‘Hunger is our weapon against injustice’: Stanford students and faculty launch hunger strike for Gaza
Sid Shniad
‘Hunger is our weapon against injustice’: Stanford students and faculty launch hunger strike for Gaza
Gaza encampment at Stanford University, on April 26th, 2024. (Photo: Stanford SJP)Hunger is our weapon against injustice
Yesterday we began our hunger strike. In every slowed minute we remember the children of Gaza, now surviving on boiled weeds and muddy water. It is now day 584 of the genocide in Gaza, and more than 60,000 Palestinians have been murdered by the Zionist entity. Just last week, at least four separate massacres have occurred in Gaza, leaving hundreds murdered and wounded. Two months have passed since Israel’s total siege of the strip on March 2nd, completely blocking all food and aid from entering Gaza. Israel has completely weaponized food; aid convoys remain blocked, grain silos stand empty and parents barter wedding rings for flour that never arrives. A generation is being starved in full view of the world.
If ever there was a moment that demands civil disobedience, it is the hour of genocide. We walk in the footsteps of earlier Stanford students who occupied this same plaza to end the Vietnam War and later to force partial divestment from apartheid South Africa. Now that baton passes to us. On October 20, 2023, Stanford students built the nation’s first Gaza‑solidarity encampment. For 120 days, hundreds of Stanford community members sustained this encampment to demand an end to the genocide in Palestine and to press Stanford University to act — by providing direct support for Palestinian students and, ultimately, by divesting its endowment from defense contractors and surveillance firms complicit in that genocide. Our university’s leadership and administration ignored the calls from the overwhelming majority of the Stanford student body to take action and only reacted with escalated repression.
Just this past quarter, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen indicted twelve of our classmates in an attempt to silence protest through prosecution. This isn’t random, it comes in tandem with federal crackdown on nationwide pro-Palestinian speech across campuses. Federal agents have abducted and threatened to deport noncitizen students and scholars — Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri, Momodou Taal and Ranjani Srinivasan — simply for standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We know that our federal and educational institutions aim to silence and crush the movement for Palestine through attacks, extreme punishment and repression, even though the movement has grown and built power beyond their control.
We call on Stanford to publicly urge District Attorney Jeff Rosen to drop the unjust, excessive charges against our peers. We will continue to defend and support the Stanford 12 and students nationwide who stand with Palestine and oppose the genocide in Gaza.
In response to the encampment, Provost Jenny Martinez announced a clutch of policies — Orwellianly named “Freedom of Expression” rules — that require protesters to secure permits days in advance, forbid overnight sit-ins and demand identification from anyone who dares pass out a leaflet. Just as Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked a McCarthy‑era law to abduct and deport students, Stanford has resurrected its 1968 Policy on Campus Disruptions — once wielded against anti‑Vietnam War and civil‑rights protesters — to suppress student movements today. The intent is not peace but intimidation, a reminder that the price of dissent is surveillance and possible disciplinary actions. Decades from now, the university may upload glossy timelines celebrating the Gaza encampment’s moral courage just as today it celebrates the anti‑Vietnam and anti‑apartheid struggles fought on these same lawns. In the present, however, the message is plain: ‘we endorse every protest except the one unfolding at this very moment.’
Why a hunger strike? Because every register of dissent — petitions, resolutions and divestment plans — have been stamped “neutral” and shelved. When the university threads bureaucratic wire around our throats, we reach for the one instrument beyond its jurisdiction. The body speaks in a prose no committee can redline: it quivers, thins, goes ice‑cold after sunset. Each tremor mirrors, on a minute scale, the famine tightening its fist around Gaza — funded in part by our tuition and fattened by Stanford’s endowment.
Some of us carry American passports; others exist on visas whose codes can be erased by keystroke. The Trump administration threatens to terminate the status of any international student deemed a “foreign‑policy threat”— a phrase elastic enough to encompass a slogan, retweet or the mere act of standing within earshot of dissent. To protest under such restrictions is to wager one’s education and one’s right to exist. Several international members of the Stanford community have joined the fast unnamed. In a country where speaking truth about genocide is branded as sedition, even the right to starve — and to grieve — becomes a privilege conferred by birthplace.
Still, hunger clarifies. Between the pulses of dizziness, we see plainly: an institution cannot claim moral neutrality while a captive population starves. It cannot champion academic freedom while collaborating with prosecutors who criminalize dissent. It cannot pledge inclusion while profiting from firms that supply white phosphorus or refine digital dragnets for an occupying army.
We do not know how long our bodies will hold. We know only that this fast etches a record of choice. What will Stanford do as mass atrocity knocks against its sandstone arches: will it marshal the courage to confront injustice with unequivocal action, or cling to a veneer of neutrality until that timidity congeals into complicity?
Students bent over problem sets, faculty refining lectures, staff who keep the lights burning: join our fast for an hour, a day or the duration; gather on the lawn for nightly prayers; organize, agitate and speak until repression tires of chasing every syllable.
Justice for Palestine, migrant rights and academic freedom on this campus are the same fight. Come claim them with us — bringing nothing but resolve if you wish, hunger if you can, but unmistakable presence.
Stanford Hunger Strikers for Justice in Palestine
Stanford Hunger Strikers for Justice in Palestine Demands
Hunger Strike for Justice in Palestine & People’s University
We, members of the Stanford University community, compelled by moral conscience, announce today our decision to embark upon a hunger strike to protest the Israeli government’s ongoing siege on Gaza. Since March 2, 2025, Israel has systematically blocked food, fuel, medicine, and other essential humanitarian supplies from reaching Gaza, precipitating widespread malnutrition, suffering, and death—especially among children. We view these deliberate actions as evidence of Israel’s intent to use starvation as a weapon, aiming to continue through deprivation what it has failed to achieve militarily over the past eighteen months. This siege is nothing short of an act of genocide, a calculated effort to annihilate an entire people through weaponized starvation.
Our hunger strike stands in the lineage of national liberation movements that wields bodily abstention as a weapon of resistance. From the coordinated fasts of Palestinian political prisoners—most recently in 2012, 2017, 2021, and 2023—to the 1981 H‑Block strike in Northern Ireland, hunger has exposed crimes of empires by rendering vulnerability unignorable. By refusing sustenance, we convert our own physiology into evidence of Gaza’s suffocation and of the complicity that sustains it. At this moment, students across California and throughout the United States are engaging in hunger strikes to bring attention to the starvation inflicted upon Gaza’s population by the Israeli government’s blockade. In solidarity with their protest, we are launching our own campus action and call upon Stanford University to demonstrate urgent moral leadership by meeting the following demands:
- We demand full transparency and principled stewardship of Stanford’s endowment. Building on the university’s own precedent of divestment from apartheid South Africa, Stanford must publish a comprehensive inventory of all direct and indirect holdings and immediately divest from companies that profit from Israel’s siege of Gaza. The university’s endowment cannot underwrite the machinery of genocide; at minimum, its portfolio must exclude firms that enable war crimes, mass surveillance, or systemic repression—among them Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Palantir Technologies.
- We demand that President Levin publicly call on Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen to drop the unjust felony charges brought against the twelve Stanford students and alumni arrested during a June 2024 protest. Student sit‑ins are part of Stanford’s activist tradition, from the 1969 occupation of the Applied Electronics Laboratory—which hastened the end of classified military research on campus—to the 1977 demonstration in Old Union that led to the Board of Trustees’ adoption of an ethical investment policy. By inflating and obscuring its alleged repair costs while styling itself as the principal “victim,” the university has enabled DA Rosen’s prosecutorial overreach that chills political expression and betrays its professed commitment to free expression.
- We demand that President Levin sign the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ open letter denouncing federal assaults on academic freedom and pledge Stanford’s noncompliance with any unlawful mandate — whether from the Trump administration or Congress—that requires the disclosure of student records, disciplinary files, or identifying information on participants in Palestine‑solidarity actions in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
- We demand that Stanford University rescind its post‑encampment speech restrictions—specifically the advance‑registration requirement outside White Plaza, the sweeping Major Events Protocol, the selective overnight‑camping ban, and compulsory ID or face‑covering checks. Together these rules operate as prior restraints and impose content‑based burdens on expression safeguarded by California’s Leonard Law. They flunk the Supreme Court’s narrow “time, place, and manner” test, chill lawful dissent, and expose students to punitive discipline merely for supporting Palestine and calling for an end to the genocide. Their repeal is essential to restore full First Amendment protections and uphold Stanford’s professed commitment to open inquiry.
This university administration faces a stark choice: how will Stanford be remembered? Will you stand on the right side of history by unequivocally opposing injustice, or will you be forever marked by complicity in genocide abroad and the embrace of authoritarianism at home? Will Stanford truly champion their so-called mission of academic freedom, or will you be remembered as a collaborator with forces undermining students standing against a genocide and for the Palestinian people? At this critical juncture, silence or neutrality amounts to cowardice and complicity, perpetuating the profound suffering inflicted upon the Palestinian people in Gaza while eroding justice and accountability here in the United States. Our hunger strike has become necessary precisely because our prior appeals for ethical action, divestment, and the protection of free speech have been repeatedly ignored or outright rejected. In the face of gross injustice, the only path forward is action guided by principle—find the courage to take it.
We would like to invite President Levin, Provost Martinez, and all members of the Stanford administration to join us at the table in good faith to discuss these urgent demands. Our hunger strike is not an act of defiance for its own sake, but a desperate appeal for moral clarity and institutional accountability. This past year, thousands of Stanford community members have organized and called for Stanford to take action against the bloody genocide in Gaza. We are willing to endure sacrifices to make our voices heard, but we would far rather see Stanford act and uphold its mission, values, and justice that it consistently boasts. Let this be a moment of dialogue, not further silence; of action, not evasion. We welcome you to meet with us, listen, and most importantly, take the steps necessary to align Stanford with the principles of humanity, academic freedom, and justice for Palestine.
Never forget your roots, Stanford. As founding visionaries, Leland and Jane Stanford declared, this university was built “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization. ” Grow the courage and live up to that.
Where will you stand?
Stanford Hunger Strikers for Justice in Palestine
An urgent ask from Stanford SJP is to sign and circulate the Drop the Charges petition which demands that the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office drop the felony charges brought against twelve Stanford University students and alumni following their participation in a protest advocating for Stanford’s divestment from corporations implicated in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
To keep up with developments in the hunger strike, follow @StanfordSJP on Instagram and Twitter.