Police arrest dozens in crackdown on pro-Palestine students at MIT, UPenn

Police have dismantled protest camps and arrested dozens of pro-Palestine activists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, in the latest crackdowns on demonstrations roiling US campuses.

Philadelphia officers in riot gear pushed reporters away from the encampment at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday before tearing down tents and tossing the belongings of protesters in a trash truck, the student newspaper reported. About 33 people were arrested on the Ivy League campus, Penn's public safety department said.

A similar scene unfolded simultaneously at MIT near Boston, where student journalists reported that riot police arrested at least 10 student protesters before flattening the encampment and discarding their belongings.

The dawn raids were the latest efforts by school and local authorities to end such demonstrations at dozens of universities around the country.

Officials at Harvard University on Friday began issuing suspensions to students who were involved in an encampment on the Ivy League school's Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, according to an Instagram post by the school's Palestine Solidarity Committee.

On Monday, Interim Harvard President Alan Garber said participants faced suspension, restricting them from campus and possibly barring them from taking exams and residing in university housing.

"Disciplinary procedures and administrative referrals for placing protesters on involuntary leave continue to move forward," a school spokesperson said in a statement on Friday, without specifying the number of students suspended.

Increasingly untenable

The protesting students are demanding a cease-fire in Israel's incursion into Gaza and have demanded their schools divest from companies with ties to Israel.

One New York City school affiliated with Colum bia University — where protests inspired the nationwide wave of demonstrations — said on Thursday that its board of trustees had endorsed students' divestment calls.

The Union Theological Seminary said in a statement it had decided "to withdraw support from companies profiting" from Israel's war after months of research into its investment portfolio. It added that "our investments in the war in Palestine are small because our previous, strong anti-armament screens are robust."

A similar step was taken by Evergreen State College in Washington state earlier this week, after officials agreed that a college committee would start proposing strategies for "divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories."

The agreement was signed by Evergreen representatives and students on Tuesday, and protesters cleared the encampment themselves on Wednesday, according to local news reports.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth said that the 10 individuals arrested on Friday peacefully had submitted to police, but that the arrests came after escalating clashes between anti-war and pro-Israel protesters.

Fueling more protests

Since the first mass arrests at Columbia on April 18, at least 2,600 demonstrator s have been detained at more than 100 protests in 39 states and Washington, DC, according to The Appeal, a nonprofit news organisation. Some police experts say such sweeping detentions can be counter-productive, fueling more protests.

Similar protests have sprung up at campuses in other countries. In western Canada, police removed protesters from an encampment at the University of Calgary on Thursday, using "non-lethal munitions," according to a statement from the city, which said the number of arrests would be made public on Friday.

Approximately 50 demonstrators rallied outside Utrecht University's library and a few dozen at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, as reported by local news agency ANP.

Meanwhile, in Paris's Sorbonne University, 86 individuals were arrested for various offenses, including disrupting order, after hundreds student protesters sat in hours long sit-in against Israel's brutal war in Gaza , according to French prosecutors.