Harvard Divinity School broke precedent by refusing to publish a video of its commencement speech after a speaker went off-script to call attention to the perilous conditions in Gaza, The Intercept has learned.

“There are no safe zones left in Gaza after 600 days and 77 years of genocide,” said Zehra Imam, who graduated from the Harvard Divinity School this spring and participated in the embattled Religion and Public Life program. Imam, who is Muslim, was speaking with two other students from Christian and Jewish faiths who had cleared a draft of their planned remarks with the school — and agreed that Imam should go off-script to address the ongoing genocide.

“I center Palestine today, not just because of its scale of atrocity but because of our complicity in it,” Imam said. “Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for you to arrive. And you must be courageous enough to rise to the call because Palestine will keep showing up in your living rooms until you are ready to meet its gaze.”

Harvard did not publish a video of the speech on its website or YouTube page, as it did with commencement speeches in past years. When Imam and her co-speakers asked why, the school told them the decision was made due to “security concerns.”

The decision runs counter to the public perception that Harvard is crusading against President Donald Trump’s threats to cut university funding to crush speech, according to seven Harvard Divinity School students and staff who spoke to The Intercept. While the university has been publicly praised for fighting back against Trump, its efforts to censor Imam’s speech and wipe out the civic engagement she took part in have raised concerns among students and staff that the school is actually capitulating to pressure from the White House.

The school made a password-protected version of the speech temporarily available to people with a Harvard login, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept. But choosing not to release it publicly “feels to a lot of students suspicious and just contradictory,” said Perlei Toor, a second-year divinity school student. “That’s not what happened last year or the year before that.”

Behind the scenes, the school has been quietly dismantling the Religion and Public Life program from which Imam graduated. Until recently led by the Divinity School’s only Palestinian staff member, the program has drawn Trump’s ire — and criticism from some alumni, campus leaders, and students.

Imam ended her portion of the speech with a poem from a student in Gaza — one of several refugees to whom she offers poetry lessons via an organization she founded connecting U.S. students with students in refugee camps. She and her co-speakers received a standing ovation.

“I had a dream / I went back home / slept in my bed / felt warmth again,” she read. “I had a dream / My eyes forgot the blood, the loss, the patience … My nose forgot the smoke smell, the deaths, the corpse rotten … My body skipped what I had lived.”

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