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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to President Trump’s escalating war on Harvard University and academia as a whole. On Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked a move by the Trump administration to bar Harvard from enrolling international students. They make up well over a quarter of Harvard’s student body. A hearing on the case will be held today.

On Monday, Trump threatened to redirect $3 billion in federal grants from Harvard to trade schools. CNN is reporting the Trump administration is also poised to cancel $100 million in federal contracts with Harvard University.

On Monday, Trump slammed Harvard for accepting so many international students and for not handing over detailed personal information about them.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Part of the problem with Harvard is that there are about 31%, almost 31%, of foreigners coming to Harvard. We give them billions of dollars, which is ridiculous. … We have Americans that want to go there and to other places, and they can’t go there because you have 31% foreign. Now, no foreign government contributes money to Harvard. We do. So, why are they doing so many, number one? Number two, we want a list of those foreign students, and we’ll find out whether or not they’re OK. Many will be OK, I assume. And I assume, with Harvard, many will be bad. And then the other thing is they’re very antisemitic.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is escalating his threats as Harvard resists requests by the federal government to hand over detailed personal information about its international students. On Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social the information is needed to determine, quote, “how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country,” unquote.

On Monday, Democracy Now! reached Francesco Anselmetti, a British Italian international graduate student in Harvard’s joint Ph.D. program in history and Middle East studies. He’s a member of Harvard’s graduate student union. He responded to Trump’s threats.

FRANCESCO ANSELMETTI: Trump’s revocation of Harvard’s ability to enroll and register international students is — of course, it’s an attack on Harvard’s international community. It’s also, seemingly, one of the largest, perhaps the largest, threat of mass deportation on a unionized workforce in American history. I mean, this is an attack on American academia as it is an attack on American labor. Around 25% of the university’s community, including around 4,000 workers, many of whom do the bulk of teaching at Harvard, many of whom, you know, despite a federal judge blocking the Trump administration’s action, are left in a position of extreme precarity and uncertainty over the short- and medium-term future.

We expect, you know, the Harvard — we expect Harvard to continue fighting for its international students in the courts, but we expect them to do so also in part because it’s in their interest, right? What we aren’t so sure about is whether it is in their interest to truly stand up for the free speech and intellectual autonomy it claims to be defending. In order for it to do so, it would have to seriously consider the claims of various student groups that have been operating on campus over the last two years in solidarity with Palestinian rights, groups which Harvard has had really no trouble in disciplining, in some cases banning. And the irony here is that, of course, these decisions from Harvard have — represent caving to outside pressures, right? These, in many cases, have been decisions that Harvard has been pressured to do in response to right-wing groups, in response to donors who represent, you know, interests that are — that want to eradicate any pro-Palestine sentiment on American university campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Harvard graduate student Francesco Anselmetti speaking to Democracy Now! Harvard’s UAW unions have condemned the Trump administration attacks on graduate student workers.

We’re joined now by Alison Frank Johnson, a professor of history at Harvard University, the chair of the German Department. She’s also a member of the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Professor. If you can start off by talking about what Trump is demanding, what exactly this means, as students who are in Cambridge and are around the world not knowing whether they are being forced to leave as we speak?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: That’s right. This is a — these measures are targeting not only the students who haven’t arrived yet, who’ve been admitted but are still at home, packing, planning to go to college, to start their doctoral programs, but also students that are well into programs they’ve already started, some of them supposed to graduate on Thursday, the day after tomorrow, some of them six years into a seven-year Ph.D. program, some of them freshmen and sophomores at college.

Even before these latest measures targeting international students, F-1 and J-1 visa holders were announced, we had already seen the harassment of international students and scholars coming into the United States. I know many international students who were afraid to go and do research, to go to archives, to go accept collaborative grant offers from other universities, which actually do many times fund research that’s being done at Harvard, afraid to leave the country because they didn’t know if they’d be let back in, even before this was happening. So, this is a massive escalation, but it’s not the beginning of the attacks on the embeddedness of the research that we do in a global community.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, we had a segment last week talking about how the European Union, Canada, the U.K., even Australia have been increasing the amount of money that they’re devoting to scientific research, hoping to lure Americans who are now being targeted by this war on science of the Trump administration. Could you talk, the discussions you’ve been having with your colleagues about whether some of them are considering leaving, going to other countries, and what the long-term impact on America’s lead in science and technology and research would be as a result of this?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: Absolutely. So, I’m a historian of modern European history. Three scholars in my field who work at Yale recently very publicly announced that they were leaving for Canada. So far, my colleagues at Harvard and I are trying to prevent that from happening. So, our focus right now is to try to work together to ensure that Harvard continues to be a place where people will want to and be able to do cutting-edge research. And so, we are not yet planning for this mass exodus, but we have — we’re aware that that is one potential outcome, one we very much want to avoid.

The work being done at Harvard where grants have been cut — in fact, I think today the Trump administration announced they were cutting all contracts and all grants with Harvard University — that affects people working on tuberculosis, on ALS, on soft robotics, on diabetes, obviously, on cancer, repairing eye damage, people working on doing things like, you know, translating the Dead Sea Scrolls — that work has already been done — reducing school absenteeism. This is useful research. It’s useful to any country that will host it, and, in fact, it’s useful to the whole world, no matter where it takes place. So, I do understand that there will be attempts to poach some of the best scholars that we have at the university, although, as I said, my colleagues and I right now are trying to — that’s not the outcome that we want. We don’t want to — we don’t want to see people get well-paying jobs and fellowship opportunities elsewhere. We want to save this university.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the range of demands that the Trump administration has made of Harvard in relation to these foreign students, what exactly they want, the information they want?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: Well, for better or for worse, it’s not entirely clear what they want. I think what they want is to destroy Harvard University as a way of destroying independent research and scholarship that they can’t control, intimidating the other universities that they haven’t yet targeted by destroying Harvard. So, whatever Harvard does, it’s not going to be sufficient.

You heard from the graduate student that you already interviewed that the university has actually taken many of the steps that the Trump administration has requested and demanded, including dismissing the director of the Center for Middle East Studies, including providing lots of information about our international students and accepting a definition of “antisemitism” that the regime favors. They also provided all legally required information related to the visa program that is being canceled, you know, SEVP. They did that.

So, when the Trump administration says that they haven’t provided the information that’s required, it’s not clear what exactly it is that Harvard even legally could provide that they still want. So, Harvard does have an obligation to protect the privacy of its students — I think, to a lesser extent, of its employees, but certainly of its students. It can’t just divulge anything to anyone. The federal government is the entity that has issued every single one of these students their visas, so, presumably, they already have access to the names and countries of origin of all of the students whose visas they have approved.

I think that whatever their demands are — and they certainly extend beyond what the law requires — even if Harvard were to meet them, they would come up with a new set of demands that it hadn’t met. It’s very clear that what they want to do is run the university into the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, I wanted to ask you two quick questions. You talked about some of the grants and what would be shut down. What about the grants around scientific research? I mean, you have the situation where the Harvard School of Public Health, apparently, The Wall Street Journal is reporting, that they are cutting funding for the School of Public Health, laying off people, also reducing graduate student admissions. What about other schools? And also, Trump’s comments when he says, “We are still waiting for the Foreign Student Lists from Harvard” — as you point out, they already have the list, because they give them the visas; they know who’s there, unless they want much more personal information — but Trump says, “so that we can determine, after a ridiculous expenditure of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.” What this means, not only for your school, but for the universities around the country?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: Yes, I think that Harvard is being made an example of, but Harvard is not really the target here. It’s the independent scholarship that’s being produced by universities, universities that work also to solve medical problems that aren’t very profitable, universities that are answerable to the truth and to future generations rather than to shareholders. And those universities do things like work on cures for cancer and work on cures for tuberculosis and work on cures for diabetes, and that work is obviously very — it’s obviously essential.

But we also do things like talk about climate change, right? We also do things like talk about the impact of income inequality. We also do things like talk about the importance of recognizing people’s identities, their sexual and gender-based identities, for their own mental health. We also talk about things like the segment that you aired before about what’s happening right now in Gaza. And those messages, whether it’s that vaccines work or that there is human-caused climate change or that we need to attend to the terrible tragedy that’s occurring in the Middle East, are messages that the administration doesn’t like, right? Universities, not only Harvard, do this work because they care about the truth. They don’t just care about what’s politically expedient for the current administration.

And I think that the assertion that the administration should decide which students are allowed to come to Harvard, which scholars are allowed to come to Harvard, whose ideas are dangerous — dangerous to whom? Right? Dangerous to an administration that isn’t interested in admitting that vaccines work, that isn’t interested in admitting that there’s climate change, that we should be reducing our dependency on fossil fuels? Dangerous to an administration whose foreign policy seems to run on friendships with bullies? That’s the kind of control that they want to have, and Harvard can’t let them have it, because we won’t be the last one they try to get it from.

AMY GOODMAN: Alison Frank Johnson, I want to thank you for being with us. We’ll follow what happens with the hearing today and beyond, not only at Harvard, but at schools all over the country right now. Professor of history at Harvard University, chair of the German Department, speaking to us from Munich, Germany. She’s also a member of the American Association of University Professors.

Up next, we go to Georgia, where a pregnant woman who’s been declared brain dead has been kept on life support for over three months, against the wishes of her family, because of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. Back in 30 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Crying in the Streets,” performed by Zeshan B in our Democracy Now! studio.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Gaza. On Friday, an Israeli airstrike hit the home of a Palestinian pediatrician, killing nine of her 10 children. The children ranged in age from 7 months to 12 years old. Dr. Alaa al-Najjar was working in the emergency room at Nasser Medical Complex at the time of the attack on her home. Her husband Hamdi, who’s also a doctor, was seriously wounded in the strike, is now being treated at Nasser. Their 11-year-old son Adam survived but was also severely wounded.

By the time Dr. Alaa arrived at her home, emergency workers were pulling the charred bodies of her children out of the rubble. This is her brother-in-law, the uncle of her children, Ali al-Najjar, who also rushed to the scene.

ALI AL-NAJJAR: [translated] We searched through the rubble, calling from Yahya to Adam, “Answer us. Uncle. Is anyone there?” Not a single person beside us. Right next to us, my cousin rented three shops, or maybe two, tire repair shops. The fire had spread to the tires. And Civil Defense extended the hose to extinguish the flames, because the hose was at risk of collapsing from the fire. One of the shops was full of rubber tires. As we were trying to put out the fire, we were shocked to find the first charred body. …

They quickly continued extinguishing the fire, and we started pulling out charred bodies. One of the Civil Defense workers was handing me one of the bodies. She, who was standing next to me, recognized it. She said, “This is Reval. Give her to me.” Look at her instinct as a mother, as if her daughter were still alive. She asked to hold her in her arms. She’s a pediatrician. See the subconscious reaction? She wanted to embrace her daughter, forgetting that her daughter was burned in front of her eyes. We took those charred children and transferred them to Nasser Hospital. I took the doctor with me. She is now caught between the dead, her only surviving child and her husband, who is between life and death. May God grant her patience and grant us patience, too.

AMY GOODMAN: U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese condemned the attack on the al-Najjar family, describing Israel’s targeting of families as a, quote, “distinguishable sadistic pattern of the new phase of the genocide,” unquote.

We go now to Gaza, where we’re joined by Dr. Graeme Groom, an orthopedic surgeon with the NHS — that’s the National Health Service — in London. He’s volunteering with the charity IDEALS at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, where he treated Dr. Alaa al-Najjar’s sole surviving child, 11-year-old Adam.

We thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Groom. Can you describe the horror? What happened to the doctor’s family?

DR. GRAEME GROOM: Well, it’s difficult for me to describe the horror of what happened to his — to her family, because we were in the operating theater all day, and this little scrap of humanity arrived when we should have finished what we had planned to do. And poor Adam was sent up to us for us to remove his left arm.

I think we can imagine — or, perhaps, we can’t imagine — what it’s like for poor Dr. Alaa to go to work in the morning, but when she goes to bed at night, if she goes to bed at night, she has only two living members of her family. The rest are dead. And the two living ones are gravely injured and may be permanently damaged.

What we do in theater in this ghastly situation is that his little body is covered from top to toe in penetrating injuries. He is literally peppered. And, of course, the explosion makes him filthy. So the first thing is to clean him from top to toe and then look for other injuries. Now, the arm injury was bad enough. He also had a wrist injury on the same side. But the thing that made us worry about him is that he was bleeding from both ears, which means he may have had a fracture at the base of his skull, a laceration on his skull. He was unconscious, and so that a head injury would be a more significant and possibly permanent issue than his arm injury. But what we do with that is we clean it. We clean it. We stabilize the bone, and we remove the dead and devitalized tissue.

And I’m pleased to say that this poor little boy has — he has not recovered. That would not be a sensible word to use. But he is improving. So, when I saw him the following day, he was eating breakfast with his right hand.

When we could have a look at him properly, it was clear that he had a cranial nerve injury, so that one of the muscles to his right eye wasn’t working properly. When he tried to look to the right, it was as though he had a lazy eye. Now, fortunately, we’ve got an ophthalmologist here, and that is improving. But the significance of that is that people who are very, very close to explosions have what we call a traumatic brain injury. Their brains are scrambled, and their cognitive function may be permanently damaged. We will continue to work on his arm and his other injuries. Time will tell about his brain injury.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Groom, many people have speculated, the enormous number of medical personnel who’ve been killed by the Israelis, that they are targeting medical workers. What is your sense of, among the medical community that works there, your view of what the Israelis are doing to these folks who are seeking to save lives?

DR. GRAEME GROOM: We’ve heard that a lot. We’ve been coming to Gaza with our little charity for 16 years, and we’ve done a lot of training, so we know many of the doctors in my line, in orthopedic surgery. We’ve had seven fellows come to train with us in London — three surgeons, two nurses, two physiotherapists. The first of our fellows, in the context of targeting doctors, was arrested before Christmas 2023 and died in Israeli prison on the 19th of April, 2024. So, we have a personal involvement in this, in this view that medical workers are being targeted. Another of our very close colleagues is a superb surgeon, [inaudible], is in an Israeli prison. Nothing has been heard of him for many, many months, and we are all very fearful that he will suffer the same fate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the Israeli military —

DR. GRAEME GROOM: I should say that — 

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, Doctor, the Israeli military has reissued a wide evacuation warning for all of Rafah and Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. That’s where you are now. What are you seeing in terms of this major ground offensive of the Israelis?

DR. GRAEME GROOM: Well, earlier on, before this evacuation order, we were seeing a great increase in casualties. But we’re not now, because there’s no access to Nasser. The evacuation line has swept past us, but we’ve not been ordered to evacuate, so we are a little island in the midst of the Red Zone. We will wait and see.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Graeme, I wanted — Dr. Graeme Groom, I wanted to ask you about another doctor. In 2024, the prominent Palestinian orthopedic surgeon Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, was killed by torture after being detained by Israeli forces for over four months at the Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank. He was head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital but was arrested by Israeli soldiers when he was temporarily providing care at Al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya, in the north of Gaza. Dr. Groom, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh was a fellow in your training program for limb reconstruction? Was that in London? And can you tell us more about him?

DR. GRAEME GROOM: Well, he was — yes, he was. I didn’t name him because it may be a distraction. But, yes, he was a lovely fellow. He came to us not within our limb reconstruction training program, not within the British one, but as an additional fellowship which was funded separately. He was with us for six months. He was a delightful fellow. He was extremely enthusiastic. He sat at our table. He was — he loved every moment of his time in London. And we loved him, because he was such an admirable, lovely fellow. And we grieve for his family and his six children now that he’s gone.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Groom, you work with the National Health Service in London typically. And last week, the United Kingdom suspended trade talks with Israel and said it will impose sanctions on West Bank illegal settlers. The British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Israel’s announcement that it would allow a small quantity of food into Gaza as “totally and utterly inadequate.” What more would you like to see the world do right now about the situation in Gaza?

DR. GRAEME GROOM: I would want firm pressure to stop the slaughter of the innocents. Only a tiny proportion of the people killed have any relation to Hamas. There is a mighty military machine that is seeking to defeat a nimble and elusive foe. And between them, there’s this huge number of civilians who are totally uninvolved, but they are the ones who are being attacked. They’re the ones who are being killed. They are defenseless and almost entirely blameless. And I would like the world to say, “Stop.”

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I wanted to ask you about this latest news of this nonprofit backed by Israel and the U.S. which began distributing this limited amount of aid in Gaza, despite objections from the U.N., which says the mission could force the further displacement of Palestinians and likely violates international humanitarian law. Groups like Mercy Corps, Save the Children have distanced themselves from it. It’s called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It began operations just hours after its executive director, approved by Israel and the U.S., Jake Wood, resigned. He wrote in a statement, calling for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, adding, “It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon,” he said as he resigned. If you can talk about what that means as you treat people, when people are starving, I mean, even people who are starving, who are burned, the inability to graft skin onto them because their skin won’t tolerate it?

DR. GRAEME GROOM: I think those are two separate issues. I must say, I read his statement. I’m full of admiration for him. I entirely support his position. I think it is impossible to be consistent with the principles of international humanitarian aid in the context of this new organization. And, of course, it’s unnecessary. There is another — there is another agenda. But we’re moving from the humanitarian into the political, and I’m not a politician. I’m a doctor.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I thank you so much for being there. You’re also, to say the least, extremely brave. Dr. Graeme Groom, orthopedic surgeon with the NHS, the National Health Service, in London, volunteering with the charity IDEALS at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza in Khan Younis, where he treated Dr. Alaa al-Najjar’s sole surviving child, 11-year-old Adam. Dr. Alaa al-Najjar’s other nine children were just killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home. Her husband had just taken her to work. He, too, is a doctor. He arrived home, and the blast took place. He, too, is in intensive care.

Coming up, we look at President Trump’s escalating war on Harvard University as he attempts to block almost a third of the student body, the international students, from attending the school. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Malian singer Khaira Arby in our Democracy Now! studio.