Police on Monday moved in to disperse a pro-Palestinian encampment at Yale University in Connecticut, and arrested nearly 50 students in the operation.
The protesters have been camping in Beinecke Plaza on the Yale University campus for three days and demanding the university break ties with military weapons manufacturers linked to Israel.
The encampment was raided early in the morning beginning with police officers cordoning off the area and demanding the protesters disperse. While some of them opted to leave, others refused and were arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing. A total of 47 students have been arrested during the raid, a university spokesperson told the Yale Daily News college newspaper.
“The university made the decision to arrest those individuals who would not leave the Plaza with the safety and security of the entire Yale community in mind and to allow access to university facilities by all members of our community,” the spokesperson explained, adding that Yale will now take disciplinary action against the arrested students.
However, the arrests have apparently not deterred the pro-Palestinian protesters, as more of them have shown up at the location after the raid. Some 300 protesters have blocked the intersection at the Plaza despite the heavy police presence remaining in the area, footage from the scene shows.
The morning raid on the camp was preceded by minor violence at the Plaza, with altercations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students reported. Namely, the editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, an independent campus publication, Sahar Tartak, claimed she was stabbed in her eye with a Palestinian flag. Tartak attributed the alleged assault to being “visibly Jewish,” yet the extent of her purported injuries remained unclear.
The effort to end the pro-Palestinian protest at Yale comes after more than 100 protesters were detained at Columbia University in New York last week during a similar protest. The Columbia campus was raided by the NYPD, which cleared out protesters and dismantled their camp.
Those protesters have also been demanding their university divest from “companies complicit in genocide” and linked to arming Israel. The daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar was among the arrested during the protest on campus and ended up suspended from the university.
The White House vowed to take action against pro-Palestinian protests, which have been going on at multiple college campuses amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza. The Biden administration slammed an “alarming surge of anti-Semitism” on campuses, vowing to aggressively implement its new strategy to protect the Jewish community.