A small group of Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted a Queen’s University convocation ceremony outside the Isabel Bader Centre in Kingston, Ont., on Thursday evening.
The group sought to bring attention to what they said was the university’s school of medicine’s silence in Israel’s ongoing war against and Hamas.
“Today’s the PGME’s (postgraduate medical education) graduation ceremony. Students and community members showed up to voice our frustrations with how the medical school has been silent as the health care crisis… in Gaza is unfolding,” said Yara Hussein, one of the protesters.
The protesters called for Jane Philpott, current dean of Queen’s Health Sciences, to step down.
“We’re not just disrupting graduation for spontaneous reasons. This is the ninth month of them (Queen’s University) being silent,” Hussein said.
“I’m here to support community members and students, in this case in their goals to get the university to divest from genocide,” said Kevin Beach, a health-care worker in Kingston who attended the ceremony and later joined the protestors.
“In this case we’re here to specifically focus on the health-care workers… that are completely ignored by the school and the university.”
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In a statement released Friday about the protest, the university said that they “regret the disruption these incidents caused graduates and their families during what was a celebratory event representing the culmination of years of academic effort.”
The added that the demonstrations resulted in the event being “cut short by several minutes due to an interruption.”
On their website, the university says the convocation celebrates final year residents and clinical fellows.
The protest comes after the university created a divestment committee to look into previous demands from protesters calling for the institution to divest from Israeli-linked companies. Although they were hoping for at least two seats in the committee, protesters said the university did not accommodate that request.
In an earlier statement to Global News, the university said the committee features a mix of members of the Board of Trustees and includes faculty and student representation.
“Two other members of the university community were selected to consider the matter in a fair and objective manner…,” reads part of the statement.
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