On Monday morning, police swarmed Yale University campus in Connecticut, starting to arrest students who had been camping there protesting against Israel for the past few days. Over the weekend, the protest had escalated into violent incidents.
Video footage posted online showed a group of police officers, some in riot gear, arriving at the Ivy League campus, blocking the entrance to a square on the campus in New Haven where over two hundred protesters had gathered.
According to the independent student newspaper Yale Daily News, the police issued warnings to the protesters upon arrival, stating that they could be arrested if they did not leave.
Despite the warnings, many protesters refused to leave. Eventually, police handcuffed several dozen demonstrators and took them away in Yale University vans.
Yale University Police Chief Anthony Campbell told Yale Daily News on Monday morning that those arrested faced charges of unlawful entry, a Class A misdemeanor. He also mentioned that the protesters would be released after initial processing of the cases.
Campbell informed Yale Daily News that the protesters had been warned twice before the arrests – once on Sunday night at 11 p.m. and another time before 7 a.m. on Monday.
The campus newspaper reported that these pro-Palestinian protesters had set up tents in Beinecke Plaza, marking their third night of camping there.
A video circulating on social media platform X showed students tightly holding flagpoles carrying protest signs and chanting slogans as the police inspected the dozens of tents set up in the square.
By around 8 a.m., the police had cleared the square and the camping site of student protesters.
A spokesperson for Yale University stated in a release that 47 protesters were arrested by the authorities.
Prior to the arrest operation, the protest had already turned somewhat violent. On Saturday night, as a Jewish student journalist was reporting on the previous day’s camping, protesters used a Palestinian flag to injure his eye.
Yale University President Peter Salovey, also known as 苏必德 (Sū bì dé) in Chinese, sent an email warning to students on Sunday night, stating that the school would take disciplinary action against protesting students engaging in violent behaviors in accordance with its policies.
Yale University is another U.S. institution where protest escalation has led to police arrest operations. Last week, a similar incident occurred at Columbia University in New York City, where over a hundred protesting students camping on campus without permission and refusing to leave were arrested. However, protests at Columbia continued thereafter.
Columbia University announced on Monday that all classes that day would be conducted online. This move aimed to ensure the safety of Jewish students, as the major Jewish holiday of Passover was beginning Monday night.