On March 30, an Upper Valley community member read a statement attributed online to Hamas during a pro-Palestinian rally on the Hanover Green.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, the speaker — who goes by EC and declined to provide her full name to The Dartmouth — said she found the statement on Instagram and thought that the statement she read “was just a Palestinian Land Day statement from the West Bank government” — rather than one from Hamas. She learned of the statement’s association with Hamas from The Dartmouth’s investigation and said she “would not repeat the statement or endorse it now.”
“Looking back at it, reading the source, I recognized that this is advocating violence which I did not realize at the time,” EC said.
The text of the statement read aloud closely matches the English translation of an Arabic-language statement which Al Jazeera — an independent news organization partially funded by the Qatari government — attributes to Hamas. The statement also closely matches statements in English attributed to Hamas by the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center and the Yemen News Agency.
According to Middle Eastern Studies professor El Mostafa Ouajjani, “almost all” of the Arabic text in the Al Jazeera article is “consistent” with the English-language versions of the speech found by The Dartmouth and with the transcript of the event. Ouajjani provided an edited translation with minor interpretive adjustments, which The Dartmouth used in its reporting.
Since 1997, the U.S. Department of State has designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization. Hamas has “vowed to annihilate Israel” and has been responsible for “suicide bombings and other deadly attacks,” including the Oct. 7, 2023 attack which killed about 1,200 people and began the Israel-Hamas war, according to the New York Times.
EC read the statement at a rally for Land Day — a Palestinian observance marking the killing of six Palestinians by Israeli troops in 1976 — organized by Dartmouth’s Palestine Solidarity Coalition, Hanover Students for Justice in Palestine and Upper Valley for Palestine. Approximately 50 Dartmouth students, local residents and high school students attended the event. Other speakers at the rally called for the College to divest from companies tied to Israel and for the Hanover Co-op to stop stocking produce tied to Israel.
EC said she did not know the statement’s origin at the time that she read it aloud.
“I did not do any more research, just the credit, copied it and read it out,” she said. “[I] didn’t realize it was a problem.”
According to EC, she volunteered to speak the day of the rally and was approved only to read “a statement about land day.” She added that she “didn’t have time to run it through the group” and that nobody — including the event organizers — reviewed the statement before it was delivered or knew that she would “read that specific statement beforehand,” she said.
It has “never been necessary to write out the whole text of the speech and then run it through everyone,” EC added.
EC told The Dartmouth that she had not given speeches at any other rallies.
The statement EC read claimed that Israel is “violat[ing] all international norms, charters and laws, becom[ing] a real danger to the security and stability of the region and the world” and called for “Arab and Islamic nations to unite and stand together.”
“We will not relinquish or concede a single inch of the land of Palestine, and our people will remain steadfast and defending it by all means until all their rights are wrested back,” the statement read.
The statement ended with a call for “mercy to the martyrs” and a “jihad of victory or martyrdom.” In Arabic, the word “jihad” means “effort” or “struggle,” and includes “an individual’s internal struggle against baser instincts, the struggle to build a good Muslim society or a war for the faith against unbelievers,” according to BBC. Jihad is often erroneously translated as “holy war,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
“I’m very sorry for getting PSC involved in this,” the speaker said, adding that she had been told that organizers “will make fairly sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, that all statements will be fully vetted or not shared at all” in the future.
In an email statement to The Dartmouth, the PSC wrote that the Land Day rally was hosted by several community groups to “celebrate Palestinian citizens of Israel and their efforts to resist the confiscation of their land.” Although the organizers “vetted speakers in advance and gave permission to read out ‘official Palestinian Land Day statements,’” the coalition had not been aware the speaker would read a statement attributed to Hamas, they continued.
“We regret that this space was instead used by a non-student Upper Valley resident to read out a statement from Hamas, misrepresenting it to the audience as a statement from ‘official Palestinian leadership,’” the PSC wrote in the statement.
The PSC wrote that the source of the statement attributed to Hamas was not “clear from its contents, which focused generally on the occasion of Land Day and did not contain any call to violence against Jewish people.”
“The PSC has repeatedly and publicly condemned violence against civilians in the past, and has held space on campus for the joint mourning of Israeli and Palestinian lives,” they continued.
The PSC statement called the incident a “violation of our trust.”
“We will be working with our community partners to ensure such incidents do not repeat in the future,” the PSC wrote. “We encourage everyone to forefront the human cost of the ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine in their mind as Israel expands its settlement project at a rapid rate.”
Ruby Benjamin ’26, a Jewish student, wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth that the incident was “deeply troubling.”
“Members of our community read aloud a statement written by an internationally recognized terrorist organization, marking themselves and other rally participants as supporters of this organization,” Benjamin wrote. “I am disappointed that the people whom I sit next to in class or walk by in Foco would believe that participating in an event which quotes Hamas and advocates for terror is in any way justifiable.”
David Kreigsman ’29, another Jewish student, similarly wrote in an email statement that hearing that a Hamas statement was read in Hanover “saddened” him.
“The statement called for ‘resistance by any means necessary,’ appearing to justify the horrible October 7 attacks,” Kreigsman wrote. “Support for Hamas means support for yet more bloodshed, not human rights or peace in the region.”
Benjamin said she thought the phrase “defending it by all means,” which was included in the statement that was read aloud, “endorses violence.”
“This type of call to violent action necessitates critical evaluation of how we approach speech, and what exactly it is that we are saying,” Benjamin wrote.
