Livestream: Must-see doc “The Encampments” keeps focus on Gaza

There is a prescient moment in the new feature documentary The Encampments, when Mahmoud Khalil is asked what would happen to him if he gets deported from the United States.

“I will live,” the Columbia University student leader responds.

“We will continue to live. The Palestinian people have been under occupation, ethnic cleansing and all sorts of crimes since 1948 and we prevailed,” he adds. “We will prevail, no matter what will happen.”

The footage, which was filmed in April 2024, is a sobering moment, foreshadowing Khalil’s arrest 11 months later. He remains detained at a federal immigration facility as the government attempts to deport him in retaliation for his speech against Israel’s genocide.

The documentary, an intimate portrait of the global student movement ignited at Columbia University in the spring of 2024 to protest institutional complicity in Israel’s genocide, just concluded a theatrical run across the US.

Ruwaida Amer, who shot moving footage and interviews for the film in Gaza, joined us on The Electronic Intifada Livestream for 1 May.

We were also joined by BreakThrough News journalist Kei Pritsker, who co-directed The Encampments with Michael T. Workman.

Amer has contributed to The Electronic Intifada for more than seven years, and has been reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza regularly since it started.

In past years, Amer produced a number of videos about life in Gaza that people don’t usually see. Many of those videos may now serve as archival depictions of people and places in Gaza that have been killed and destroyed by Israel.

Amer spoke about the difficulties of working while trying to survive the genocide, but said that she felt that continuing to report was the only thing that kept her sane.

We showed a montage of some of the videos Amer produced over the years, many of which can be watched here.

Amer had been injured at the same time of filming, and was forced to evacuate her home, but wanted to bring the stories of students in Gaza to light.

Israel is perpetrating a “scholasticide – i.e., the wholesale, deliberate, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system,” Gaza-based human rights group Al Mezan reported last month.

More than 95 percent of schools in Gaza have sustained some form of damage. Major universities were wholly annihilated, as footage in the documentary shows, in juxtaposition with nationwide protests on US campuses, and the subsequent university and police attacks on these encampments.

“You helped bring forward the truth of the encampments, which the students were always insisting on, which is that this movement was always about Gaza,” Pritsker told Amer on the Livestream.

“It was never about anything but Gaza.”

Editors screened short clips from the film showcasing the work of Gaza’s team, the student takeover of a campus building and renaming it Hind Hall – after the 6-year-old Palestinian girl murdered by Israeli troops in January while she was on the phone to the Palestine Red Crescent Society desperately calling for help.

The Hind Rajab Foundation – an organization that was founded during the genocide to bring to bring to justice Israeli soldiers involved in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – publicly named for the first time Hind’s alleged killers.

The foundation is calling on the International Criminal Court to bring her perpetrators to justice.

Pritsker explained how students understood what was at stake when they launched the movement which started at Columbia and expanded to universities nationally and even globally.

“The encampments were a referendum, not just on Palestine, but on the ability, on the so-called right of the United States to dictate to the world,” Pritsker said.

“Who should live and who should die, who should be in power and who should not. Who has the right to life, who has the right to water, who has the right to happiness and education, and who does not, and this was a mass uprising of the next generation.”

Resistance engages Israeli army in Gaza

Later on in the program, contributing editor Jon Elmer covered all the latest resistance news from the Gaza Strip.

This included a sniper attack by Palestinian fighters of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, against Israeli soldiers in what is considered a buffer zone.

Qassam apparently conducted the attack with snipers stationed in two different positions.

“Usually the soldiers run after these sniper attacks, but the Yahalom soldier climbs on top of the tank, and now there’s three of them on top of the tank, and they’re hit with a single round,” Elmer reported.

Yahalom is an engineering unit within the Israeli army.

Elmer also covered the loss of a US fighter jet off an aircraft carrier while evading Yemeni fire in the Red Sea.

The attack by Ansarullah sent the $67 million-aircraft to the “bottom of the Red Sea,” Elmer reported.

“This is the most concentrated naval warfare, the Navy says, since World War II.”

Executive director Ali Abunimah provided an update on the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student and legal permanent resident arrested during his citizenship interview on 14 April.

Abunimah also presented his analysis of two recent reports put forward by the “Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias” as well as the “Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias” at Harvard University.

Abunimah’s close reading of the two reports demonstrated how largely baseless anti-Semitism accusations have been at Harvard University, while anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab attacks on students and faculty have created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation on campus.

At the top of the show, associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman presented a news briefing on news across Palestine, with a focus on the catastrophic situation in Gaza due to Israel’s ongoing massacres and the starvation it is deliberating causing by blocking the entry of food and other essential humanitarian supplies.

You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform. This writer produced and directed the program and Asa Winstanley contributed analysis and production. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.

Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.