Police make arrests, dismantle barricades at UCLA after clashes with students protesting war in Gaza
The police arrested pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses across the U.S. overnight, notably at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where chaotic scenes played out early on Thursday as o£cers in riot gear surged against a crowd of demonstrators and made arrests.
The police removed barricades and began dismantling demonstrators’ fortied encampment at UCLA after hundreds of protesters deed orders to leave, some of them forming human chains as police red ®ash-bangs to break up the crowds.
Numerous protesters were arrested, their hands bound with zip ties.
The action came after o£cers spent hours threatening arrests over loudspeakers if people did not disperse. A crowd of more than 1,000 had gathered on campus, both inside a barricaded tent encampment and outside it, in support. Protesters and the police shoved and scu°ed.
Protesters chanted, “Where were you last night?” at the o£cers, in reference to Tuesday night, when counterprotesters attacked the encampment and the UCLA administration and campus police took hours to respond.
‘Unlike other protests’
Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across campuses nationwide in a student movement unlike any other this century. The ensuing police crackdowns echoed actions decades ago against a much larger protest movement against the Vietnam War.
Yale University Police arrested four persons on Wednesday night after around 200 demonstrators marched to the school president’s home and to the campus police department, school o£cials said.
Protesters ignored repeated warnings that they were violating policy by occupying parts of campus without permission, school o£cials said in a statement Thursday. Two of those arrested were students, Yale said
The protest group Occupy Yale said campus police were violent during the arrests and did not issue warnings beforehand. The group posted a video on Instagram showing o£cers taking one person to the ground and pinning another to a sidewalk.
In Oregon, the police have started working to clear demonstrators out of a library at Portland State University. The protesters have been occupying the Millar Library since Monday.
The protests at UCLA appeared to be getting the most attention. Iranian state television carried live images of the police action, as did Qatar’s pan-Arab Al Jazeera satellite network. Live images of Los Angeles also played across Israeli television networks, as well.