US campuses in uproar as Israel-Palestine conflict exposes divide

Tensions spill across universities like Columbia and Harvard as students on each side accuse the other of a kind of bloodlust

• See further coverage of Israel-Hamas war

To one side, Columbia students stood silently, wrapped in the blue and white of Israel as they gripped pictures of the murdered and abducted. Across the grass and brick divide, a slightly larger cohort of students chanted “Free, free Palestine.”

The faultline between the two ran along the claim by each that the other was pursuing a kind of bloodlust – a charge that has divided university campuses across America in the wake of the bloody Hamas attack on Israeli communities and Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza.