As anti-Israeli war protests on Gaza disrupted college campuses across the United States, signs and chants demanded “Divest” and “Ceasefire Now!” This fall, the language of protest has become bolder, as if celebrating the October 7, 2023, attack, and echoing the rhetoric of Hamas, declaring, “Glory to the Resistance!” The mass protests and police and security crackdowns that swept college campuses last spring have dissipated, and campuses have become quieter and more peaceful this fall. But on some campuses, student groups have struck a strikingly more aggressive tone.

Israel’s brutal war on the besieged and devastated Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, 70 percent of them women and children according to the United Nations, is regularly described as genocide, “but until recently few of these slogans seemed pro-Hamas,” according to the newspaper, which says that “for some, including many in the Jewish community, this is a disturbing shift. But for others, the new rhetoric is the natural evolution of a movement responding to a brutal war now in its second year, with no end in sight.”

The newspaper quotes Mitchell Silber, an associate professor at Columbia University who runs a nonprofit that helps provide security for Jewish communities in the New York metropolitan area, saying that groups often escalate their rhetoric when they don’t achieve their goals, with a small group urging stronger action. “We’re at this tipping point. We’re starting to see a radicalization of their message,” he said. Silber, a former director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department, sees a more explicit rhetoric: “blatantly pro-Hamas, blatantly pro-Hezbollah, blatantly pro-Houthi.” The tougher messaging could soon clash with the incoming Trump administration.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on campus protests, and his allies expect the Department of Education to more aggressively investigate college campuses' responses to pro-Palestinian movements.

In May, Trump told donors, “If I’m reelected, we’re going to set this movement back 25 or 30 years.” He also promised to deport foreign students who participate in the protests. “Once they hear that, they’re going to act appropriately.”

The messages sometimes appear on social media including Telegram and Instagram, and sometimes at public events. Colleges have repeatedly said they do not tolerate violence but have also said they respect students’ right to free speech.

The new rules have limited how groups can protest on many campuses, and the large camps that disrupted campus life in the spring are gone. There are also more organized efforts to channel student and faculty concerns about issues in the Middle East into academic discussion, Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told the newspaper.

Although fewer students have participated in antiwar efforts this year, many of those who remain are more extreme in their messaging, some observers say, according to the paper, which notes that “at the University of California at Berkeley a year ago, students hung a long banner from Sather Tower, a famous 307-foot bell tower on campus. It read: ‘Stop the Fire Now. Free Gaza,’ with an image of the Palestinian flag. This fall, that banner was gone and a new one was hung in its place, reading: ‘Glory to the Resistance,’ with an inverted red triangle, a symbol used by Hamas to mark military targets and that has become associated with the Palestinian resistance movement.”

Some protesters now refer to the October 7 attacks as the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” a name used by Hamas. On the first anniversary of the attacks, a Columbia University protester, walking through the center of campus amid a noisy crowd, held aloft a banner that included drawings of a hang glider, an inverted red triangle, and the message “Long live the Al-Aqsa Flood/Glory to the Resistance.”

Students involved in protest groups say the move toward more hardline rhetoric is a result of frustration with a war that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

News from the Middle East has been controversial in recent weeks, with the killing of Hamas leaders, Israeli incursions into Lebanon, attacks on Iranian targets and horrific videos of civilians dying.

Students now believe it will take more drastic action to bring about change, and they are no longer willing to practice “respectability politics,” says Matt Kovak, a Berkeley history graduate student who helps run the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. “What we’re seeing is a realistic response to people who have been marching and protesting for a year, and these international institutions and the United States have no interest in a ceasefire, a year into the war,” Kovak says.

The paper says that there is no doubt that the majority of activists for Palestine are engaged in completely peaceful protests: calling for a ceasefire, writing divestment proposals, organizing educational seminars and film screenings, creating art and embroidery together. Some groups have hosted vigils for those killed in the war in Gaza; in Colombia, students read thousands of names aloud.

“We have overwhelmingly seen that the student-led protests are peaceful calls for human rights for those in Palestine; of course, they are becoming more urgent as the situation abroad continues to deteriorate,” said Farah Afifi, research and advocacy coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The newspaper claims that the shift (in the intensity of the discourse) is most evident at Columbia University, the center of last year's protests.

For weeks, Columbia University Apartheid Devest, one of the pro-Palestinian groups on campus, has taken a tougher tone through its communications channels. On Substack, the group has praised the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah (known as the Houthis), all Iranian-backed groups that the United States has designated as terrorist organizations. One post referred to these groups as the Axis of Resistance and said they “effectively utilized a hierarchy and organized structure led by an anti-imperialist political line to carry out operations effectively.”

The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona is one of the chapters that has posted positive messages about Sinwar after his killing by Israeli forces. On Instagram, the group posted a photo of him with the words: “The face of the resistance. Martyred while fighting for our liberation. Rest in peace,” followed by a heart emoji.

On this point, the newspaper attributes to Mia Amari, a Palestinian-American and the branch president, that “last year people were more afraid to speak up.” Now, she said, “people are finally fed up and saying what’s on their minds.”

Asked if this could be read as support for terrorism, she said, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Like other pro-Palestinian activists, she argued that the focus on the October 7 attacks was unfair, and that the day should be understood in the context of a long history of oppression.

A member of the leadership team at Mac for Palestine at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, made a similar point. Orianne Saxe Bernstein, a third-year student at Macalester, said that terms like “terrorism” “lose their persuasive power among students,” because they are applied to violence committed by Palestinians but not violence committed by Israel.

She said that students’ experiences on campus with the protest movement, including “intense surveillance, violent police, brutal arrests and threats to their education or even their personal safety,” have changed the way they see the Palestinian struggle. She said students realize that they are suffering “only a small part of the extreme oppression that defines Palestinian existence under occupation” and that “this form of oppression is extreme.”

However, she said the group's posts about Sinwar's life were not intended to support Hamas.