in Gaza.
They also demand that their respective universities stop engaging in business with Israel over its offensive in Gaza, which has resulted in the loss of thousands of innocent lives.
The student activists want their institutions to end relations with companies that produce weapons and other industries supporting Israel’s war on Gaza.
Some of the protests on US campuses have been accused of antisemitism.
Some of the universities that have had students participate in the encampment include Columbia University in New York City, Yale University in Connecticut, University of Texas at Austin, Emory University in Atlanta, Emerson College in Boston, George Washington University in Washington DC, New York University, University of Southern California (USC), Northeastern University in Boston and the University of California.
Others are Berkeley College in New York, University of Michigan, Georgetown University in Washington DC, American University in Washington DC, Brandeis University in Boston, California State Polytechnic University in Humboldt, Harvard University in Cambridge, Brown University in Rhode Island, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Indiana University, among others.
The protests seem to be drawing inspiration from 1985 when college students targeted companies doing business with apartheid South Africa and ultimately forced more than 150 schools to divest from the country.
Students staged sit-ins to protest against the South African apartheid. They also protested the university's investments in the South African state.
The protest became an encampment that remained on the steps of Sproul Hall from April until the end of the 1985 school year.
In 1968, five buildings on the Columbia University campus were taken over by students protesting the institution’s links to military research, during the Vietnam War.
In the protests, police arrested over 700 students.