Students at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University, took over a school building and prevented students from attending their classes on the same day the two murdered child hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, were laid to rest in Israel.
Video footage shows the protesters banging drums and chanting the genocidal anti-Israel slogan “from the river to the sea.”
Protestors @BarnardCollege have flooded the main building, chanting and drumming while trying to block public safety officers with their keffiyehs. The building is locked down and students cannot get to classes.
And yes, this is inside an academic building during class time. pic.twitter.com/xAJv2pIPJq
— Elisha (Lishi) Baker (@LishiBaker) February 26, 2025
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told The Daily Wire that the campus administrators need to step up, or the Trump administration will.
“Anti-Semitism in any form is wrong, full stop,” said Ernst. “Campus administrators need to stop sitting on their hands and actually follow the law, or the Trump administration will hold them accountable. Jewish students should not be forced to risk their personal safety to pursue an education.”
Barnard student Shoshana Aufzien told The Daily Wire she was prevented from attending class because her professor and many classmates were stuck outside of the building due to the disruption. Aufzien later posted a screenshot of an email from her professor asking her if she was okay and explaining that class was canceled because they were not allowed in.
“By the time I arrived I and several other students were not able to get into the building (a very large gentleman instructed us otherwise),” the professor wrote. “We stood outside waiting to see if the situation would change. Soon, the students who couldn’t get inside came outside. When it looked like no one was being allowed in, I dismissed ‘class.’”
This is the email I just got from my professor: https://t.co/f2bfSQTkUL pic.twitter.com/T3faHbjwYd
— Shoshana Aufzien????️ (@shoshanaaufzien) February 26, 2025
Columbia student Elisha Baker shared a video showing another student being prevented from attending his class in the building by campus police, who told him he has to “wait until this is over.”
????@jonny_led has class in the @BarnardCollege building that protestors now occupy. But Public Safety blocked him from entering, saying: “you have to wait until this is over.”
The disruption of academics couldn’t be more clear cut. pic.twitter.com/gb89WaVLCR
— Elisha (Lishi) Baker (@LishiBaker) February 26, 2025
The protesters handed out a list of demands, which included reversing the expulsion of two students who were disciplined for disrupting an Israeli history class at Columbia in January. The masked protesters delivered a speech during the class, advocating for a world where Israel does not exist.
“Israel is backed by the world’s most violent imperial forces, and they attempt to erase the truth from our collective consciousness to make this occupation seem moral and okay, to make it seem like a world without Israel can’t exist, but we know it can and has,” the protesters say in a video posted to Instagram.
Both of the expelled students were reportedly second-semester seniors.
Columbia/Barnard Hillel Exec Director Brian S. Cohen praised the students’ expulsion in a statement.
“When students have their right to get an education trampled on by masked protesters who burst into their classroom, those protesters need to be held accountable,” Cohen said. “We applaud Barnard College for taking decisive action, and hope Columbia follows suit with the other perpetrators who have infringed on student rights in the past year — from the encampments to the takeover of Hamilton Hall.”
Other demands include “amnesty” for all students who have been disciplined for their anti-Israel “action or thought,” a public meeting with school officials, and an “abolition of the corrupt Barnard disciplinary process and complete transparency for current, past, and future disciplinary proceedings.”
Here's a clearer image of their handout: pic.twitter.com/LPug3UQsHD
— Shoshana Aufzien????️ (@shoshanaaufzien) February 26, 2025
The flyer concludes with the students declaring there will be “disruption until divestment,” “resistance until return,” and “agitation until amnesty.”
The students said they will not stop until their demands are met.
Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s International Spokesperson to the United Nations and alumnus of Columbia Journalism School, said the protest happening on the same day members of the Bibas family were buried is disturbing.
“Today, Israel came to a standstill to bury Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir — the beautiful Bibas family brutally murdered by Hamas,” Harounoff told The Daily Wire. “To see Barnard students and faculty interrupt classes and once again call to ‘globalize the intifada’ on that very same day, while preventing students from going to class, is grotesque and deeply disturbing.”
Yarden Bibas delivered a heartbreaking eulogy for his wife, Shiri, and their sons on Wednesday after their bodies were returned from Hamas terrorists and officially identified.
“Shiri, this is the closest I’ve been to you since October 7th, and I can’t kiss or hug you, and it’s breaking me,” Yarden said, fighting back tears.
Yarden, who was freed in the first phase of the hostage and ceasefire agreement earlier this month, asked for forgiveness for what happened to the family on October 7. Shiri, 32, was taken hostage by Hamas and killed while in captivity along with the boys, who were four years old and eight months old when abducted by the terrorists.
According to the Israeli Defense Forces, terrorists killed the Bibas brothers with their bare hands.
In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that marshals all federal resources to combat anti-Semitism and demands the deportation of anti-Semitic demonstrators who violated American laws, including students on visas. The order directs agency heads to submit recommendations to the Trump administration within 60 days, outlining all of the available tools to combat anti-Semitism.
Under the order, the Justice Department is instructed to quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation by investigating and punishing “anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”
The order came in response to a rise in anti-Semitic protests following Hamas’ rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. Many of these protests have taken place on college campuses, where students have been documented defending Hamas’ attack, chanting ethnic cleansing slogans, committing vandalism, and setting up encampments that have led to the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students.
Anti-Semitic incidents on campus have surged over 500% since the October 7 attack, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“The new Senate Republican majority is going to work with the Trump administration to enforce the law in the face of campuses that have fanned the flames of hate through inaction,” Ernst previously told The Daily Wire. “Elite universities have made their bed, and they’ve got to lie in it, but not on the taxpayers’ dime.”
Barnard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.