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The sun was still low Thursday when the student organizers told their classmates it was time. They started to run. Some lugged snacks and foldable tables to the lawn; others arrived with tents. One person draped a kaffiyeh over a statue of George Washington.

“RISE &amp; SHINE DMV,” an organizer wrote on the group’s Instagram story.

With that, the encampment began. For more than 24 hours, students and activists refused to leave the lawn of George Washington University’s downtown campus — calling for schools to cut ties with Israel and to protect the free speech of pro-Palestinian student organizers. Some advocated the end of the state of Israel. Students held up bullhorns and chanted slogans like: “Free, free Palestine!” and “Resistance is justified! When Palestine is occupied!”

The protest, which included about 30 tents and hundreds of people at its peak, dwindled only when D.C. police began to block off the area early Friday. GWU officials said in a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/26/gwu-protests-encampment-pro-palestinian/" target=_blank>statement</a> that morning that they would pursue “disciplinary actions” against the students taking part in the demonstrations, which they noted “continue to disrupt university operations.”

By Friday evening, the school had not responded to the students’ demands.

Nusayba Rashid, 22, a senior studying civil engineering at George Mason, helped organize the encampment at GWU. She said her grandparents were expelled from a Palestinian city in 1948.

“These students are coming and risking their academics, taking legal risks just by doing something as simple as peaceful protesting. And they’re doing it for my homeland, for my people,” Rashid said. “It just brings me to tears.”

The encampment was a culmination of months of tension on campus over the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Israel-Gaza war</a> and a week of near-sleepless planning by some D.C.-area students, who said they were inspired by the activists at Columbia University to take a dramatic stand.

But it was not always clear whether the encampment movement that started at Columbia would make its way to the nation’s capital. In the days following the action in New York, which involved Columbia’s president summoning New York police officers to arrest her students, similar encampments began to appear on college campuses throughout the country. Students from Atlanta to California said they would refuse to leave their tents until university officials met their demands, which often centered around divestment from companies tied to Israel.

In D.C., home to some of the nation’s most storied protests, there was relative quiet. On GW’s campus, students were pulling all-nighters and considering whether they wanted to launch an encampment — and if they could, in the heart of the capital city, represent all universities in the region.

“We didn’t want to just do an encampment for the sake of doing the encampment,” said Rafi El-Habashi, a junior journalism student at George Washington University. “We wanted something that would escalate pressure on George Washington University and other universities to meet our demands.”

El-Habashi, 21, is part of Students for Justice in Palestine Coalition (SJP), which has at least eight local chapters. The group officially formed a few months after GWU <a href="https://gwhatchet.com/2023/11/14/gw-suspends-sjp-for-three-months-after-anti-israel-library-demonstration/" target=_blank>suspended </a>its SJP chapter in November, following an incident in which its members projected “glory to our martyrs” and the slogan “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” on a campus library after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel.

At the time, GWU President Ellen M. Granberg <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/11/14/gwu-images-palestinian-students-for-justice/" target=_blank>denounced the act</a>, which she said included “antisemitic phrases that have caused fear and anxiety for many members of our Jewish and broader GW community.”

Mahmoud Beydoun, a 20-year-old junior at George Washington studying international relations, said the suspension enraged student activists across the D.C. region who felt the university had unfairly suppressed their rights to free speech. Their fury bound them.

“We became closer than just friends on a group chat,” he said. “We organize because we acknowledge that the pain that we are experiencing is beyond words.”

Soon they were co-sponsoring protests and giving each other advice on how to deal with issues like doxing. Then they saw what unfolded at Columbia.

“It was more so like, ‘Oh, my God, did you guys see this? This is amazing. Like what they’re doing is amazing,’” Rashid said, describing conversations among student organizers.

Soon, Rashid said, the organizers moved forward on planning a mass encampment. They decided that each SJP chapter had reached a “point of no return” and felt that their universities did not support them and would not respond to their demands.

Next, she said, they needed to agree where it would be held. Since students would be coming from Maryland, Virginia and D.C., organizers thought a university in the city would be the most accessible to the largest number of people. They chose GWU for the convenience and, ultimately, for the symbolism.

“You have the State Department two blocks away. The White House, you could walk right up to it,” Rashid said. “All these centers of the empire that we are protesting, that we are demanding justice from, are literally right next to us.”

At first, Rashid said organizers wanted to launch an encampment earlier in the week. But they realized students needed tents and tarps, food, safety plans and the physical and mental preparedness to bring it all to fruition. They decided on Thursday.

Everyone volunteered for different roles; some would wear yellow vests as “safety marshals,” while others would pitch tents and some, like Rashid, would coordinate social media strategy for both her school and the coalition’s SJP accounts. El-Habashi said he did not share details about the effort with classmates — worried the plans would leak — but recalled telling his friends: “Big things are coming. I’m really excited.”

Grace Chinowsky, 20, the incoming editor in chief of the school’s student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, was also preparing for big things. She was awake at 1 a.m. Thursday before there were tents on the lawn, sketching out her own plan to make sure the Hatchet would be staffed if her instincts proved right.

“As soon as we saw the intensifying student movement across the U.S. this week, we all assumed and expected this to happen,” she said.

It was still dark outside when Rashid pulled up Instagram. Just after 5 a.m., she hit share.

Then she messaged a group of student organizers from nearby universities.

University of Maryland, College Park

Ellie Silverman covers protest movements, activism and local news. At The Post, she has also covered local crime and courts. She previously reported on retail, breaking news and general assignment stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer, her hometown paper. She graduated from the University of Maryland, where she reported for the Diamondback.

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Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting, finalist (part of a team), 2020

Brown University, B.A.

Emily Davies is a reporter covering crime and criminal justice in Washington, D.C. She started at The Washington Post as an intern in June 2019.

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