One day after Hamas accepted a Gaza ceasefire agreement proposed by Qatari and Egyptian mediators, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the deal declaring an end to the war is unacceptable and launched the long-feared military offensive in the city of Rafah.  Before the May 7 offensive got underway, President Biden reiterated his opposition to an Israeli Rafah ground invasion where more than 1 million displaced Palestinian civilians have sought refuge from the 7-month long war.  U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Israel that a full-scale assault on Rafah would “be a strategic mistake, a political calamity, and a humanitarian nightmare.”

Students at colleges and universities across the U.S. continue to protest Israel’s war in Gaza that has now killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.  As Republican and Democratic politicians vilify student anti-war activists as antisemitic and pro-terrorist, university administrators have called in police to clear Gaza peace encampments, arresting more than 2,400 people on at least 51 campuses.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Helen Benedict, an award-winning author and professor of journalism at Columbia University, which has been the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian U.S. student movement. Here she talks about the police suppression of free speech on campus and the charge that student activists are being manipulated by “outside agitators” to take a stand against U.S. complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Helen Benedict’s latest novel is The Good Deed.