At the end of last week, Palestinians gathered in the Gaza Strip to protest the failing economy and the Hamas government’s onerous taxes, enacted as other sources of funding have dried up. Bassam Tawil comments:

The unprecedented protests . . . apparently caught the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip by surprise. . . . That may explain Hamas’s response to the mass protests, which by all accounts was . . . extremely violent. Within 24 hours, Hamas militiamen and security officers had opened fire on hundreds of Palestinian protesters chanting: “We are hungry!” and “Save Gaza from starvation!” . . . It is also worth noting that many of the Palestinians who were brutally beaten by Hamas were children. . . .

Meanwhile, . . . instead of calling out Hamas for its crimes against its own people, the hypocrites at the UN, the international media, and other international forums continue to point an accusatory finger at Israel for simply defending itself against rockets and missiles that are fired toward Israeli civilian centers on an almost daily basis.

Recently, in a grotesque allegation, UN human-rights “experts” claimed that Israel may have committed war crimes by shooting at Palestinian demonstrators who tried to breach the Gaza-Israel border fence and infiltrate into Israel. The demonstrators who were shot were mostly Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, as both organizations have openly admitted. In other words, Israel is being accused of war crimes for defending its border against terrorists attempting to infiltrate it in order to murder or kidnap Israelis. . . .

It is the leaders of Hamas, and only Hamas, who are violating international law in and around Gaza. They are committing war crimes against Israelis, and they are committing crimes against their own people. It is time for the human-rights “experts” and foreign media to wake up to facts.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.