French police officers have broken into the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Paris and removed pro-Palestinian student activists who have occupied its buildings to protest Israel’s war on Gaza, French media reported.
Under the slogan “Stop the Genocide in Gaza,” students have been protesting since Tuesday, demanding a ceasefire and an end to the systematic violence against the Palestinian people.
Gathering at the university campus located in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, popularly known as Tolbiac, the students expressed their strong support for Palestine.
Carrying Palestinian flags around the campus, students chanted slogans including “Macron may not want this, but we are here for the honour of Palestine and for those who have been killed.” Matheo, a history student, told media:
Today we are organising a protest against the genocide in Gaza for Palestine.
He said they started the demonstration on campus to respond to Israel’s actions and “to protest against the pressure on French universities opposing the genocide in Gaza.”
Mateo said they held a similar protest last October, but the school’s administration prevented it by taking Palestinian flags from students’ hands, adding that students also have the right to speak out about what is happening in Gaza.
Police on Friday “moved in” to one of the buildings and removed more than 50 students who were staging a sit-in, including some who had begun a hunger strike.
James, a student at the university, told the media that the school’s administration held another round of talks with the protesters earlier on Friday, but negotiations to move the protest to another location on campus broke down. He said:
There were no assurances given that there wouldn’t be a police intervention after people leave the rooms.
Another student named Lucas, who is studying for a master’s degree, told the AFP news agency that he witnessed how “some students were dragged and others gripped by the head or shoulders”.
Outside the Sorbonne University, a few hundred metres from Sciences Po in central Paris, members of the Union of Jewish Students in France (UEJF) were setting up a “dialogue table” on Friday. UEJF President Samuel Lejoyeux told broadcaster Radio J:
We want to prove that it’s not true that you can’t talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To do that, we have to sideline those who single out Jewish students as complicit in genocide.
In the northeastern city of Lille, the ESJ journalism school was blocked off, according to the AFP news agency.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s office said such protests would be dealt with “in all severity”, adding that 23 university sites were “evacuated” on Thursday.
Israel has been waging a military offensive on Gaza since a cross-border Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 that killed some 1,200 people. Since then, more than 34,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, the vast majority of them women and children, while thousands more have been injured amid widespread destruction and a severe shortage of basic necessities.
According to the UN, more than six months into Israel’s war, vast swathes of Gaza lie in ruins, with 85 per cent of the enclave’s population displaced amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine.
