Entitled Pro-Palestinian campaigners beg for shopping list of items including food and blankets in bid to continue protest
Pro-Palestinian campaigners at UK universities are begging for food and blankets in order to continue.
British students have requested “food for community dinners” as well as mats, tents, blankets and “sources of light”.
The demonstrators mirror a Columbia University Student in New York who earlier this week demanded that the Ivy League school provide food for protesting students or they could “die of dehydration and starvation” if not given supplies.
Students at UK universities have set up temporary encampments to protest against the war in Gaza, with the most recent tent sites established at University College London (UCL) on Thursday night.
Around a dozen orange and green tents have been pitched outside the main building in Bloomsbury.
Protesters called for the public to donate “nutritious and healthy” to their group to support their cause.
Junayd Islam, 20, a third-year student, said: “We are open for donations. If people can donate sanitary things, torches and food – anything healthy and nutritious. Some people have already given us food and other things.”
Calling UCL a “disgrace” for its stance on the ongoing war, the protesters are demanding that the establishment pledge to rebuild universities in Gaza.
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They are also demanding that the University divest money in companies that are supplying arms to Israel.
A spokesperson for the group said: “In the last seven months, we have witnessed unimaginable horrors taking place in Gaza, and we as students cannot stand by and watch UCL continue to profit from this genocide.”
Tent protests have also been set up at Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield, Warwick, Swansea, Bristol and Goldsmiths, University of London.
On Instagram, a pro-Palestinian group called Newcastle Apartheid posted a request for urgent help.
Headed with the caption “urgent callout list please circulate”, the group said it needed “blankets, food for community dinner (please dm so we know how much to expect), sources of light, mats, tents.”
One of the encampments at a piazza at Warwick University has been in place for almost a week, with student campaign groups claiming Warwick is “continu[ing] to reject our demands to cut ties with genocide”, and professing to “rise up in unison with fellow students all over the world, from Columbia, NYC, to Paris, to Sydney”.
While at Goldsmiths, University of London, students established camps overnight at the university library and stuck banners to windows stating “from the river to the sea” and “shut it down for Palestine”, claiming they would not leave “until senior management come to face us”.
A UCL spokesperson said: “Like many other universities, a small protest with tents is taking place in our quad. We are speaking with the organisers and carefully monitoring the situation.
“We will manage this in line with our legal duty and commitment to promote freedom of speech within the law whilst ensuring the safety and security of our community and enabling our education and research activity to continue.”