New York’s sole publicly financed law school is under fire after a campus organization announced it will host a program depicting Hamas’s sprawling tunnel system in Gaza as an example of “decolonial land use.”

The program, titled “The Underground in Gaza,” is set for March 4 in a community space at the City University of New York School of Law in Manhattan. It is being arranged by the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, part of a nationwide network that has been highly visible in anti-Israel demonstrations since the Gaza war erupted in October 2023.

Flyers promoting the event state that Columbia University anthropologist Hadeel Assali will present a lecture exploring “the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization.” The materials characterize the subterranean system constructed by Hamas as a model of “decolonial” activity.

To critics, that framing amounts to an attempt to recast a terror apparatus in academic language. They argue that describing the tunnel network in such terms obscures its function in facilitating deadly attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Hamas, designated by the United States as a terrorist organization, spent more than a decade building an intricate maze of passageways beneath heavily populated sections of Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly said the effort consumed massive financial resources and construction supplies that could have gone toward civilian infrastructure. Rather than investing in schools, hospitals, or protective shelters for residents, they contend, Hamas directed materials into underground routes used to transport operatives, conceal weaponry, and coordinate assaults.

The tunnel system played a pivotal role in Hamas’s October 2023 assault on Israel, when terrorists killed approximately 1,200 people and kidnapped hundreds. Captives were taken into Gaza and confined below ground. Israeli officials and former hostages have recounted brutal conditions in the tunnels, including starvation, torture, and sexual abuse. Some abductees were killed while held underground.

Opponents of the upcoming event say labeling the network as “resistance” disregards the suffering it enabled and overlooks Hamas’s choice to position military infrastructure within civilian areas. Entrances and command hubs were located beneath residential buildings, mosques, and schools, intensifying combat in Gaza as Israeli forces worked to dismantle the system while seeking to limit harm to noncombatants. Gaza’s civilians were not allowed to use the tunnels as bomb shelters.

Assali, a faculty member at Columbia’s Center for Science and Society who teaches a course titled “Science Underground,” has addressed the tunnel network in scholarly and public discussions. In 2024, she referred to the system as “a space that evades colonial capture,” and described tunnels as “an essential form of resistance in Palestine,” though she did not specifically mention Hamas in those remarks.

Her scholarship draws on the “settler-colonial” framework, an approach that has gained traction in certain academic circles. Supporters employ it to portray Israel as an imposed foreign entity. Detractors counter that the model dismisses the Jewish people’s ancient ties to the land and fails to account for the many Jewish Israelis whose families fled oppression in Europe and across the Middle East.

The dispute has renewed scrutiny of the broader atmosphere at CUNY Law, which in recent years has faced criticism over provocative commencement speeches and legal activism linked to strongly anti-Zionist causes. Many of the school’s graduates go on to serve in public-sector legal positions throughout New York City, including as public defenders and attorneys for nonprofit organizations.

A spokesperson for the law school said it is “committed to open dialogue, academic freedom, and free speech,” adding that events organized by student groups do not represent the official positions of the school or the wider CUNY system.

Israel’s consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, has urged administrators to call off the program, stating that portraying Hamas’s tunnel network as legitimate resistance “constitutes the normalization of terror and crosses a moral red line.”

For numerous Jewish students and advocates for Israel, the controversy reflects a deeper worry that, in some academic settings, the rhetoric of decolonization is being deployed to soften or rationalize violence against the Jewish state. They maintain that serious debate over Israeli government policy is both valid and necessary, but argue that rebranding a terrorist organization’s underground combat infrastructure as creative land use shifts from criticism into a distortion of moral reality.