📍University of Chicago

UChicago United for Palestine hosted a walkout and protest today, October 11. Once all of the protesters were past Hull Gate, they pushed the gate closed and locked it with bike locks. Chicago PD arrived in riot gear to attack students.

Live updates here: https://chicagomaroon.com/44154/news/live-upadtes-ucup-locks-hull-gate-marches/

🟡 NOW: Students tried to barricade themselves in the Free University of Berlin, threatening to destroy the server room if police entered the building. They demanded an immediate end to the deep-seated relationship between the university and the State of Israel, among other things.

However, several university staff remained in the building alongside the Palestine solidarity activists. As the police arrived quickly, ready to crack down, they escaped the building. None of the occupiers remain in the building, and police have already made several arrests.

The attempted occupation follows last summer’s takeover at Humboldt University Berlin, where protesters tried to negotiate their demands with university authorities.

A statement released by the occupiers declares, “The time for begging for justice from the University is over.”

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Writers Against the War on Gaza, Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement:

On October 13, 2023, the Israeli occupation army ordered the evacuation of 22 hospitals in northern Gaza. Four days later, a missile exploded at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. Nearly five hundred people, many of whom had been seeking shelter there, were martyred in the blast.

After early reports laid the blame for the explosion at Israel’s door, the IOF—with the full collaboration of the U.S. government—launched an aggressive campaign of finger-pointing and disinformation. Israeli and American officials spread tales about “Hamas tunnels” under the hospital and attempted to discredit the casualty figures.

As a direct result of this hasbara campaign, the @nytimes apologized for its initial reporting having cited the Gaza Ministry of Health. As a corrective, the paper published an op-ed by columnist Michelle Goldberg who brushed aside the idea that Israel was deliberately targeting Palestinian healthcare workers. She warned against “accepting incendiary claims of Israeli atrocities at face value” because it was “impossible… for outsiders to know what is happening in the… war between Israel and the Palestinians.”

That New York Times essay did its damage. And the forced debates, the competing visual and forensic investigations, worked to cast doubt. Doubt that would lay the blueprint for Israel’s bombing and wholesale destruction of hospitals over the year to follow, leading to today: Israel has bombed and either partially or wholly destroyed every single hospital in Gaza.

Three days ago, on October 14, Israel carried out its latest attack, this time at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, where patients were burned alive. By now, there was no doubt about who the perpetrator was. But it didn’t matter—the subject was no longer deemed to be newsworthy.

Today, allow us instead to read the transcript issued by the Palestinian healthcare workers from that “press conference at the end of the world,” its transcript copied above. Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah and his colleagues surrounded by the bodies, a man resting his head on the podium holding a martyred child, the dead, already shrouded, behind the hospital staff.

We won’t forget and we won’t forgive.

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