Demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza have continued to rage at universities across the United States, in a night capped by mass arrests in New York and an attack by counter-protesters in California.
In New York, the NYPD said it had arrested 282 people at Columbia University and the City College of New York into Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. That came as police cleared students who had occupied Columbia University Hamilton Hall since April 30.
The building had been dubbed building “Mandela Hall” when students took similar action in support of South African liberation in 1985. This time around, protesters named the building “Hind’s Hall” in honour of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed alongside her family by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Columbia University student journalist Meghnad Bose sad he was inside the university gates when he witnessed the police “arresting pro-Palestinian protesters who had lined up right [in front of] the gates to prevent the NYPD from coming in”.
In a post on X, Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations at the New York Police Department (NYPD), said that Columbia University had requested the police to help “take back their campus”.
He said the police were “dispersing the unlawful encampment and persons barricaded inside of university buildings and restoring order”.
Meanwhile, at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), pro-Israel counter-protesters sought to tear down a pro-Palestine encampment, with witnesses saying the assailants threw objects at those taking part in the demonstration.
Sergio Olmos, an investigative journalist reporting from the UCLA campus, said he witnessed several hundred counter-protesters as they tried to tear down walls set up by the pro-Palestine encampment.
He described counter-protesters trying to hit the pro-Palestine protesters with sticks and in some cases throwing glass bottles.
Witnesses said the incident went on for about two hours. In a post on X, the Los Angeles Police Department said it had responded to the scene “at the request of UCLA, due to multiple acts of violence within the large encampment on their campus”.
