University of Milan suspends ties with Israeli institutions over Gaza war

Italy's University of Milan announced on Wednesday it would suspend relations with an Israeli institution following ongoing student demands for a boycott of academic exchanges and research with Israeli institutions. 

The suspension came after the university's rector Marina Brambilla met with a delegation of Palestinian students who had protested the continued ties with Israeli universities, according to the Italian news agency ANSA.

The university administration said the decision was linked to the worsening conditions in the region, citing the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, ANSA said.

The New Arab has contacted the University of Milan for comment.

Earlier this year, it had ended its agreement with Ariel University, another Israeli institution. 

The decision by the university to suspend relations with Israeli institutions comes after intense pressure from student activists.

Inspired by similar actions in the US and elsewhere, students from the University of Milan set up an encampment on campus earlier this year to protest Israel's ongoing war in Gaza and the university's links with Israeli educational institutions.  

Last month, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement shared an open letter from Palestinian academic unions, representing nearly 10,000 faculty and staff across 18 Palestinian universities urging academic institutions across the world to sever ties with Israeli universities, accusing them of complicity in Israel's actions. 

"We welcome the many calls from universities around the world for an immediate ceasefire and the steps toward reviewing, suspending and severing collaboration agreements with Israeli universities and research centres that are complicit in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide," the letter issued by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) and the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology (PalAST) read.  

"These are necessary steps to end institutional ties with Israeli academic institutions that have played a key role in Israel’s 76-year settler-colonial apartheid rule oppressing all Palestinians and, now, in what the International Court of Justice has ruled is plausibly genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip."

It underscored Israel's "genocide" and accused it of "scholasticide"—the systematic destruction of Palestinian academic institutions.  

It noted that universities, laboratories, archives, and libraries in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. 

In November, the heads of 15 Palestinian universities called for Israeli universities to face "international isolation" for their role in supporting Israel's human rights violations.

In addition, Palestinian university leaders in Gaza called on the global academic community to stand against Israel's "scholasticide" and collaborate directly with Palestinian academics to rebuild the academic institutions devastated by the assault. 

According to local health authorities, Israel has killed more than 42,700 people, predominantly women and children, with nearly 100,300 others injured, since the onset of the brutal war on the Palestinian enclave.