By Erika Hernandez
06 Nov 2023, 20:33 PM EST
Authorities reported that a young man from University of Massachusetts Amherst He was arrested for allegedly punching another Jewish student and spitting on the Israeli flag during a campus vigil on Friday.
The incident occurred at a vigil called “Bring Them Home: Solidarity Walk and Installation” organized by UMass Hillel, a Jewish organization on campus.
The event featured empty seats at a Shabbat table representing the 240 people taken hostage by Hamas, the organization said.
The student suspect walked through the crowd at the gathering “aggressively pointing the middle finger at people,” he said. UMass Amherst Hillel in a statement on Sunday.
After the event concluded and security left, the same student returned and hit a young Jewish man holding an Israeli flag. He then took the flag and spit on it, the organization said.
A Hillel staff member intervened to calm the situation, while members of UMass witnessed the incident, according to the statement reviewed by NBC News.
Hillel says it will “continue to maintain heightened security out of an abundance of caution,” although the university has no indication of an ongoing security threat.
The attacked student was not injured, school officials said.
The student attacker, who was not identified, was arrested that same night and released on bail with a ban on returning to campus.
“The student will be subject to the legal consequences of his actions as well as the Student Code of Conduct“officials said.
The arrest is just the latest in a series of incidents on university campuses during the war between Israel and Hamas. Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States have increased 388% since the attacks, compared with the same period last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which works to combat anti-Semitism and extremism.
Last week, a 21-year-old Cornell University student was also charged with making online threats against Jewish students. While on the West Coast, an Arab Muslim student at Stanford University was run over Friday in a possible hate crime.
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