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Gaza City, May 31 (RHC)-- The Palestinian student movement in the besieged Gaza Strip has called on students to rise up against Israel to force the occupying entity to halt its war on the Palestinian enclave. 

In a statement, the movement said that it is high time for a revolutionary escalation of global student “intifada” for Palestine against Israel’s war machine, using the Arabic word which means “shaking up.”

“We write this call from our student movement in the Gaza Strip, from the heart of occupied Palestine, from under the brutal Zionist bombing, explosions, and the clutches of the monstrous nightmare of death that lurks around us in every corner, house, and street,” the movement said.

The first Palestinian intifada erupted in Gaza on December 9, 1987 and lasted six years. It was a series of Palestinian protests in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip. The protests were against the second wave of Israeli occupation that had begun 20 years earlier, in 1967.

“We raise it from prison cells, from beneath the destruction, and from inside the rubble, to send it to our fellow students, our comrades, brothers and sisters, in all the universities, schools and institutes of the world everywhere, and we address the global student movement that was launched in order to stop the genocidal war that is being engineered and financed by the governments of the United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and others,” the student movement said.

It also hailed as “courageous” the student protest encampments that swept universities and colleges in the US and a number of European countries, saying the protests have served as an integral part of “our struggle” that shows the conscience of students and all those who yearn for justice and freedom.

Protesting students demand, among others, a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to US military assistance to the apartheid regime, and university divestment from companies profiting from the brutal aggression.

“Today, we call on you, from the midst of massacres and siege, to a new revolutionary phase of comprehensive escalation, and to raise the pace of your struggle and your honorable stances, quantitatively and qualitatively, against the institutions, corporations, and governments that participate in the slaughter of our children, our students, and our people in Rafah, Jabalia, Khan Younis, and the entire Gaza Strip,” the Gaza’s student movement further called on students worldwide.

The movement also stressed that school students are a great asset to boost resistance against the occupying regime.

“Today we turn to high school students all over the world to participate widely in the struggles and activities of the university student movement, organizing demonstrations, sit-ins, and vigils, writing petitions and letters, and organizing educational days about the Palestinian struggle and the goals of the Palestinian people for liberation and return to their homeland,” it noted.

Israel has also been enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory into a trickle  The regime has killed over 36,200 people, most of them women, children, and adolescents in Gaza since that October day.