On a cloudy Monday morning on the downtown campus of WVU, Anna Avalon halted what had been a brisk stride carrying her across Woodburn Circle enroute to the Mountainlair Student Union.
Avalon, a recent business administration graduate from Cleveland, was back at her alma mater for a weekend visit with her younger sister, who still attends classes here.
She slowed down, then stopped, altogether.
What caught her eye were all those tiny red flags – and not just because their crimson hue stood out against the gray of the day.
The flags, the people who planted them said, were meant to symbolize the cruel pragmatism and politics of collateral damage in the current Israel-Hamas war, which has been grinding on for a year now.
Each of those 2,000 flags, student members of WV Coalition for Justice in Palestine said, is equal to 100 lives lost in the conflict, across Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
Casualties of war, with a caveat, Omar Ibraheem said.
“These aren’t soldiers,” said Ibraheem, a WVU biology major and past president of the school’s Muslim Student Association.
“They’re women and children,” he said.
“True innocents, who just happened to live there, and get caught in the way.”
Which is the sad byproduct of any war, he continued.
“They’re not shooting guns. They’re not throwing bombs.”
Ibraheem is also a founding member of the West Virginia Coalition for Justice in Palestine.
That’s a group mainly made up of students who planted the flags at Woodburn Circle, where they’ll remain through Tuesday, with the blessing of WVU.
After that, they’ll move on to Evansdale.
The flags will be displayed at the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center on Wednesday, Ibraheem said, then across the Evansdale campus Thursday and Friday.
“We’ve been pleading for a cease-fire since Oct.7,” the student said.
He’s referring to the Saturday morning in 2023 when 1,200 people – young adults, mostly – died when Hamas militants attacked a music festival in southern Israel.
The numbers the group is citing for the flags, Ibraheem said, come from the United Nations and other sanctioned sources.
“We’re not trying to make political statements,” he said.
“We’re talking about a humanitarian crisis,” he continued. “And the numbers we’re representing go through July 10, so they’re already out of date.”
But not out of mind, Avalon said.
“Whatever your politics, when you see numbers like those, in that context, it’s heart-breaking.”
