The New York police on Tuesday evening dislodged the pro-Palestinian demonstrators barricaded since the previous night in a building at Columbia University, intervening manu militari in the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian mobilization on American campuses.
• Read also: Students barricade themselves in a building at Columbia University
• Read also: Pro-Palestinian Students Refuse to Leave Columbia University Despite Evacuation Order
A New York police spokesperson announced to the New York Times around 3 a.m. Wednesday that the operation had ended: “There is no one left in the building” and the camp is empty.
About two hours later, an AFP journalist saw that the encampment had been cleaned, with all the tents taken down by university staff and the remaining items thrown into huge black trash bags.
For their part, the American media claimed that all the demonstrators had been evacuated from the campus.
It was in riot gear, aided by an intervention vehicle with a ladder, that dozens, even hundreds of police officers, entered the Columbia campus on Tuesday evening (around 1:30 a.m. GMT), while American student anger has been spreading for two weeks at universities across the country, reminiscent of protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.
AFP
Helmeted officers, climbing the ladder, then burst through a window into the occupied building.
Dozens of people, some wearing keffiyehs, were arrested and handcuffed before being placed in police buses, AFP noted. Outside the campus, crowds shouted “Free Palestine!” “.
“Last night’s events on campus gave us no choice,” wrote university president Minouche Shafik in a publicly released letter, asking the New York Police Department to intervene at the perimeter. from this private establishment in Manhattan.
AFP
Until May 17
For two weeks, she and many other university leaders across the country have faced protesters, sometimes just a few dozen, who have occupied their campuses to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas.
In her letter to the New York Police Department, Ms. Shafik asks law enforcement to “maintain a presence on campus until at least May 17, in order to maintain order and ensure that no encampments is not established. » The graduation ceremony is scheduled for May 15.
AFP
During the night from Monday to Tuesday, a few dozen protesters barricaded themselves in a building, Hamilton Hall, renamed “Hind’s Hall” by the pro-Palestinian group “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, in homage to a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza. .
On its Instagram account, this group denounced an “invasion” of the campus.
The Columbia presidency began on Monday to administratively “suspend” students who refused to leave the tent “village”.
” Chaos “
Six months before the presidential election in a polarized country, this student movement has provoked a strong reaction from the political world.
Joe Biden “must do something” against these “paid agitators,” Republican candidate Donald Trump said Tuesday evening on Fox News. “We must put an end to the anti-Semitism that plagues our country today,” he added.
AFP
“While Columbia University is plunged into chaos, Joe Biden is absent because he is afraid to tackle the subject,” Republican leader of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson wrote on X in the evening. It has long called for the departure of its president, Minouche Shafik.
“Occupying a university building by force is the wrong approach” and does not represent “an example of peaceful demonstration,” John Kirby, spokesperson for Democratic President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, thundered before the police intervention. .
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators are demanding that their universities cut ties with patrons or companies linked to Israel.
Columbia refuses.
AFP
But another elite Northeast campus, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, announced a deal with students: dismantling the encampment in exchange for a university vote in October on possible “corporate divestments.” who enable and profit from the genocide in Gaza+.”
” Restore order “
Across the United States, images of law enforcement in riot gear brutally intervening on campuses have gone around the world. Since last weekend, hundreds of students, teachers and activists from around twenty universities have been arrested, some arrested or placed in detention.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a group of students claimed responsibility for raising a Palestinian flag in the center of campus, before police put up the US colors again, according to press reports.
These new pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the United States have reignited the electric debate since October between freedom of expression and accusations of anti-Semitism.
The country has the largest number of Jews in the world after Israel, and millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.
AFP
The war in the Gaza Strip was triggered by the unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7 on Israeli soil which led to the massacre of 1,170 people, mainly civilians, according to an AFP report based on data Israeli officials.
In retaliation, Israel promised to destroy the Palestinian Islamist movement and its vast military operation in Gaza left 34,535 people dead, mostly civilians, according to Hamas.
