NEW YORK — New York City’s public law school is set to hold an event nexzt month that brands the Hamas terror tunnel network as “decolonial land use,” highlighting how “resistance” to Israel is packaged in some academic settings.
Students for Justice in Palestine at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law announced the event earlier this week.
The gathering, called “The Underground in Gaza,” will feature a talk by the Columbia University academic Dr. Hadeel Assali, advertisements for the event said.
“This anthropologic investigation will examine the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization,” the advertisements said.
The event will take place in the CUNY Law School’s community room in Manhattan on March 4.
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The campus branch of Students for Justice in Palestine is listed as a recognized student group on CUNY Law’s website.
Students for Justice in Palestine is a loosely linked, national network that has been behind some of the vitriolic protests on campuses since the start of the Gaza war. Immediately after the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, National Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the onslaught as a “historic win for Palestinian resistance.”
Hamas built a vast network of tunnels under Gaza population centers, draining the Strip’s resources for more than a decade.
A screenshot of an undated video released by the Israel Defense Forces on December 17, 2023, shows Hamas commander Muhammad Sinwar, right, riding in a car traveling through a tunnel under the Gaza Strip. (Screenshot: Israel Defense Forces)
The tunnels were used to attack Israeli soldiers, hide Hamas terrorists and weapons, and hold hostages. Some of the hostages were starved, tortured, sexually assaulted and executed in the tunnels.
The tunnels’ presence in civilian areas contributed to the widespread destruction in Gaza, and Hamas did not allow civilians to take shelter in the underground system. Hamas is a US-designated terrorist group.
Dr. Hadeel Assali (Columbia University)
CUNY Law is the only publicly funded law school in New York City and its graduates go on to fill many public sector legal jobs in the city, such as serving as public defenders, working in the court system or finding employment at nonprofits.
CUNY did not provide a comment on the event by the time of publication.
Assali is an anthropologist at Columbia’s Center for Science and Society. Her work examines the “ongoing colonial legacies of the discipline of geology” and “anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine,” according to the university website.
Assali has written repeatedly about the Hamas tunnel network, saying in 2024 that the underground network was “a space that evades colonial capture, despite Israel’s claims of military prowess.”
Hamas-held hostage Evyatar David filmed digging what he says he fears will be his own grave in a tunnel in Gaza, in a Hamas propaganda video that his family cleared for publication on August 2, 2025.
“The opacity of the underground is a blind spot for colonial regimes of occupation and surveillance and for settler-colonial states that seek to eliminate the native,” she wrote in 2024, calling the tunnels “an essential form of resistance in Palestine,” without mentioning Hamas.
In her doctoral thesis in 2021, she said the tunnel network “offers us a case study of the potential of subterranean knowledge to rethink the Earth Sciences and their colonial capitalist paradigms.” Her adviser was Mahmood Mamdani, the father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who joined anti-Israel protests on the Columbia campus.
Assali teaches a course at Columbia called “Science Underground.”
She has written on social media, “Keep supporting our resistance in ALL its forms,” and “May we see the end of Zionism and the liberation of Palestine.”
A lawsuit filed in 2024 said she had canceled her class sessions during Columbia’s anti-Israel protests and encouraged the students to attend the rallies.
Her positions lean into the settler-colonial paradigm, an academic framework that has become widespread in universities in recent decades and is often used to vilify the Jewish state as a foreign implant bent on oppression, genocide and apartheid.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators from CUNY at a rally near Bryant Park, New York City, November 9, 2023. (Luke Tress)
Critics say the paradigm is a gross misrepresentation of Israel, ignoring Jews’ millennia of history in the land, societal ties to Israel, and Jewish migrants’ history as persecuted refugees fighting for survival in a hostile region.
A growing movement of activist academics says that settler-colonialism is a pillar of anti-Zionist ideology that is often turned against Jews and Jewish peoplehood.
The CUNY law school has been a hotbed of anti-Israel activism for years.
Two prominent anti-Zionist activists delivered inflammatory commencement speeches at the law school in 2022 and 2023, causing a national uproar.
A legal nonprofit at the school, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR), provides legal advice to some of the hardline activist groups in the city, including at Columbia. The two commencement speakers were CLEAR alumni who now head Within Our Lifetime, likely the leading anti-Zionist activist group in the city.
The head of CLEAR, Ramzi Kassem, is Mamdani’s chief counsel, linking the anti-Zionist activist network to City Hall.
Hamas terrorists carry a white bag believed to contain a body, retrieved from a tunnel during a search for the remains of hostages in Hamad City, Khan Younis, southern Gaza, October 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
Israel’s consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, sent a letter to CUNY’s leadership on Wednesday demanding the event’s cancellation.
“Support for such an event constitutes the normalization of terror and crosses a moral red line,” Akunis said.
CUNY is a sprawling system with 26 colleges and around 240,000 students spread around the city.
The system has grappled with alleged antisemitism on its campuses for years and has taken measures to rein in discrimination against Jews.
The experience of Jewish students varies widely between the different campuses, and each college has significant autonomy from the central CUNY administration.
A third-party review of antisemitism and discrimination at CUNY last year called for an overhaul of the system’s policies related to antisemitism.
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