Jewish Yale student stabbed in eye with Palestinian flag during rowdy protest: ‘Mob behavior’

A Jewish student journalist at Yale University says a protester wielding a Palestinian flag jabbed her in the eye during a rowdy anti-Israel protest on campus Saturday evening and got away with it. 

Sahar Tartak, editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, had been covering the protest, which had drawn hundreds of students in support of Palestinians, when she says she was surrounded by a mob of protesters. 

Yale University student, left, says a demonstrator jabbed her in the eye with a Palestinian flag.  (Sahar Tartak)

Tartak said the protest had been slowly brewing for the week prior, with students setting up a tent encampment in the middle of campus and creating a memorial to a Palestinian terrorist, Walid Daqqa. The crowd had also created a mock F-16 covered in fake blood to protest the Israeli military. 

This activity, Tartak said, culminated in hundreds of students gathering at the plaza, chanting slogans like: “There is one solution, intifada revolution.” 

When Tartak went Saturday night to cover the protest with a friend, the crowd instantly singled them out because they were “identifiably Jewish,” she said. 

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“They made a human blockade in front of us and blockaded us whenever we tried to exercise our freedom of movement around the protest,” Tartak said. 

At some point, she and her friend were separated. The protesters formed a circle around her, chanting incendiary slogans and taunting her. 

“One of the students, whose face was covered in a keffiyeh, took a Palestinian flag that he was holding, waved it in my face and hit my left eye,” Tartak said. 

A man trying to record the protest at Yale University on April 20, 2024, was hounded by activists who used umbrellas and flags to prevent him from seeing the activity. (FNTV)

Tartak tried to run after the assailant, but the human blockade prevented her from pursuing him because “they wanted to protect him.” Others were laughing at her, and none made an effort to track him down, she said. 

“He had anonymity because of the keffiyeh. The organizers encourage anonymity at these events because it creates immunity, so that students can physically assault people like me and then get away with it,” she said. 

Sahar reported the incident to the police, who called ambulance for her. An EMT recommended that she go to the hospital. 

Sahar told Fox News Digital that violence was bound to happen, as the university has refused to intervene for fear of escalation – which in turn, enables violence to escalate. She said no administrators were at the protest, nor were campus police given instructions to disband it when things turned violent.  

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“If students continue pushing the envelope, I knew this was going to happen, I just didn’t expect it to be me,” Tartak said. “I think it’s important to understand the violence is at the core of this movement. It’s about violence against Jewish people. It’s about violence against the West.”  

She decried the protests as “mob violence.” 

“So what’s going to happen, God forbid, more students get beat up, more of nothing happens, and then in a couple of years, these gangsters take over the universities,” she said. “Allowing them to push the envelope is so dangerous. I am lucky that guy’s flag wasn’t pointy at the end.” 

The Yale Police Department told Fox News Digital it is investigating a report of an assault that occurred during a protest on Beinecke Plaza. 

“The university does not tolerate violence, threats, harassment, or intimidation of members of our community, and is providing support to a student who made the report,” the department said. 

Earlier Sunday, President Salovey published a statement acknowledging reports of “egregious behavior” that had emerged from the protest. 

“We do not agree on everything, but we all have a responsibility to do our part in fostering a community in which we can have open, civil discussions about any topic, no matter how complex and how difficult,” Salovey said. “As members of a university committed to learning and the search for truth, we can do no less.” 

NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)

Saturday’s protests come after protesters at Columbia University were heard shouting pro-Hamas slogans, resulting in more than a hundred arrests as they set up an encampment on campus Thursday that continued into Friday.

Such demonstrations have exploded across college campuses in recent months out of protest at Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which in turn is a reaction to Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on Israel that saw 1,200 people killed and around 240 taken hostage. 

Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry claims that the war has killed at least 34,097 Palestinians and wounded another 76,980, though Israel has disputed these figures. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between combatants and civilians in its count. 

Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner and The Associated Press contributed to this report.