On May 5th, seven students from California State University, Long Beach, launched a hunger strike as part of an organized protest across four CSU campuses: San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Jose State. In total, twenty-five students are striking for Gaza. They join a wave of nationwide protests demanding an immediate end to the United States’ arming and facilitating a genocide in Gaza by Israel.
The seven strikers announced on the campus their commitment to refuse food until their institution divests from companies that supply weapons, military equipment, and surveillance technology, among other demands, to Israel’s military. In addition, they call on their campus administration to pressure other CSU presidents and the Board of Trustees to do the same.
“This is part of a larger student movement to ensure that California State Students’ tuition, and Universities’ investments, are not complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people,” read the statement by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at CSULB.
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Similar hunger strikes and encampments have spread to campuses in the Los Angeles area. Thirty miles north in Eagle Rock, ten Occidental College students began their hunger strike protest in April. Like the students in Long Beach, their demands included protecting students from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and providing a Sanctuary Campus for non-citizen students. The strike has drawn both support and backlash, with the protesters being accused of antisemitism, a claim organizers firmly deny.
University officials have yet to respond to a request for comment for this article. Meanwhile, students and local activists began providing water and electrolytes to the strikers, while medical students volunteered to monitor their health. “We (strikers) are in constant communication, and we have a lot of support from student organizers,” said Marcus Bode, one of the seven hunger strikers at CSU Long Beach.
As the strike enters its third day, local attention is growing, said Bode, hoping to get the nation’s attention so it applies pressure to the CSU school system to divest from Israel.
The protest comes as global outrage continues to grow over the rising death toll, and denial of food. “It is a privilege to be able to voluntarily go without food. That is not something Palestinians have the option to do. They will not survive another summer,” said Bode.
The idea of using a hunger strike as a form of protest began on April 25th, when the United Nations (UN) agency World Food Programme (WFP) reported that it had run out of food in the Gaza Strip, as Israel continues to block any humanitarian aid into the region, where over two million Palestinians live. “The call came from students from Birzeit University in the West Bank, and we were one of the first schools to answer the call because of the UN announcement,” said Bode.
Thousands of people depend on the U.N. food program for survival. The agency states that its warehouses are now empty and cannot provide for the one million people it has been feeding over the last year, half of Gaza’s population.
The UN stated that it has “more than 116,00 metric tonnes of food assistance – enough to feed a million people for up to four months – are ready and waiting to be brought into Gaza by WFP and partners as soon as borders reopen.”
The strikers want to bring awareness to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with their hunger strike, and have their university take part in divesting from its contract with Israel-related companies. Since the destruction of the ceasefire, and in the last few weeks in particular, Israel has bombed Palestinians in refugee camps, which has accelerated the crisis, claiming the lives of countless civilians and destroying whatever little infrastructure remains.
On May 4th, the United Nations and its partners issued a warning of the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. For the ninth consecutive week, no aid has entered the Gaza Strip. Twenty-five bakeries were fully closed by March 31st because wheat flour and cooking oil ran out, and that same week, food parcels distributed to families went empty.
“Israel officials have sought to shut down the existing aid distribution system run by the United Nations and its humanitarian partners,” read the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs statement.
The CSU Long Beach administration contacted the strikers a few days after launching to set up a meeting, but nothing is currently scheduled. The students at Long Beach are prepared to continue their hunger strike indefinitely until their demands are met.
An attempt to reach CSULB President Jane Close Conoley was met with silence.
This story was originally published on Abraham Márquez’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Israeli paper’s soldier whistleblower exposes reality of ‘sadistic torture camp’ Sde Teiman
‘They entered alive and left in body bags’: Palestinian hostages raped, tortured, murdered – and all exposed in Israeli press while UK media and government ignore it
…..
Sde Teiman, as anyone who was there knows, is a sadistic torture camp. Dozens of detainees entered alive and left in body bags. There are testimonies from guards, doctors, and detainees. None of that was mentioned in the [state-owned TV channel KAN 11] investigation. As if the entire hell we created there boils down to whether or not an object was inserted into a detainee’s anus. But I saw that hell.
I saw a detainee die in front of my eyes—he was sitting with other detainees, blindfolded, and at some point, we just realized he was dead…
…I saw people come into the facility with war injuries, then be starved for weeks with no medical care. I saw them urinate and defecate on themselves because they weren’t allowed to use the toilet. I still remember the smell. Many of them weren’t even militants—just Gazans arrested until investigation, who were then released home after severe abuse, once it turned out they were innocent. It’s no wonder people died there. The real wonder is that anyone survived.
The Zman Emet [programme] investigators were shocked when I told them this—but there was no trace of it in the program.
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/05/09/israeli-papers-whistleblower-exposes-reality-of-sadistic-torture-camp-sde-teiman/
Abraham Márquez
Abraham Márquez is an independent investigative journalist based in Los Angeles. His writings and commentary have appeared on TeleSurTV English and TeleSurTV Spanish, PRESS TV, RTV, Fox Sports, Al Jazeera Arabic, LA Taco, palabra, Los Angeles Public Press, Geopolitical Economy Report, and others. Follow his work at abemarquez.substack.com.
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