How D.C.-area college students launched their own Gaza protest encampment

The sun was still low Thursday when the student organizers told their classmates it was time. They started to run. Some lugged snacks and foldable tables to the lawn; others arrived with tents. One person draped a kaffiyeh over a statue of George Washington.With that, the encampment began.

But it was not always clear whether the encampment movement that started at Columbia would make its way to the nation’s capital. In the days following the action in New York, which involved Columbia’s president summoning New York police officers to arrest her students, similar encampments began to appear on college campuses throughout the country.

El-Habashi, 21, is part of Students for Justice in Palestine Coalition , which has at least eight local chapters. The group officially formed a few months after GWUits SJP chapter in November, following an incident in which its members projected “glory to our martyrs” and the slogan “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” on a campus library after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel.

“It was more so like, ‘Oh, my God, did you guys see this? This is amazing. Like what they’re doing is amazing,’” Rashid said, describing conversations among student organizers.decided that each SJP chapter had reached a “point of no return” and felt that their universities did not support them and would not respond to their demands.Next, she said, they needed to agree where it would be held. Since students would be coming from Maryland, Virginia and D.C.

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