Students at an Israeli college observed a minute of silence in memory of Palestinian civilians killed in the Gaza Strip.
At the behest of an Arab colleague, students in the Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel’s educational faculty stood in silence Monday to commemorate dozens of Palestinian civilians who died over the weekend during an Israeli assault on Hamas in northern Gaza.
Mindful of the sensitivities of the Jewish students, the program’s director, Osnat Dor, asked that the gesture also be in solidarity with residents of southern Israeli border towns who have come under years of Palestinian rocket salvoes.
But there was criticism of the minute of silence from the student union, which asked in a statement, “Perhaps the next step will be to hang up pictures of Palestinian ‘martyrs’ instead of Israeli military commanders in the college halls?”
Israel’s Army Radio queried whether the minute’s silence, for all its apparent goodwill, would have been brooked in Sderot’s Sapir College, where a 47-year-old father of four was killed last week by a Hamas rocket.
