University students on some of the country’s top college campuses are voicing their support for Palestine as Israel has declared it is at war with the territory and has plans to seize Gaza, one of the country’s enclaves.

On Saturday, Hamas, a Palestinian faction with a military wing, launched a surprise, coordinated attack against Israel, igniting a war between the two countries that has since left over 1,000 dead on each side.

For 16 years, Palestinians in Gaza have been trapped by the Israeli government in what is effectively an open-air prison, according to the United Nations and the Human Rights Watch.

At a news conference from the White House, President Joe Biden called the attacks “an act of sheer evil,” which has seen 14 American citizens killed. The US has supplied the country with $3.8 billion in military aid annually since 2016.

“We stand with Israel and we will make sure it has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself and respond to this attack,” Biden said. “There’s no justification for terrorism. There’s no excuse.”

During a news conference Monday, Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan referred to the attacks as “Israel’s 9/11.”

“We will not let the world forget the autocities our country suffered,” Erdan said. Of Hamas, he said, “They want one thing only: The annihilation of the Jewish state.”

In an interview by media outlet Democracy Now on Tuesday, The Nation’s Palestinian journalist Mohammed El-Kurd argued that likening the incident to 9/11 was being used by Israel’s PR strategy to invoke Islamophobic sentiments and to further justify mass genocide.

“It feels to me as though we are living in the very first few days of an unfolding genocide,” said El-Kurd, who was named in TIME’s top 100 list as one of the “extraordinary leaders from around the world working to build a better future.”

“Media outlets and journalists who have taken on this framing without any questioning not only work to equate the violence of a besieged, politically isolated group like Hamas with the violence of al-Qaeda and ISIS and so on, but they are also doing the dirty work for Israelis. They are preemptively justifying the genocide of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians.”

Dozens of student groups across college campuses in the US publicly condemned Israel’s war against Palestine. Students at Harvard are still experiencing backlash after 35 student organizations at Harvard university signed a letter blaming Israel for the bloodshed.

“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” the letter reads.

“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘”open the gates of hell,’” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.

“Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.”

Statements released by other pro-Palestine organizations at Yale University, Portland State University and City College of New York also echoed similar sentiments.

“The events of October 7th are not an isolated event but the inevitable outcome of a decades-long apartheid and suffocating blockade, in addition to a year of escalated settler violence against civilians in the West Bank,” read a statement released by Yalies4Palestine, Yale University’s pro-Palestine group.

Students at Tufts University in Massachusetts also released a statement raising their support for Palestine, which was denounced by the college, the Boston Herald reported.

On Sunday, Israel announced that it would be cutting off food, fuel and water to the Palestinian city of Gaza, which is home to approximately 2.3 million people. The war marks the latest attacks in approximately 7 decades of on and off fighting between the territories, leading to the 5,739 deaths of Palestinians and 251 Israeli deaths from 2008 to 2021, according to Al-Jazeera.

Gaza is made up of 2 million Palestinian citizens, half of whom are children, according to the charity Save the Children.

Israel previously launched a ground operation in Palestine in 2014, leaving about 2,000 people dead, mainly civilians.

Tensions between the nations first ignited after Israel’s founding in 1948, a year after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two states: one for Arabs and one for Jews.

On Tuesday, Harvard academics released a letter signed by at least 100 faculty members calling the attacks launched by Hamas a “war crime” with “no military or specific objective.”

It continued: “The Israeli security forces were engaging in self-defense against this attack while dealing with numerous hostage situations and a barrage of thousands of rockets hidden deliberately in dense urban settings.”

The letter went even further to say that the students who supported the letter blaming Israel were justifying the deaths of innocent people.

“In the context of the unfolding events, this statement can be seen as nothing less than condoning the mass murder of civilians based only on their nationality.”

Based on initial numbers, Hamas took at least 100 hostages from Israel during the first attacks Saturday, the Israeli government announced Monday.

Student solidarity with Palestine has a long history, dating back to the 1960s. In the early 2000s, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement gained traction on campuses around the world, and National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) was founded in the United States in 1993.

BDS campaigns have successfully pressured universities and other institutions to divest from companies that support what they believe is Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine. Over 200 NSJP chapters across the nation have organized protests, demonstrations and educational events to raise awareness of the Palestinian struggle.

Given that history, it was all but guaranteed that those same student-led groups would continue to support Palestine, as tensions heightened this weekend.

“Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,” the Harvard student letter states.

“From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.”

On Wednesday, Gaza’s only power plant ran out of fuel and shut down. Medical supplies in the city are limited, the World Health Organization said, as the area attempts to grapple with the number of dead and injured from increased fighting. The war is expected to intensify as Israel continues to launch airstrikes into the region.