‘The People That I Know In Gaza, They’re Starving’
“The people that I know in Gaza, they’re starving,” Angela, a bartender and Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York, tells me. It’s a Tuesday afternoon at the end of May, and in an hour, she and seven other students will gather on the steps of the university’s graduate center in midtown to kick off an indefinite hunger strike. They are joining hundreds of people across the country — including students at Stanford and the University of Oregon, plus affiliates of Veterans for Peace — in abstaining from food to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Angela is thinking about her friend Oday, whom she met on Instagram last October and had spoken with earlier in the day. In the last year, both Oday’s home in southern Gaza and his school were bombed. He and his family evacuated to a nearby town where they have been sleeping in the streets. “He just turned 18,” she says.
Israel, which aims to occupy 75 percent of Gaza, blocked virtually all food, fuel, and medicine from entering the territory from March to late May. More than 2 million Palestinians — including 930,000 children — have been pushed to the verge of famine; dozens have already died from malnutrition. The cost of a standard 55-pound sack of flour has reportedly risen to between $235 and $520, a more than 3,000 percent increase from February. Oday told Angela he’s been paying $600. “Seeing how escalated the siege on Gaza was, hearing of kids being starved to death, we felt like it was more important than ever to take action, even in a climate of escalated repression,” Lucien Baskin, a doctoral student in urban education who is hunger striking, says.
The same day the students launched their strike, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a controversial Israel-approved, U.S.-led group overseeing aid distribution in Gaza began its operations. GHF’s aid plan forces starving Palestinians to walk for miles to one of four fenced-off hubs manned by armed U.S. and Israeli security forces in order to secure just “one kilo of flour, a couple of bags of pasta, a couple of cans of fava beans,” as one Al Jazeera reporter put it. GHF’s director resigned shortly before these centers opened, stating that the aid plan was not possible to carry out humanely; indeed, Israeli guards reportedly killed more than 30 aid seekers when large crowds approached one hub over the weekend. “Aid distribution has become a death trap,” one U.N. official said in a statement. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of boxes of U.N. aid meant for Gaza are decaying in Jordan.
The CUNY strikers are pressuring the nation’s largest urban public university to divest from companies supporting the Israeli occupation, including American weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. (Israel received its 800th planeload of guns, bombs, and ammunition from the U.S. as the strike began.) Demonstrators are appealing to precedent: Last month, the University of San Francisco announced that it would sell off its investments in U.S. defense companies that contract with the Israeli military, and CUNY’s Board of Trustees previously voted to divest from Apartheid South Africa in 1984 and Big Tobacco in 1991.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began in 2023, members of the CUNY community have set up encampments, staged die-ins, interrupted trustee meetings, and even sued the administration for refusing to release records detailing the school’s investments. Like their peers at other U.S. universities, they have been beaten and arrested for their activism, including in early May, when law enforcement swarmed an encampment at Brooklyn College. Sally Zieper, an MFA candidate and adjunct writing instructor, tells me that police had yelled at Black and brown high school students arriving on campus that day for her office hours; after they left, she went out to the encampment and saw cops slamming CUNY students to the ground, some of whom were hospitalized. “With hunger-striking, it’s a risk that we’re taking on our own bodies,” she says, “but at least hopefully the police aren’t going to beat us this time.”
Inside a student lounge in the grad center, Flora de Tournay, a Ph.D. candidate and English lecturer at Hunter College, walks her peers through physical symptoms they might encounter on their hunger strike. Their blood pressure could drop, potentially leading to dizziness, heart palpitations, or brain fog. “You need to maintain your electrolytes,” she warns the students. She tells me she consulted her late father’s diaries for motivation: He was a conscious objector to the Vietnam War who underwent an extreme fast to avoid the draft. He subsisted on liquids and a single piece of fish a day; at his lowest, her dad, who was six-foot-one, weighed only 120 pounds.
At 4 p.m., dozens of CUNY students, staff, and faculty show up to rally in support of the strikers, most of them wearing keffiyehs and holding signs that read “Free Mahmoud Khalil” and “Israel Bombs Sleeping Children.” A few NYPD officers stand by monitoring. The demonstrators’ choice of location is strategic. CUNY Graduate Center — or the “Graduate School for the Public Good,” as it’s advertised on one of its window banners — sits at a highly visible location across the street from the Empire State Building; Times Square and Trump Tower are not too far away. As demonstrators shout into a megaphone, tourists flying by on double-decker buses crane their necks to see the source of the noise; disgruntled passerby in businesswear stop to object.
“You’re terrorists,” a middle-aged man wearing a fedora hisses at the group. A few minutes later, an older man in a button-up and slacks starts haranguing a CUNY professor wearing a red keffiyeh, saying, “There is no Arab state where there is justice.” One speaker mentions the $4 billion in military aid the U.S. has greenlit for Israel. “Let’s double that if necessary,” the same man shouts before walking away.
CUNY Graduate Center president Joshua Brumberg leans against one of the center’s columns, observing the action and chatting with other university administrators. When I approach him for comment, he pauses for a few seconds, smirking. “We support the students’ right to protest,” he says.
International students participating in the rally wear masks, aware of the risks of protesting while on visas. One student who I’ll call Brooke emphasizes to me that she felt it was important not to cave to anticipatory obedience. “If we can’t speak up against an active genocide, then we’re no longer in a space for critical thought,” she says. “So what the hell are we doing here, in this country, to study and write?” Another international student reads a statement from Bassel, a 37-year-old father in Gaza who has lost at least 60 family members to the war: “I miss going to the office, going to the beach, going to the gym. I miss coming home and sleeping knowing that I’m relaxed and safe, not scared of bombs that kill me.”
The students are also hosting teach-ins, leading letter-writing campaigns, and collecting nonperishable food to distribute to local mutual-aid organizations during the strike. “Whether it’s in New York or Gaza, hunger is written about as this natural, unavoidable fact of life,” Baskin says. “In reality, we live in a world that is capable of providing food for every person on this planet.” He notes that, in 2023, CUNY graduate students started a campus food pantry to shame the university into reopening dining centers it had closed during the pandemic, and that one in four children in New York City live in poverty (a statistic that will only worsen if the massive cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill pass Congress). “The city that will spend so much money to police poor people of color and send their money to Israel won’t feed its own children,” he says.
A week into their strike, I call the students, who are out sitting on the Graduate Center steps together. Although doctors have come almost every day to check their vitals and remind them to hydrate, they report feeling dizzy and faint. They have not gotten a response from CUNY yet, but Brooke tells me “the morale is very, very strong.” Strangers have rushed up to them on the street to support the cause. “Yesterday, a taxi driver just jumped out, took a selfie with us, and then gave us 40 bucks,” she says. The students have already exceeded their $10,000 fundraising goal, distributing an initial $769 each to 13 families in Gaza. Angela shares messages from several of the families, who said they were able to buy flour and tents, and from Oday, who had asked for photos of the strikers. In response, he wrote: “All respect, appreciation and love to you.”
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