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Pro-Palestinian US campus protests grow as police crack down
Riot officers used chemical irritants and tasers at one university as administrators at some of the country’s most prestigious institutions battled to prevent occupations taking hold, AFP reported.
Staging sit-ins and mounting boisterous demonstrations, the activists are calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, as well as for colleges to sever ties with the Israeli regime and with companies they say profit from the conflict. “For 201 days, the world has watched in silence as Israel has murdered over 30,000 Palestinians,” organizers of a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles said in an online message.
“Today, UCLA joins students across the country in demanding that our universities divest from the companies which profit off of the occupation, apartheid and genocide in Palestine.”
More than 200 protesters were arrested Wednesday and early Thursday at universities in Los Angeles, Boston and Austin, Texas, where around 2,000 people gathered again on Thursday.
The spreading protests began at Columbia University in New York.
Meanwhile, students in Paris protested again on Friday after police broke up a pro-Palestinian solidarity demonstration Wednesday night at Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious universities.