Dozens of police officers in riot gear at the University of Utah on Monday tried to break up a tent city outside the university president’s office that had been set up in the afternoon. Police dragged students by their arms and legs and broke down tents and students at Richmond Commonwealth University pelted police officers with bottles and boards, AP News reports.
Law enforcers used tear gas and rubber bullets. Mass detentions were reported during the riots. The university administration assured that those students who stayed and did not stop the protest would be suspended. Those who participated in the rallies but obeyed the rectorate and folded their tents will not be affected by the measures, The New York Times reports.
The elite university has already begun suspending students who disobeyed orders to leave their pro-Palestinian encampment by 2 p.m. on Monday, a deadline set by the university, according to NBC News. A university spokesman Ben Chang said:
We have begun suspending students as part of the next phase of our efforts to ensure the safety of our campus.
He did not specify how many students were suspended, but said those “create a hostile environment” for Jewish students.
Earlier, US authorities summoned the president of Columbia University to the education committee. At the same time, US police are getting tougher on the protesters by the day.
Campus protesters stormed and occupied a building on Columbia University’s main campus overnight, hanging a Palestinian flag from the windows of Hamilton Hall.
For the past two weeks, student communities at American universities have begun issuing open letters in defence of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and going out to rallies. Protests have spanned Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, New York University, among others. In response, faculty members at the institutions demanded that students’ rights to peacefully protest be respected. At UCLA, tensions spilled out when protesters broke behind security barricades. NBC News reports hundreds arrested this weekend.
At the University of Texas at Austin, “no encampments will be allowed,” per Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. “Instead, arrests are being made,” he said.
Meanwhile, the regional council of Ile-de-France said on Monday it would suspend funding for Sciences Po University in Paris because of demonstrations by its students in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s war on Gaza, CNN reports.
Council president Valerie Pecresse said she had decided to suspend funding “until calm and security are restored at the university.”
Accusing pro-Palestinian students of “radicalisation” and calling their protests a manifestation of anti-Semitic hatred, Pecresse wrote on X that the La France Insoumise (LFI) party and its “left-wing allies” cannot dictate their laws to the entire educational community. She said Ile-de-France defends the right to free, informed and respectful debate at a French university.
Sciences Po has become another prestigious Parisian university where pro-Palestinian demonstrations calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza are taking place.
Israel launched a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip after a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on 7 October last year that killed some 1,200 people. Since then, nearly 34,500 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and more than 77,600 have been injured in the massive destruction and severe shortages of basic necessities.
According to the UN, vast swathes of Gaza lie in ruins after more than six months of Israeli warfare, forcing 85 per cent of the enclave’s population to move internally amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine.
