A Spanish university announced on Thursday its intention to suspend ties with Israeli institutions that do not express a “clear commitment to peace” as the war in Gaza escalates.
Student protests have accelerated across Western Europe in recent weeks, with participants taking a cue from demonstrations that hit campuses in the United States and demanding an end to the bloodshed in Gaza and a severing of ties with Israel. ing.
In a statement, the Council of University Presidents (CRUE) condemned the violence and expressed support for the recent protests on Spanish campuses.
Calling for an immediate end to Israel's actions in Gaza, they called for “a review of relations and, where appropriate, cooperation with Israeli universities and research centers that have not expressed a firm commitment to peace and respect for international humanitarian law.” promised to stop.
However, this diplomatically worded statement was not enough to placate students in several protest camps that have sprung up across Spain and have so far been peaceful.
“What we really want is for the government and university presidents to meet our demands and sever ties with Israel,” he said as protesters threw dozens of people into the law. Sebastian Gonzalez, 28, a political science student, told AFP at Madrid's Complutense University. Tents on Tuesday.
“If our demands are met, the camp will be disbanded. Until then, we will continue our resistance here and throughout Spain,” said Gonzalez, a spokesman for the protesters.
In Spain, the first protests began on April 29 at the University of Valencia in the east, where students set up around 20 tents and demanded “an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
This was followed by a similar tent protest at the University of Barcelona, and this week encampments spread to Madrid, the northern Basque country, eastern Alicante and southern Andalusia.
The war in Gaza began on October 7 when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli statistics. .
Israel, vowing to destroy Hamas, launched a ferocious retaliatory attack that killed about 35,000 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip's health ministry.
The violence sparked a wave of pro-Palestinian protests that rocked U.S. campuses for weeks with an intensity not seen in decades, before spreading to cities in Europe and even Australia.
(AFP)
