Undercover Israeli agents shoot Birzeit University student, arrest five in broad daylight

On Monday afternoon, January 10, 2022, several armed Israeli undercover agents infiltrated Birzeit University’s Eastern Gate, shot one student in the leg, and detained and arrested him along with four other students, all of whom were then brutally forced into an unmarked van and taken to an unknown location.

Two of the arrested students, Abd Al-Hafiz Sharbati and Walid Herazana, were released later that night, but Ismail Barghouti, Mohammad Khatib and Kassam Nakhla are still detained by the Israeli occupation’s forces.

The brazen Israeli attacks on Birzeit University and its students, which are carried out with alarming frequency, are only part of an ongoing policy by the occupation’s forces of targeting university campuses and undermining the safety of their communities. In 2018, an undercover Israeli army unit stormed Birzeit University’s campus during classroom hours and arrested political science graduate and former head of the Student Council Omar Kiswani. 

In 2021, the Right to Education Campaign has documented the arrests of more than 55 students. There are 66 students currently held in Israeli prisons and detention centers; some have been in detention since 2001. Most of the students have been imprisoned for exercising their right to speak freely and organize student activities inside the university’s campus.

Birzeit University, with its  faculty, staff and students to stand as one to denounce the military raids on campus and voice their commitment to the right to education and to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence. Birzeit University will always remain an open space for academic exchange and a safe place for students to exercise their freedom of expression. The university calls for strengthening the global movement to put an end to the repressive measures against Palestinian students and assert, and protect, their right to education.