AN Israeli media report says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made new demands in negotiations on the second phase of the ongoing ceasefire deal signed with Hamas.
According to Israel’s Channel 13, Netanyahu is demanding Hamas leadership to be exiled abroad, Gaza to be demilitarised and Israel to maintain security control over the enclave.
These were not included in the deal signed in mid-January. As per that accord, Hamas would have released all the remaining captives and Israeli troops were to withdraw from the Strip.
Meanwhile, Mamayan Jabateh, a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago, was working on a final paper inside a dorm on campus, when a knock came at the door.
Four Chicago police officers were standing on the other side. They presented Jabateh, who uses the pronoun “they”, with a printed photograph. It showed them at a pro-Palestinian campus protest two months earlier, on October 11.
Jabateh was immediately handcuffed and hauled away. They were detained for 30 hours. But the arrest was only the beginning: Jabateh was also indefinitely suspended and banned from campus.
Free-speech advocates are warning that, with attention on the protests waning and national politics in the United States swinging rightward, university punishments against pro-Palestinian protesters have grown harsher — something Jabateh knows firsthand.
“It’s a really extreme reaction,” says Megan Porter, a lawyer who is supporting Jabateh during the disciplinary process on a pro bono basis. “But it seems to be a tactic that a lot of universities are starting to take.”
Since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023, thousands of students flooded onto campus lawns and other common areas to denounce Israel’s actions and US support for them.
At the height of the protests, in April and May, tent encampments cropped up at many universities across the country, including the University of Chicago.
Amid political pressure and accusations of anti-Semitism, many university leaders responded by calling in the police.
Campus protesters were arrested en masse, sometimes more than 100 at a time. As many as 3,100 had been arrested by July.
But as the demonstrations have shrunk in number and size this academic year, advocates say universities have instead switched to targeting individual students with severe disciplinary actions, including months or in some cases years of suspension.
That was the case for Jabateh. In October, on the first anniversary of the Gaza war, Jabateh had taken part in the “Week of Rage”, a series of protests planned by Students for Justice in Palestine, the country’s largest pro-Palestine student organisation.