Anti-Israel activists at Barnard College, affiliated with Columbia University, stormed a campus building on Wednesday in protest of the expulsion of two students who had disrupted an Israeli professor’s class earlier this semester.

Footage posted to social media showed dozens of activists, many covering their faces with keffiyehs, chanting and beating a drum in a hallway adorned with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flags.

The protesters shouted, among other things, “Every fascist state must fall” and, “Palestine is Arab.”

Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition spearheaded by Columbia’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, issued a statement demanding that Barnard College reverse the expulsions of the two students, grant amnesty to all students disciplined for anti-Israel demonstrations, hold a meeting with the activists, and dismantle the college’s disciplinary system.

“When two students are expelled, hundreds more rise up,” the statement read. “The repression cannot stand! We will not rest until full amnesty.”

The incident the demonstrators were protesting took place on the first day of the semester, and quickly gained widespread attention on social media.

Videos circulating online showed four individuals wearing keffiyehs as masks entering a Columbia University course titled “History of Modern Israel” and interrupting the lecture.

The university suspended one of the protesters enrolled at Columbia and referred two others to an “affiliated institution” for disciplinary action.

The disruptions last month were the latest in a series of incidents at Columbia related to the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. Columbia has come under increased scrutiny over the rise in antisemitism on campus since the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Pro-Palestinian Arab demonstrators at Columbia set up dozens of tents in April of last year, demanding that the university divest from its Israeli assets. The university administration called in police to dismantle the encampments.

On April 30, at the request of university leaders, hundreds of officers with the New York Police Department stormed onto campus, gaining access to the building through a second-story window and making dozens of arrests of the pro-Palestinian Arab demonstrators who had taken over Hamilton Hall.

Before the anti-Israel encampment on campus, the Chabad rabbi of Columbia University and a group of Jewish students were forced to leave the university campus for their own safety during a pro-Hamas demonstration.

In August, three Columbia University deans resigned from the school, after it was discovered that they had exchanged “very troubling” texts that “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes”.

Later that month, Columbia University President Dr. Minouche Shafik announced her resignation, following months of criticism for her handling of campus antisemitism.

In September, on the first day of classes, dozens of masked anti-Israel protesters gathered at the entrance to Columbia and at Barnard College.