For all the media attention focused on the coasts, mainstream media largely ignored the protests that swept campuses across the Rust Belt and into Appalachia, where students from working- and middle-class backgrounds have formed their own Gaza encampments and led protests at the University of Pittsburgh, Case Western Reserve University, and Ohio State University. Student demonstrators held protests for Gaza in 11 out of 13 states in the Appalachian region, as well as in every state in the Rust Belt. Hundreds of the more than 2,900 student protesters arrested since the encampments started this spring hailed from inland schools. Protesters and professors at schools like Arizona State, University of Georgia, and the University of Texas at Austin were tackled, pepper sprayed, and shot with rubber bullets.