Harvard University has fired an employee who was caught ripping down posters of the Bibas children, who were taken hostage by Hamas during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and later murdered by the terrorist group.
Jonathan Tuttle, formerly a cataloger of published materials at the university's Radcliffe Institute, was filmed removing the posters during a Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine rally on March 3. The posters featured the faces of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas and four-year-old Ariel Bibas, the youngest hostages Hamas took during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Bibas children and their mother, Shiri Bibas, were later killed in Hamas captivity.
Tuttle's dismissal, first reported by the Harvard Crimson, comes as the Trump administration investigates Harvard and nine other universities over their response to anti-Semitic protests on campus, which have spiked since the October 7 attack. The administration's anti-Semitism task force on Friday revoked around $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University for failing to curb anti-Semitic incidents.
Tuttle did not respond to the Crimson's request for comment.
Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin condemned Tuttle's actions, saying they are in violation of Harvard's policies and not protected under the First Amendment.
"Disruptive behaviors—including property destruction or defacement and acts of vandalism that seek to suppress or censor the speech of others—are not protected speech," Brown-Nagin wrote in a letter to Radcliffe affiliates. "They are behaviors that constitute misconduct; they violate multiple Harvard and Radcliffe rules and may also be punished under criminal law."