New York mayor says nearly 300 people arrested in Columbia campus raid; 30 arrested after clashes in Wisconsin
Mounting tensions on U.S. campuses boiled over on Wednesday when pro-Israel supporters attacked an encampment of pro-Palestinian and anti-war protesters at UCLA, just hours after police arrested activists who occupied a building at Columbia University and flattened a tent city on its campus.
Police deployed in force on the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) campus on Wednesday morning after Israel supporters attacked a camp set up by pro-Palestinian protesters.
Witness footage from the scene, verified by Reuters, showed people wielding sticks or poles to attack wooden boards being used as makeshift barricades to protect the pro-Palestinian protesters.
Footage from the early hours showed mostly male counter-demonstrators, many of them masked and some apparently older than students, throwing objects and trying to smash or pull down the wooden and steel barriers erected to shield the encampment.
Some yelled pro-Jewish comments as pro-Palestinian protesters tried to fight them off.
“They were coming up here and just violently attacking us,” said pro-Palestinian protester Kaia Shah, a researcher at UCLA.
“I just didn’t think they would ever get to this, escalate to this level, where our protest is met by counter-protesters who are violently hurting us, inflicting pain on us, when we are not doing anything to them.”
Demonstrators on both sides sprayed each other with pepper spray and fights broke out.
Another pro-Palestinian student protester, Sophia Sandino, said: “We had people [spraying] us, beating us with bats and sticks, throwing whatever they could to us and none of this law enforcement was here at all. So it’s kind of disappointing that we’re seen as the perpetrators here.”
Katy Yaroslavsky, a Los Angeles city council member whose district includes UCLA, posted on X: “Everyone has a right to free speech and protest, but the situation on UCLA’s campus is out of control and is no longer safe.”
Fifteen people were injured during the UCLA confrontation, including one person who was hospitalized, according to University of California system president Michael V. Drake.
UCLA is part of the University of California system. It has about 32,000 undergraduate students and is located in the residential neighborhood of Westwood just outside of Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.
Last weekend, hundreds of counter-protesters had turned up there chanting support for Israel, hoisting signs and waving blue-and-white Israeli flags.
Supporters of Israel erected a screen that played a video loop of scenes from the Hamas Oct. 7 attack. The two sides taunted one another, pushed, shoved and threw punches while campus police struggled to contain the skirmishes.
Video from WISC-TV showed police with riot shields pushing against protesters and the protesters pushing back while chanting slogans, including “Free Free Palestine.”
More than 30 people were arrested, most of them released without charges, but four were charged with battering law enforcement, police said.
Four officers were injured, including a state trooper who was hit in the head with a skateboard, according to University of Wisconsin police spokesperson Marc Lovicott. Within hours, protesters had erected more tents at the UW campus.
The station said that at least 10 protesters were taken away by police with their hands zip-tied by officers.
Protest encampments on campuses have been set up with greater frequency this month in several states in the U.S.in solidarity with students at Columbia University in New York City. There have also been encampments set up at some Canadian campuses.
Late on Tuesday, New York City police arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian and anti-war demonstrators holed up in an academic building on Columbia’s Manhattan campus and removed a protest encampment that the Ivy League school had sought to dismantle for nearly two weeks.
