We are the eight students, staff, and faculty from across the City University of New York system who started an indefinite hunger strike on Tuesday, May 27th. As we write this we sit with supporters on the steps of the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan facing the Empire State Building, a testament to US imperialism. For 19 months and counting, we have watched the obscene violence and horror of that imperialism, live streamed through our phones direct from Gaza, and we refuse to continue with business as usual.
We have one demand: that CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and the CUNY Board of Trustees immediately divest from Israel and from all weapons and technology manufacturers equipping the Israeli-U.S. genocide in Palestine.
Israel is starving all Palestinians in Gaza. Gaza has been under total siege by zionist forces since their direct military withdrawal from the Strip in 2007 (though Israel controlled the flow of goods into Gaza long before then). Those enduring genocide in Gaza have faced a near-complete blockade of humanitarian aid since March 2nd of this year. Fatima Ahmed, a mother surviving in Gaza, says “there’s no flour and no food to feed the children, nor the adults. Everyone is hungry. No one is eating. No one is eating.” As Israel continues to hold food and basic life-enabling supplies hostage in trucks waiting outside the Israeli controlled gates to Gaza, approximately 300 people—primarily children and the elderly—have been starved to death. A United Nations (IPC) report released on May 20th stated that over 930,000 children in Gaza are at risk of imminent death from starvation. We are joining the nationwide student hunger strike because we refuse business as usual while Gaza is starving.
Israel’s intensifying onslaught has displaced 180,000 Palestinians in only the last 10 days. At the same time as Israel allowed some 100 trucks carrying aid into Gaza as a PR stunt (Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, called it a “distraction from atrocities”), it continued to bomb residential areas and attack starving people as they sought aid. On Tuesday, the same day we launched our hunger strike, Israel once again opened fire on Palestinians attempting to collect packages of food. Mohammad Imad Abdel-Hadi, Khalil Ashraf Mousa, and Ashraf Anwar Khalil Mousa were among those killed. In the last 48 hours, Israel has killed ten people as they tried to get aid.
On the 27th of May, the day that we began our hunger strike, israel received its 800th planeload of weapons from the US since it began its genocide on October 7. On that day the israeli government boasted that the US had delivered more than 90,000 tons of arms, ammunition, military gear and other equipment to arm its genocide in Gaza.
We are outraged beyond words. We are outraged at the hypocrisy of administrators who claim to care about knowledge and yet refuse to state the basic facts on the ground––that this is genocide, and that it is being committed by the US and Israel. We are outraged by academics who write about colonialism and refuse to acknowledge the worst excesses of colonial violence happening in front of their eyes. We are outraged that our university continues to fund this carnage, while calling itself a university “for the public good.” While CUNY has refused to disclose its investments (in 2024 students sued CUNY to force them to disclose: the case is ongoing), we know the following: as of Fiscal Year 2021, CUNY had 13 contracts exceeding $8.5 million USD with companies that aid in, or profit from, zionist colonization, occupation, and war crimes, including Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo, Cisco, and BMC Software. As the 2018 CUNY Apartheid Divest Resolution outlines, these companies supply bombs and fighter jets to the Israeli military, help surveil Palestinians, produce demolition equipment that is used to destroy Palestinian homes, and aid in constructing zionist colonies across Palestine. As of fiscal year 2014, CUNY had $1.9 million invested in Israeli companies.
Our communities across New York City and the CUNY system have been protesting the israeli-US genocide since October 2023 and organizing for Palestine long before this, with the conviction that the liberation of Palestine is essential to all of our liberation. CUNY students have protested Board of Trustees meetings and high profile events, and occupied the Graduate Center to demand divestment. Multiple CUNY campus student bodies have passed resolutions to boycott israel, including the CUNY School of Law and the CUNY Graduate Center. Our campuses have been the sites of multiple encampments such as the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment of April 2024 at City College of New York, the April 24, 2025 City College Hilmi Al-Faqaawi Liberated Zone and the May 8, 2025 Brooklyn College Hassan Ayyad liberation zone. The CUNY administration has responded with consistently repressive tactics, penalizing students academically, firing instructors and unleashing NYPD brutality on students protesting an active genocide. Eight CUNY community members continue to face felony charges for their participation in the April 2024 encampment at City College, more than one year later.
We refuse to allow our tuition and tax dollars to fund genocide. We refuse to allow our university to profit off our academic research into colonialism while materially investing in the most brutal forms of colonial violence. We will be on hunger strike until CUNY divests.
Yesterday, at our opening speakout, a student read a letter from his friend Bassel, who is currently surviving in Gaza. Bassel’s is one of 13 families in Gaza that we are fundraising for as part of our strike https://bit.ly/hungerstrike4gaza. We end with Bassel’s words and hope that they reach you.
Before October 7, 2023, I was Bassel Barkat. Afterward, I’m still Bassel, according to my ID, but I can’t recognize this new version of myself. I am 37 years old, married and a father of two lovely kids.
I’ve lost 60 family members in the last year, and I struggle to process how quickly everything has changed. Displaced by bombing from my home in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, to the al-Mawasi neighborhood of Khan Younis, I have lost so many loved ones to Israel’s attacks over the past year: I am mourning 60 family members, including my friend and cousin Hassan, He has been missing since we evacuated our home in Rafah in May. I do not want to acknowledge that he is likely dead as well.
Once I saw martyrs being referred to as “unknown persons” or placed in mass graves. Some of them are even body parts that couldn’t be identified. Is it possible that all it would say on my shroud would be “a young Man in a black/blue t-shirt”? Could I die as an “unknown person,” just a number?
I am a refugee. My grandparents were refugees who were forced by the Israeli occupation to leave our occupied land in 1948. They moved to the Gaza Strip and lived in the Rafah refugee camp, west of the city.
Back in March 2023, Ibrahim Ashor, one of my closest friends, sent me a message late at night: “Hi Bassel, I’m by your house.” I was surprised. Mohammed was visiting me out of the blue! Smiling, I replied, “You must be kidding?” I hadn’t been meeting friends much because I was busy applying for jobs and master’s degree scholarships. Still, I eagerly went downstairs to open the door for Ibrahim and welcomed him in.
“What’s the value of our lives?” he asked.
Ibrahim and I stayed up all night wrestling with this question, each of us dreaming about our possible futures—me in English translation, him in laboratory science. But unfortunately, we had no answer to how we’d get there. It had been more than six years since our graduation, and we’d applied for countless jobs and scholarships, but had been rejected every time. Without a visible way forward.
On the night of October 6, 2023, Ibrahim called me again. I vividly remember him saying, “We need a miracle!” We thought life couldn’t get much worse. We were wrong. Instead, that weekend in October, I woke up to the sounds of bombs. I went straight to the market to get food and basic essentials––I knew a war would be starting soon. I was only thinking about the coming days.
For 20 months in Gaza, I’ve never felt safe or secure. When I go to sleep, I know that I might not wake up the next morning. My entire life has changed since October, and it will never be the same. Today, I don’t do a single thing I used to. I constantly worry about those around me and try to take care of them.
As a parent of two children, the worst feeling was knowing I cannot protect them. They can be killed at any time, and there is nothing I can do about it. Before the war, I felt that I was the provider and protector of my family. Now, I just feel so powerless. I cannot secure the basic needs for me and my family, like food, or gas for cooking. For the longest time in my life, I haven’t been able to eat any meat. I have lost around 23kg, I look like a completely different person. Any food that is available here is now too expensive. Finding transport in Gaza is impossible and there is no fuel available, so people can’t reach their families. I’ve lost so many loved ones. My best friend was killed. Another of my close friends was killed, along with his whole family. My friends who I used to see every day are all gone.
Before October 7, 2023, I still had my cousin, Hassan, who was not just my sibling but also my best friend. The last thing he said to me on May 5 of this year, as we faced an order to evacuate from our home in Rafah, was, “I will follow you tomorrow.” He stayed behind to collect more of our belongings. He promised to meet me in al-Mawasi, where we sought shelter. But tomorrow came, and many tomorrows followed. To this day, we don’t know what happened to him.
I remember Hassan telling me, “You have to stand by my side because you’re my older brother. I need your help to secure my future.” Although he had a job as a police officer, the pay was extremely low (only the equivalent of $210-$315 a month). I had worked to finance his studies at the police college, and he trusted that if any member of our family had the chance for success, it was me. His words touched me, but I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to help him, to help my entire family and to help myself. But I couldn’t. I really couldn’t.
The war has broken me in ways I didn’t think possible. But it also pushed me toward action. Everything has changed so fast, and I don’t know how to process it all. But I must accept that the Bassel of today is not the Bassel of yesterday.
In the last six months, I have been displaced 13 times. I won’t move again. There are only three options left for me––either I will be killed, I will flee to Egypt, or this war will end. It is extremely overcrowded here. The streets are always full of people. If an Israeli military invasion goes ahead, it will be an absolute catastrophe.
I miss my whole life before October. I miss my home. 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 could kill me. I wish I could go back to my old life, where life was more normal. I want the war to end, the crossings to be open, and I want work to go back to normal.
I hope I don’t lose anyone else. I hope my family and friends will be safe, and God will grant them happiness and peace
I will survive this genocide, and I will keep moving forward—not only to rediscover who I am, but to define the value of my life in the face of all that has been lost.
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