Columbia University

Following the protest, the university began an investigation into rules violations, banned participants from the campus and placed them on interim suspension, it said.

During the CNN interview, Khalil said, "It’s disingenuous to ask about condemning Hamas while the Palestinians are the ones being starved now by Israel."

Columbia's Interim President Claire Shipman stressed that there was "no place for intimidation, hateful language, or targeting of Jews or Israelis at Columbia."

Many of the reps. echoed President Donald Trump's recent attacks on universities, and questioned whether the presidents were doing enough to protect Jewish students.

Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, is one of The Gaza Tribunal’s 29-member advisory policy council.

“From the moment that I was detained, I knew that I would eventually prevail,” he said. “What I simply did is protesting a genocide.”

A DHS spokesperson called Khalil's claim "absurd" and said the Trump administration acted well within its legal authority to detain Khalil.

A letter Davdai posted shows that Columbia closed the inquest on July 8, "without any findings or conclusions of wrongdoing and without imposing discipline or penalty."

The outages, which started on June 24, caused a smiling image of US President Donald Trump to appear across monitors on campus. 

Columbia faced intense pressure from the federal government to address allegations of discrimination by some Jewish and Israeli students.