The New York police entered a building on the Columbia University campus with a large number of officers on Tuesday night (30), invaded by protesters against Israel, and arrested several of them. Also at night, there was a riot between pro- and anti-Israel protesters at a university in California.
Police officers used a crane to enter the Columbia building from the first floor, as students participating in the protest had blocked the main entrances.
The protesters offered no resistance, were detained one by one and then taken on several buses to be booked into police units, according to The New York Times.
According to CNN, more than 200 protesters were arrested in Columbia and City College of New York, another protest site.
The building, called Hamilton Hall, had been invaded the night before by undergraduate students from Columbia, the epicenter of university protests in the United States against Israel due to its offensive against the terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The university said in a statement that after learning of the building invasion, it made the decision that the protest had become the responsibility of the police.
“We regret that the protesters decided to worsen the situation with their actions. After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized and blocked, we had no alternative,” the institution said.
The White House reacted to the invasion of the building of the prestigious New York university by protesters: “Taking buildings by force is not peaceful, it is wrong,” one of its spokespersons, Andrew Bates, told NPR public radio.
Also at night, groups of pro-Israel protesters clashed with students installed in a camp at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to protest the Israeli offensive.
The clashes occurred hours after the university announced that the protest “is illegal and violates university policy” and warned that students who did not leave could be suspended or expelled, according to the Los Angeles Times newspaper reported this Wednesday (1st).
“Horrible acts of violence occurred at the camp tonight and we immediately called authorities to request mutual support. Firefighters and medical teams are at the scene. We are sickened by this senseless violence and it must end,” Mary Osako, vice provost for Strategic Communications at UCLA, said in a statement.
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