More than one in four undergraduate students in Britain believe that the October 7th Islamist Hamas terror attacks on Israel were “defensible”, a survey has found.
Polling conducted between May 5 and 13 by Savanta for a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has found that students are strikingly out of step with the broader British public on key issues, including support for terror groups like Hamas.
Despite the 2023 October 7th terror attacks on Israel seeing over 1,200 mostly civilians being brutally killed by jihadists and hundreds more being taken as hostages, 28 per cent of students polled said that they viewed Hamas’ actions that day as “defensible”.
This compares with just 4 per cent of the British public who said the attacks were justified in a 2024 YouGov survey.
“Although ‘justified’ might be regarded as qualitatively different to ‘defensible’ and although there was a two-year gap between the YouGov and HEPI/Savanta polls, it nonetheless seems highly likely that a larger proportion of students than adults as a whole regard Hamas’s attacks on October 7 2023 as justifiable,” the HEPI report said.
Meanwhile, a lower percentage of students were likely to support Israel, with just 18 per cent saying that the Jewish state’s response to the terror attacks were justified, compared to 50 per cent who said that the actions of Jerusalem were “indefensible”.
The polling also found that students were vastly out of step with the rest of the country on issues like nuclear disarmament, with 72 per cent of students backing Britain’s unilateral disarmament, compared to just 11 per cent of the public as a whole.
The student population was also found to hold radically different views on the issue of slavery reparations, wth 47 per cent backing the idea that Britain should hand out reparations for its historic role in the slave trade, despite the country playing a critical role in stamping out the practice in the Western world. In contrast, just 24 per cent of the broader British public backs reparations.
Unsurprisingly, the far-left Green Party appears to be the political movement of choice for university undergrads, with the Savanta survey finding that 35 per cent support the Greens.
This is nearly triple the support of the next closest party, with Labour at 12 per cent, Reform UK at 8 per cent, the Liberal Democrats at 7 per cent, and the Conservatives at 6 per cent.
A further 24 per cent said they had no intention of voting, while 5 per cent said they were currently undecided voters.
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