Escalating Gaza protest
Police storm occupied university building
May 1, 2024, 5:28 a.m
Listen to article
This audio version was artificially generated. More info | Send feedback
On Tuesday night, pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied a building at New York’s Columbia University. They only want to leave when their demands are met. Now the police are taking action against the squatters on the campus.
The pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University in New York are escalating. The New York police entered the university’s Hamilton Hall on Tuesday evening (local time) to evict activists who had occupied the building. “We’re evacuating the building,” police officers from a riot squad shouted as they advanced toward the barricaded entrance to the building. Meanwhile, dozens more police officers made their way to the protest camp.
“Shame! Shame!” shouted many students standing outside on campus. Television images showed how numerous police officers entered the building through a window on the second floor and reached the upper floor from the outside using a vehicle with a ladder. About 50 detainees, their hands tied behind their backs with cable ties, were put on a bus.
The occupation of the elite university began on Tuesday night when demonstrators broke windows and entered Hamilton Hall. They unfurled a banner reading “Hind’s Hall” to symbolically name the building after a six-year-old Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Outside the eight-story neoclassical building, protesters blocked the entrance with tables, folded their arms in a human barricade and chanted pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas slogans.
Apparently agitators came from outside
At a news conference the evening before police arrived, Mayor Eric Adams and law enforcement officials said the Hamilton Hall occupation was instigated by “outside agitators” unaffiliated with Columbia and known to law enforcement. Police based their conclusions in part on the occupiers’ escalating behavior, which included vandalism, the erection of barricades and the destruction of security cameras. Adams suggested that some of the protesting students were not fully aware of the “external actors” in their midst. One of the leaders of the protests, Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, disputed claims that outsiders initiated the occupation. “They are students,” he told Reuters.
The situation at Columbia University joins a wave of Gaza-related protests at other US universities. Demonstrations against the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have roiled the university landscape and divided the public in recent weeks. Pro-Palestinian groups have called on universities to stop investing in companies that support or profit from Israel’s military actions in the occupied Palestinian territories. Many Jewish students fear for their safety on campus because of the sometimes anti-Semitic protests.