The episode also occurred a day after the university announced that 13 Harvard students who took part in a protest encampment would not receive their diplomas with their classmates. Some students chanted “Let us march, let us march” during the graduation ceremony on Thursday, urging the university’s leadership to allow the 13 seniors to receive their degrees with their classmates. “This semester, our free speech and our expressions of solidarity have been criminalized,” student speaker Shruthi Kumar said to applause. She said she had to address the “13 members of the class of 2024 who are not graduating today,” which drew sustained applause and cheers from the crowd. “I am deeply disappointed by the university’s intolerance of free speech and the right to civil disobedience on this campus,” she added. More than 1,500 students have signed a petition and about 500 faculty and staff members have spoken out against the sanctions, she said. “Civil rights and the defense of democratic principles are at stake. The students have spoken. The faculty has spoken. Harvard, are you listening?” she said. The students who participated in the encampment had called for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and for Harvard to divest from companies that support the occupation. The ceremony’s featured speaker, Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist and press freedom advocate Maria Ressa, told the graduates: “We do not know who we are until we are tested, until we fight for what we believe in. Because that defines who we are.” “The protests on campuses are testing all of us in America. Protests are healthy. They should not be violent. They should not be silenced,” she said. There was a heavy police presence on campus Thursday, with officers mingling with the graduates, their families, and flower vendors on the sidewalks. A small plane flew overhead, trailing an Israeli and an American flag, and a truck with an electronic billboard parked near the entrance to campus displayed the names and pictures of some of the pro-Palestinian protesters and the words: “Harvard’s leading anti-Semites.” See the moment in the gallery above. A wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses has led to more than 3,000 arrests nationwide. On Oct. 7 last year, Israel launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip to “neutralize” the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas after it fired a barrage of rockets into Israel, killing more than 1,170 people, the majority of them civilians. The Islamist movement Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007 and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Israel, has also taken 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in captivity and 37 of whom have died, according to the latest figures from the Israeli army. The conflict, which entered its 231st day on Thursday and continues to threaten to spread throughout the Middle East, has so far left 35,800 dead, 80,200 wounded, and about 10,000 missing, presumed buried in the rubble, the majority of them civilians, according to updated figures from local authorities. The conflict has also displaced nearly two million people, plunging the impoverished and densely populated Palestinian enclave into a severe humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people facing “catastrophic levels of hunger” in what the UN has called “the highest level of food insecurity we have seen in any of our hunger reviews” worldwide. Read Also: Spain recognizes Palestine? Israeli deputy asks the same for Catalonia (Portuguese version)