Tom Hurndall Student Protection Project

The Tom Hurndall Student Protection Project is LPHR’s initiative to tackle the systematic targeting of Palestinian university students for military detention by Israel’s military authorities in violation of basic human rights. Cases have surged since August 2019 of students being criminalised and arbitrarily detained for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of association, assembly and expression. LPHR will submit complaints to relevant UN Working Groups and Special Rapporteurs, and engage with governments and parliamentarians.

LPHR emphasises there is a continuum in the systematic targeting of children for military detention (see our Children’s Rights Project) and the targeting of university students for military detention. This punitive practice that foreseeably and immeasurably harms young Palestinian lives needs to end immediately.

This crucial project is named in honour and memory of Tom Hurndall, a courageous, British photojournalism student passionate about truth and justice. Tom was shot in the head as he carried a Palestinian child out of the range of an Israeli army sniper in the town of Rafah in the occupied Gaza Strip. Tom died nine months later in hospital in London, on 13 January 2004, aged only 22-years-old. In his journals,‘The Only House Left Standing: The Middle East Journals of Tom Hurndall’, Tom wrote discerningly and objectively about the injustices he had witnessed in Gaza and that had a profound effect on him. This project is an extension of Tom’s profound legacy.

The Tom Hurndall Student Protection Project has the full support of Tom’s mother and LPHR Trustee, Jocelyn Hurndall. 

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