Two years on, the encampment endures. What began in May 2024 as a direct response to the genocide in Ghazzah, the SOAS Liberated Zone has survived repeated attempts by university management, aided by police and bailiffs, to dismantle it, relocating twice before settling in its current form, a narrow strip of grass sandwiched between a local church and a cluster of food stalls on the fringes of university land.
At its peak, the camp drew hundreds of participants and hosted prominent national and international speakers, rapidly establishing itself as one of the most visible epicentres of student resistance in the country, as well as a fierce ideological battleground between institutional power and the student body. This weekend, to mark its second anniversary, the encampment hosted a full day of events – an exhibition, a vigil for the more than 21,000 Palestinian children killed, and a screening of The Present, a short film on life under occupation. It also hosted a series of guest speakers including orthopaedic surgeon and author Dr. Ang Swee, Holocaust survivor and activist Stephen Kapos, and cardiologist Dr. Habib, who recently returned from Ghazzah. Defiant and unsilenced, the camp remains a space that refuses to let Ghazzah’s dead be forgotten.
The Spark
There is a patch of grass in Bloomsbury. You may have walked past it without noticing, a small quadrangle surrounded by buildings on three sides, the kind of forgettable institutional lawn that universities accumulate like furniture. On any given day it might be empty, or home to a few pigeons, or streaked with the long shadow of Senate House. It is, by any objective measure, unremarkable.
Unless you know what it has held.
Because on the morning of May 6th, 2024, students from the SOAS Palestine Society arrived and planted tents on that lawn and called it a Liberated Zone. They strung rope barriers, laid wooden pallets, built an outdoor kitchen from salvaged materials, and put up a whiteboard listing seven demands. They hung Palestinian flags and wrote names of the dead on a cloth of pure white.
Two years later, the tents have moved to a different location – outside the formal campus boundary where the court orders can’t reach quite as easily. Smaller than before. Fewer people. But the flags are up, and the demands are on the board, and every day that it exists is a day that somebody decided not to go back to sleep.
The Wave
The encampments came to the UK a few weeks after they sprang up in the US, where Columbia University established the first student camp. Within days more than a hundred student held spaces had established themselves across the country. Then the energy jumped across the water.
By early May 2024, students had established solidarity encampments at more than twenty-five UK universities. The Warwick camp went up first, then the others in rapid succession, each one a cluster of tents on a quad or a green or a courtyard, each one flying the same flags and making similar demands of their universities: disclose your investments, divest from companies supplying the Israeli military, cut the academic partnerships, drop the disciplinary proceedings against students already punished for speaking up, and publicly denounce the genocide in Ghazzah.
The SOAS Liberated Zone came to life on May 6th, 2024. Students occupied the small patch of grass between Senate House and the Brunei Gallery. Within weeks it was drawing a hundred people to rallies, fifty overnight campers, a stream of daytime visitors. Jeremy Corbyn came by. Word went around the movement that this camp, in this building-hemmed courtyard in London WC1, was something different. More committed. More dug in.
The students at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) had particular cause for their fury. They discovered their university was holding a £10 million revolving credit facility with Barclays, an institution with documented arms-financing activities. They found out that it held investments in companies producing white phosphorus – the incendiary weapon that Human Rights Watch had confirmed the IDF was using in populated areas – and that it maintained a partnership with the University of Haifa. One student expressed it simply: once you know those things, you have exactly two choices – silence or something else.
They chose something else.
The Commune
The term “Liberated Zone” is not accidental. It carries history in its bones. It points backward to a tradition of radical politics that reaches its highest expression in Paris, in the spring of 1871, in the 72 days of the Commune.
The Communards were workers, mostly printers, mechanics, seamstresses, petty tradespeople, who refused to accept the French government’s capitulation to Prussia, refused to hand over their cannons, refused to simply absorb the humiliation and go home. They took over the city of Paris and ran it themselves for two months and ten days. They cancelled rent. They opened schools. They made decisions by democratic assembly. They created, in the space of resistance, a different kind of community – one governed by solidarity rather than hierarchy, one that took the suffering of ordinary people as its first political fact. The Commune has become a reference point in the history of what it means to hold space against power.
The students at SOAS and the dozens of other UK encampments were making a version of the same gesture. The language of liberated zone – not protest camp, not sit-in – was chosen with care. These were not simply places to shout. They were places to constitute something – a community of a different kind, governed by the premise that the deaths of people 2,000 miles away were real, immediate, and binding. They built kitchens and libraries and classrooms. They held teach-outs and broke bread.
And like the Commune, they were met with the full institutional machinery of a state that found their very existence politically threatening.
The Crackdown
LSE fell first, in June 2024, the first British university to move through the courts to clear its campus. Students at the Marshall Building had been there more than thirty days when the Central London County Court ruled in the university’s favour and issued an interim possession order. The eviction notice gave them twenty-four hours. As enforcement staff moved in, students chanted the only thing there was to chant – 40,000 people dead, you’re evicting us instead.
Other universities followed. The legal strategy was identical at each institution – frame the encampment as a safety and order issue, invoke property rights, send in the bailiffs.
What Was Proven
The students who slept in those tents were not doing so in an evidential vacuum. They were responding to a mounting, authoritative, legally precise body of documentation.
Amnesty International, in December 2024, published a 296-page report titled You Feel Like You Are Subhuman, drawing on 212 interviews, satellite imagery, authenticated video footage and statements by senior Israeli officials. The conclusion, stated plainly by Secretary General Agnès Callamard, was that Israel is committing genocide in Ghazzah. The report documented intentional attacks on civilians, systematic destruction of food, water, and medical infrastructure, mass forced displacement, torture, and obstruction of humanitarian aid.
In July 2025, B’Tselem, Israel’s oldest and most respected human rights organisation, published their report, Our Genocide. Its conclusion was unequivocal – Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian life and society in the Ghazzah Strip.
In September 2025, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry – two years of investigation, found that Israel is actively committing genocide, guilty of four of the five acts specified in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The students on the grass in Bloomsbury, and in Bristol and Edinburgh and Leeds and Newcastle, were responding to a documented, legally analysed, internationally confirmed atrocity. They were not misinformed. They were not naive. They had done the reading.
The Names
There is a cloth attached to a tent at the SOAS Liberated Zone. On it, in red, is written “Rafaat al-Areer”.
Refaat Alareer was forty-four years old. He was a professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Ghazzah. He taught world literature and creative writing and ran writing workshops for young Ghazzahans so that the stories behind the headlines would not disappear with the people who lived them. On December 6th, 2023, an Israeli airstrike killed him along with his brother, his sister, and four of his nephews and nieces.
Hind Rajab was five years old. She dreamed, her mother said, of becoming a doctor. On January 29th, 2024, she was in a car with her uncle, his wife, and their four children, fleeing fighting in the neighbourhood of Tel al-Hawa in northern Ghazzah. The car came under Israeli fire. Hind’s fifteen-year-old cousin survived long enough to call the Palestine Red Crescent Society for help. Then there was a burst of gunfire. The line went dead.
When dispatchers called back, Hind answered. She was bleeding from her mouth and surrounded by dead bodies. She asked them to come. “Come take me. I’m so scared” the five-year-old pleaded. Paramedics set out to reach her, but their ambulance was destroyed by an Israeli tank shell. It took twelve days for rescuers to finally reach the car. Hind was dead. The car had been struck by over 300 bullets.
Dr Hussam Abu Safia ran Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Ghazzah. He stayed at his post after his son was killed. After his hospital was overrun by Israeli forces, he was taken to Ketziot prison. UN experts later confirmed he had been subjected to severe torture.
Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of Al-Shifa Hospital, was detained in March 2024 during an Israeli raid on the hospital. He was held for seven months without charge. When he was released, he described being beaten with rifle butts, attacked by military dogs, and denied food, water, and basic hygiene.
Nurse Khader Abu Nada was detained at a checkpoint while evacuating with his family from northern Ghazzah in November 2023. He was in civilian clothes. He was taken to the Sde Teiman facility. He described being suspended from a chain attached to his handcuffs, being electroshocked, having broken ribs from beatings, and being given what he believed was a psychoactive drug before interrogations. Human Rights Watch documented his case alongside those of seven other healthcare workers as part of a pattern of systematic abuse. None of the eight were charged with any offence.
The Sacred Ground
There is something that happens to a place when it becomes a site of witness. It is the accumulated weight of what people have brought there, what they have carried and set down and refused to take back.
The encampments hold that quality. Look at the sites clearly and you see what they were – patches of grass, patches of university quadrangle – where a small number of young people in a country 2,000 miles from Ghazzah decided to stop pretending that distance was the same as innocence. They came and they slept on the ground, and they cooked food, and they educated each other, and they held the names of the dead in the only way available to them – by refusing to leave, by making the names visible, by insisting that the universities look at the horrors they were funding.
The ghost of Hind Rajab is in those tents – the ghost of a child who clutched a phone in the back of a bullet-riddled car and asked, in a voice growing fainter, for someone to come and take her. She is there in the cloth and the red words and the Palestinian flags that, when the wind drops, hang like exhausted souls. She is not there because the students made her present. She is there because she was not allowed to become absent, because a brave few refused to let her slide into the category of regrettable collateral – unnamed, ungoverned, unmourned.
That is what sacred ground is. It is a place where people have refused to let certain truths be forgotten. Churches, temples, and mosques are sacred because of centuries of prayer, of grief, of hope carried through their doors and left on their stones. The SOAS Liberated Zone is sacred because of two years of people choosing – every day, in the rain, in the face of court orders and bailiffs and disciplinary proceedings and institutional indifference – to be present to something unbearable rather than look away.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
