On Jan. 19, Israel and Hamas began the first six-week phase of the ceasefire in Gaza including a hostage release deal. The first phase is meant to entail Israeli military withdrawal and the allowance of Palestinian refugees back into Gaza alongside humanitarian aid into the strip. Hamas will also release 33 hostages in the first phase, dispersed across the six-week period, and Israel will release 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.
This ceasefire deal has brought a tentative end to Israel’s 15-month siege on Gaza which killed at least 45,000 civilians, wounded over 100,000, and destroyed 90 per cent of the housing units in Gaza. Al Jazeera reports that 1,706 Israelis were also killed throughout the period.
Negotiations for the next phases are slated to begin on the 16th day following the commencement of the second phase. While the second and third phases are anticipated to continue the release of hostages and further Gaza’s rebuild, some worry the ceasefire may not persist beyond the first phase of the deal.
In light of the ceasefire, student activists at McGill are continuing to demand the university cut ties with companies involved with funding Israel through weapons manufacturing.
Students for Palestine’s Resistance and Honour (SPHR) at McGill, alongside Engineers for Palestine at McGill, launched an email campaign demanding the removal of weapons companies complicit in the genocide in Palestine from the McGill TechFair, which will be held Jan. 29 and Jan. 30. Companies like MDA Space, Galvion, and Cisco have aided Israel in the engineering of weapons and surveillance technology used in the genocide.
“We will keep holding McGill accountable for its complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and ongoing complicity in the settler-colonial Zionist project,” a representative from SPHR at McGill wrote to The Tribune.
On Jan. 22, SPHR at McGill hosted a fundraising poster sale, donating proceeds to La Fondation Canado-Palestinienne du Québec’s Emergency Gaza program.
Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) McGill also reaffirmed its commitment to anti-Zionism following the ceasefire, emphasizing that it still aims to hold McGill accountable for its continued financial involvement with companies complicit with Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
“As a group, we want to keep trying to educate people about the ongoing history of this conflict, continue to build progressive Jewish community with anti-imperialist values, and protest the ongoing complicity our universities and governments have in the forced displacement and mass murder of the Palestinian people,” an IJV representative wrote to The Tribune.
IJV also spoke to the importance of critiquing McGill’s colonial actions. The organization noted that McGill removed a Great White Pine sapling planted by a group of Kanien’keha:ka women last November as an example, demanding McGill commit to anticolonial efforts beyond divestment.
“Our administration has spent the last 15 months bankrolling an active genocide, and that responsibility does not disappear with a ceasefire, it can only be addressed through divestment,” IJV wrote.
In a written statement to The Tribune, McGill’s Media Relations Office (MRO) explained that the university’s Board of Governors Committee on Sustainability and Social Responsibility (CSSR) has committed to assessing its investments in companies manufacturing weapons. The committee has yet to present its findings to the Board. In December, the CSSR did not recommend McGill divest from companies with ties to Israel’s siege on Gaza on the grounds that such actions did not constitute social injury. In regard to its academic ties with Israeli institutions, the MRO echoed President and Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini’s remarks from February 2023.
“McGill will not unilaterally sever its research and academic ties with Israeli institutions,” the MRO wrote. “Moreover, McGill will not interfere with the academic freedom of individual members of the university community to engage or partner with an institution simply because of where it is located. To do so would be wholly opposed to our institutional principles.”
Students from other universities in Montreal are also demanding change. A representative of SPHR Concordia stated that students will continue to push for divestment regardless of the ceasefire.
“The demands to cut ties with five weapons companies partnerships (Lockheed Martin, CAE, Pratt & Whitney, Bombardier, Airbus) in addition to completely divesting from blood money remains,” the SPHR Concordia representative wrote to The Tribune. “Concordia’s responsibility is to not fund this occupation and listen to its students who clearly haven’t given up on divestment.”
