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Posted on 05/22/2025 10:23:53 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Students from universities including Yale, Stanford and UCLA have been refusing to eat in solidarity with Palestinians at risk of starvation in Gaza
When I speak to Iman Deriche, she hasn’t eaten in five days. “There are some moments of fatigue,” she says. “But I’m doing well.”
The 21-year-old Stanford University student is one of 24 students and three faculty members who are taking part in a hunger strike in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. They aren’t alone: students and faculty at universities across the US are going on hunger strike with activist organisation Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), from California State University, to Yale, to UCLA. One UCLA student, 23-year-old Maya Abdallah, was recently taken to hospital in an ambulance after nine days of hunger striking.
“A few of my friends had gone on hunger strike at Chapman University about a month before I did,” Abdallah, who is Palestinian and Lebanese, tells Dazed. “Seeing so many non-Palestinian, non-Arab students care enough to put their bodies on the line was really inspiring. We’ve tried so much for Palestine, but I’d never tried to put my body on the line. So that’s what I did.” This chimes with Deriche. “Since October 2023, Stanford students have been taking action and demanding that Stanford take action and end its complicity in the genocide,” she says. When she heard that SJP were trying a new tactic by organising a hunger strike, she volunteered straight away.
It’s difficult to understate how much strain a hunger strike can put on a human body. One striking Stanford student reported experiencing joint pain and extreme exhaustion around day four of the strike, “falling asleep every five minutes”. Striking University of Oregon students are reporting symptoms including brain fog, shakiness and fatigue. Paramedics, who were called after Abdallah lost consciousness on day nine of her strike, told her that her resting heart rate was 40 per cent higher than that of an average person. Abdallah says it was “very scary” to be hospitalised, adding that she had “never been in an ambulance before”.
Still, reflecting on her experience, she believes that the mental challenges were “much harder” than the physical challenges. She kept going by thinking “about the people of Palestine, who haven’t given up for nearly two years”, as well as her own Palestinian grandmother. “She kept the key to her home until her final moments, always hoping to go back.”
The hunger striking movement has grown as the threat of famine in Gaza has mounted. Israel stopped all deliveries of humanitarian aid and commercial supplies to Gaza on March 2, resuming its assault two weeks later and ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas. On May 19, some aid was authorised to enter for the first time since March, but only five aid trucks had reached Gaza by Tuesday (May 20) afternoon. According to Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office, aid workers had not been permitted to distribute the supplies either.
UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher described the paltry aid as “a drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed”, with an assessment by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warning that half a million people face starvation if Israel does not allow adequate aid into Gaza; Fletcher told the BBC on Tuesday morning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in 48 hours if aid did not reach them in time. Last week, it was reported that 57 children had already died from the effects of malnutrition over the past 11 weeks.
We’ll continue until our university takes action against its complicity in this genocide
“I’ve never felt more grounded or connected to the Palestinian struggle for liberation until now,” Deriche says. “One of the biggest things that keeps me going is knowing that I can break the strike at any time. I have the privilege to access food and healthcare whenever, but our brothers and sisters in Gaza do not.”
22-year-old Phia Dornberg is also taking part in a hunger strike alongside other students and faculty at the University of Oregon. She’s on the second day of her strike when we speak. “I didn’t realise how much I would think about the impact of not being able to eat and have that as part of your routine. There’s a psychological impact on top of the physical impact, which I wasn’t expecting,” she says. Being able to communicate with families in Gaza is getting her through the hardest moments. “Just giving them updates, to give them a little bit of hope… it’s very motivating, and it’s definitely kept me going.”
Hunger striking has long been used as a protest tactic by Palestinians and pro-Palestinian allies. In 1968, less than a year after the 1967 Naksa, Palestinian prisoners in Nablus Prison engaged in a three-day hunger strike to fight for an end to routine beatings and better living conditions within the prison. In 1970, Palestinian women imprisoned in Neve Tirza Prison led a nine-day hunger strike to demand sanitary products. In 1980, three Palestinian prisoners – Rasem Halaweh, Ishak Maragheh and Ali Al-Jaafri – died after being force-fed by Israeli prison guards during a 33-day-long hunger strike for better living conditions at Nafha prison. Many of these strikes were successful in achieving their demands.
Deriche is acutely conscious of the long history of hunger striking in the fight for Palestinian liberation. “Being Algerian, and having older relatives who were part of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism – who faced famine and starvation and participated in hunger strikes as well – I had no doubt I would do this hunger strike,” Deriche says. “[Palestinians] are literally my brothers and sisters [...] I feel and see their struggle every day.”
Alongside expressing solidarity with those in Gaza, the striking students have clear demands. Disclosure and divestment remain a key concern, with students demanding that their universities be transparent about where they get their funding and end their complicity in genocide by divesting from companies that profit from Israel’s continued siege on Gaza (at Stanford, this includes Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Palantir Technologies). Students are also keen to protect freedom of speech on campus, with the Stanford strikers demanding that university president Jonathan Levin call on District Attorney Jeff Rosen to drop the charges brought against 12 students and alumni arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest in June 2024. Many are also asking their universities to introduce scholarship schemes for Gazan students.
Most are still waiting for their universities to engage with them. The University of Oregon administration is yet to sit down with the striking students. Abdallah claims that despite UCLA being aware of her hospitalisation, she has still not heard “anything” from the university. Stanford has been similarly reluctant to engage meaningfully with student activists. Deriche says their concerns have been brushed off and they have been urged to consider different forms of protest that do not jeopardise their health. “It’s ironic, knowing that we’ve tried almost every tactic you can think of, and they’ve never come to the table in good faith,” she says. “We know the risks. The whole point of the hunger strike is to put your body on the line to make a political statement. We’ll continue doing this until Stanford finally decides to sit at the table.”
One thing is clear: despite all the setbacks, intimidation, and even criminal charges, the pro-Palestinian student movement isn’t going anywhere. “We’ll continue until our university takes action against its complicity in this genocide,” Deriche says. “We are watching a genocide unfold. We will continue to take action until our institutions wake up and heed the call of the Palestinian people. Palestine has called for decades. Now we must answer.”
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Thank you very much and God bless you.
Good.
Ship them to Gaza.
Let’s make it “real” for them.
Appropriately named source.... Dazed.... Ha... Ha...
Hey losers, 1972 called...
They want their meaningless gestures back!
They have my undying support. 😃
Great after a few months maybe they will be able to join the military...
They have an issue with no young people being within weight standards.
They could use some weight loss. Have at it.
Now they should only take media out the region and world news from Aljazeera . Lebanon and West Bank TV 24/7/365 shows it warts within a week, or new appreciation for friends and knight rider.
Let them. If they wish to starve themselves to death, their deaths are on their own hands.
Oh, those poor, poor children!
Naw. Just kidding. They’ll be fine after a day or maybe two.
Starting a hunger strike before summer break, sure I am not eating, on zoom.
Oh, well. They can probably use the break from food.
Hunger striking has long been used as a protest tactic by Palestinians and pro-Palestinian allies.
would like to gather enough people with McDonalds Kentucky fried chicken and wendys to sit in front of them and eat for how ever long they do this
The hunger strike will be catered by the nearest halal restaurant. You do not want to make the fat people mad.
I was thinking the same, they are probably mostly, if not all, lard butts.
From what I’ve seen of the Hamtifa cohorts, they could stand to shed a few pounds.
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