More Than 30 Harvard Students Hunger Strike for 12 Hours in Solidarity With Brown Protesters

More than 30 pro-Palestinian Harvard students participated in a 12-hour hunger strike Friday in solidarity with 17 students at Brown University who refused to eat for eight days to pressure the Brown Corporation to divest from Israel.

Nineteen students at Brown began the strike — which was originally indefinite — on Feb. 2, ahead of the Brown Corporation’s planned meetings beginning Feb. 8.

The students intended to strike until the Brown Corporation considered a resolution to divest from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine,” but they ended the strike after Brown University president Christina H. Paxson denied their request, citing “now-obsolete demands,” per the Brown Daily Herald.

The 17 students ended their strike at 5 p.m. on Feb. 9, along with the Harvard demonstrators and more than 200 other Brown students who fasted for 32 hours in solidarity.

“To send solidarity to @browndivestcoalition for their incredible hunger strike, 30+ Harvard students committed to a day-long hunger strike to prove to university corporations that we will not back down,” the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Coalition wrote in an Instagram post on Friday.

Violet T.M. Barron ’26, an organizer with Harvard Jews for Palestine and a Crimson Editorial editor, said in a video posted on the PSC’s Instagram that she participated in the hunger strike because “until our universities divest, they are complicit and we are complicit — because we pay tuition — in the genocide in Gaza.”

Syd D. Sanders ’24 also said in an interview posted by the PSC that he chose to participate “because we will not rest until we divest.”

Harvard was among six universities — including Yale, UChicago, and Pomona College — whose students participated in solidarity strikes with the strikers at Brown.

—Staff writer Michelle N. Amponsah can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @mnamponsah.

—Staff writer Azusa M. Lippit can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @azusalippit or on Threads @azusalippit.