A Jewish Yale University student journalist reporting on an anti-Israeli protest at the school on Saturday night was stabbed in the eye with a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flag while her assailant has gone unpunished, The New York Post reported.
Sahar Tartak, the editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, was covering the protest – which saw hundreds of students camping at the campus in support of Palestinian Arabs – when she was suddenly surrounded by demonstrators.
Tartak told The New York Post she and a friend were singled out for wearing Hasidic Jewish attire as the crowd formed a blockade around them to interfere with their filming.
“There’s hundreds of people taunting me and waving the middle finger at me, and then this person waves a Palestinian flag in my face and jabs it in my eye,” Tartak said.
“When I tried to yell and go after him, the protesters got in a line and stopped me,” she added.
Tartak said she tried to report the assault to campus police but that they told her there was nothing they could do.
Instead, she got an ambulance ride to the hospital to get her eye checked out.
Tartak slammed the university for not cracking down on Saturday’s protest, the latest incident at Yale, where demonstrators have blocked entrances to school buildings as they condemn the war in the Gaza Strip.
Yale officials said the university’s police department is investigating the assault and that the school tolerates no violence on its campus.
Campus antisemitism has spiked across the US since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza which followed.
The House Education Committee has launched a probe on campus antisemitism. The probe followed a December hearing in which the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT equivocated when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people would be considered harassment on campus.
Harvard President Claudine Gay and Penn President Elizabeth Magill both resigned in the wake of the hearing. MIT President Sally Kornbluth testified at the same hearing but has thus far emerged relatively unscathed, with MIT's governing board expressing its firm support for her.
The investigations began with those three schools, with Harvard’s probe recently escalating to a subpoena from Foxx.
The committee has since added Columbia University and Rutgers University to its probe.
This past Wednesday, Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik testified to the House Education Committee about antisemitism on campus.
Shafik refused to condemn the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as antisemitic during the hearing, or to say that it violates university policy. Instead, she called the chant "hurtful" and said that she would rather not hear it uttered on campus.