A controversy has erupted around a planned academic event at City University of New York (CUNY) Law School, where a lecture will be given on "tunnel uses in Gaza" and their definition as a component of "resistance to colonization."
According to a publication by Students for Justice in Palestine at CUNY, the event is described as "a conversation with Dr. Hadeel Assali on decolonial land use in Gaza," which will examine "the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization." The lecture is scheduled to take place in early March on the university campus, at an event open to the public, subject to advance registration.
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Outside academic halls, Gaza's tunnels are identified first and foremost with Hamas' terror infrastructure. According to a 2024 New York Times estimate, the tunnel network in the Strip stretched approximately 350 to 450 miles (560 to 720 kilometers) – a massive underground system dug over years beneath civilian neighborhoods, hospitals, mosques, and schools. In Israel and the West, the tunnels are seen not only as a means of warfare, but also as a major factor in deepening harm to civilians due to the deliberate use of civilian infrastructure as human shields.
The lecture's leader, Dr. Hadeel Assali, is an anthropologist who serves as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. According to her biography on the university website, her work deals with "colonial legacies of geology" and "anti-colonial ways of knowledge in southern Palestine," and also incorporates "family stories originating in Gaza."
At first I thought it was a bad joke but it turns out it isn't.
There will be a discussion in City University of New York School of Law on the brilliance of Hamas's terror tunnels.
To be clear: terror tunnels under civilian infrastructure in the reason there is so much… pic.twitter.com/0kwqAdRJQe
— Rabbi Poupko (@RabbiPoupko) February 9, 2026
The criticism received sharp expression in the words of Rabbi Elchanan Poupko, an Orthodox rabbi and American educator and prominent public figure in the Jewish community in New York, who wrote on X, "At first I thought this was a bad joke, but it turns out it isn't. There will be a discussion in City University of New York School of Law on the brilliance of Hamas's terror tunnels. To be clear: terror tunnels under civilian infrastructure is the reason there is so much destruction in Gaza."
Poupko's words ignited a wave of angry responses on social media. Some commenters even compared the event to the academic glorification of historical crimes. For example, user Bruce Thompson was shocked by the publication and claimed, "This is terrible, it's similar to a program praising the plumbing work that built the gas chambers at Auschwitz."
CUNY University did not publish an official response to the controversy.
