Pro-Palestinian US campus protests grow as police crack down
LOS ANGELES, (AFP) - Pro-Palestinian protests spread to more college campuses in the US as authorities appeared to be running out of patience and police began to push back forcefully.
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.
Staging sit-ins the activists are calling for a ceasefire in Israel's war on Gaza, as well as for colleges to sever ties with the country 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," organisers of a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles said. "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 at universities in Los Angeles, Boston and Austin, Texas.
At Emory College in Atlanta, photographs showed police wielding tasers as they wrestled with protesters on neatly manicured lawns.
The spreading protests began at Columbia University in New York, where a midnight deadline was approaching for students to remove an encampment that has become the epicenter of the movement.
Student protesters say they are expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, where the death toll has topped 34,305.
Demonstrators, who include a number of Jewish students, have disavowed anti-Semitism and criticised officials equating it with opposition to Israel.
"People are here in support of Palestinian people from all different backgrounds... (compelled by) their general sense of justice," a 33-year-old graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin, who said he was Jewish told AFP.
Protests and encampments have also sprung up at New York University and Yale, Harvard, Brown University, MIT, the University of Michigan and elsewhere.