Protests demanding an end to the Israeli aggression on Gaza continue in American universities amid police repression

Protests in support of the Palestinian people continued in a number of American universities yesterday, amid a new wave of detentions carried out by the police against demonstrators. Security forces carried out a forceful dismantling of the tent camps built by students.

Agence France-Presse reported that US police arrested 17 demonstrators at the University of Texas in Dallas and forcibly dismantled a protest camp.

Law enforcement authorities also arrested many people at Fordham University in New York, and evacuated a camp set up on campus in the morning, according to officials.

For its part, the New York Police Department announced during a press conference that it had arrested about 300 people from two universities. The students were in a building at the prestigious Columbia University in Manhattan to protest the Israeli aggression on Gaza.

Meghnad Bose, a student at Columbia University who witnessed the evacuation, said: “The police dealt with them in a brutal and hostile manner.”

In turn, a coalition of pro-Palestinian student groups at this university said in a post on the Instagram application: “The police randomly arrested people, and a number of students were injured to the point that they needed to be transported to the hospital.”
Other camps were also dismantled yesterday at the University of Arizona in Tucson in the southwest of the country and also in the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the north of the country, according to local media.
The wave of student protests has been escalating for two weeks in major American universities from California in the west to the northeastern states, passing through the central and southern states such as Texas and Arizona. The protest condemn the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, and demand that their administrations sever their ties with the Israeli occupation entity, its donors, and affiliated companies.

According to a count by Agence France-Presse, since April 17, American police have carried out arrest operations on at least thirty university campuses.

Photos documenting riot control officers at universities showed that these officers intervened at the request of their administrations. Photos spread all over the world, reminding us of similar events that occurred in the United States during the Vietnam War.