We, students, faculty, and staff at the CUNY Graduate Center, School of Labor and Urban Studies, and Baruch & Brooklyn Colleges, are launching an indefinite hunger strike on the steps of the Graduate Center on May 27, 2025. We have one demand: that Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and the CUNY Board of Trustees immediately divest from the zionist state and from all weapons and technology manufacturers equipping the israeli-US genocide in Palestine.

Israel is starving Gaza and CUNY is complicit. Gaza has been under total siege by Zionist forces since 2007 and has faced a complete blockade of humanitarian aid since March 2nd of this year. As israel stops all food from entering Gaza and attacks the Freedom Flotilla with drone strikes, at least 300 people in Gaza—primarily children and the elderly—have been starved to death. As we write, UN relief chief Tom Fletcher warns that 14,000 babies in Gaza are at risk of dying of starvation in the next 48 hours. A UN (IPC) report released on May 20 states that over 930,000 children in Gaza are at risk of imminent death from starvation. CUNY’s investment of millions in Israeli corporations and weapons manufacturers have provided material support to the Israeli-US genocide for 19 months and counting, as Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza in addition to targeting schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, journalists, refugee camps, and aid workers. It is in this context that students and workers at the City University of New York have begun an indefinite hunger strike.

Instead of feeding its students suffering from food insecurity or paying its workers a living wage, CUNY has chosen to invest in increasing funding for policing and surveillance on campus, including by the notoriously racist NYPD which violently arrested over 170 people protesting genocide at the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment on April 30, 2024 and over a dozen more at the Hassan Ayyad Liberated Zone at Brooklyn College on May 8, 2025. The NYPD systematically collaborates and shares intelligence with the israeli occupation forces.

While defunding CUNY, the city is investing in a massive expansion of its carceral infrastructure, including New York's own Cop City, an expanded youth prison, and a borough-based jail system that will cost at least $16 billion. This carceral infrastructure includes ICE prisons where student organizers such as Mahmoud Khalil and thousands of immigrants are subjected to state violence, mirroring the impunity of the Zionist prison system in which 11,000 Palestinians are currently held hostage.

Our hunger strike will take place in the heart of empire, on the steps of the historic Graduate Center building facing 5th Avenue across from the Empire State Building. It launched at 4pm 5/27 with a public speakout. It is accompanied by a fundraiser for Palestinians in Gaza, a local food distribution effort and a series of political education events. We have taken this action to direct attention to CUNY’s complicity in a genocide that is funded by our tuition and tax dollars. We REFUSE business as usual while the US and israel continue to bomb and starve Palestinians under the eyes of the entire world.

CUNY DIVEST NOW!