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WARWICK UNIVERSITY leaders are to negotiate on demands that it withdraw investments and co-operation from arms firms supplying Israel after a sustained campaign by staff and students.

University authorities are to meet the Warwick Stands With Palestine (WSWP) coalition of more than 70 staff and student organisations which oppose Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

The agreement to talk followed 13 days in which Palestine supporters occupied the Warwick Manufacturing Group’s (WMG) international digital laboratory on the campus.

WMG is the university’s centre for collaboration with industry.

Students and staff at universities across Britain are maintaining protest camps and other actions following Israel’s invasion and attacks in Gaza, in which more than 38,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October.

Warwick students and staff have run a protest camp for 60 days, mounted protests for nine months and then staged the 13-day occupation, which they have now ended.

One campaigner said: “After months of being ignored by the university, this occupation had the simple short-term aim of securing a meeting with university management.

“It is absurd that we have had to go to such lengths to establish a line of communication but we are happy to finally be entering into this dialogue.”

The campaigning coalition said the university’s digital laboratory is “heavily complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Gaza due to their academic and research partnerships with weapons manufacturers who supply Israel’s criminal army.”

One student occupier said: “In putting 300 office desks out of service for two full working weeks and disrupting other WMG buildings through frequent protests, we struck at the heart of militarism on campus.”

The Warwick protesters are demanding that the university withdraws investment in, and co-operation with, firms supplying weapons and technology to Israel such as Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, that the university assists in rebuilding Gaza’s education system and that it protects freedom of speech on campus regarding Palestine.

Research by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has revealed that universities in Britain collectively invest nearly £430 million in companies complicit in Israeli violations of international law.

York University authorities agreed to divest from arms firms supplying Israel in April following sustained protests by staff and students.

Warwick University was invited to comment.