Pro-Palestinian students and faculty of Drexel University, Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania demonstrate as they spend night where they erected an encampment at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia on Thursday. College campuses across the US braced for fresh protests by pro-Palestinian students, extending a week of increasingly confrontational standoffs with police, mass arrests and accusations of anti-Semitism. — AFP LOS ANGELES, April 26 (AFP): Pro-Palestinian protests spread to more college campuses in the United States on Thursday as authorities appeared to be running out of patience and police began to push back forcefully.
Riot officers used chemical irritants and tasers at one university as administrators at some of the country's most prestigious institutions battled to prevent occupations taking hold.
Staging sit-ins and mounting boisterous demonstrations, the activists are calling for a ceasefire in Israel's war with Hamas, as well as for colleges to sever ties with the country and with companies they say profit from the conflict.
"For 201 days, the world has watched in silence as Israel has murdered over 30,000 Palestinians," organizers of a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles said in an online message.
"Today, UCLA joins students across the country in demanding that our universities divest from the companies which profit off of the occupation, apartheid and genocide in Palestine."
More than 200 protesters were arrested Wednesday and early Thursday at universities in Los Angeles, Boston and Austin, Texas, where around 2,000 people gathered again on Thursday.
At Emory College in Atlanta, photographs showed police wielding tasers as they wrestled with protesters on neatly manicured lawns.
The Atlanta Police Department said officers responding to the school's request for help were "met with violence" and used "chemical irritants" in their response.
The spreading protests began at Columbia University in New York, where a midnight deadline was approaching for students to remove an encampment that has become the epicenter of the movement.
- Free speech? -
The protests pose a major challenge to university administrators who are trying to balance campus commitments to free expression with complaints that the rallies have crossed a line.
Pro-Israel supporters and others worried about campus safety have pointed to anti-Semitic incidents and allege that campuses are encouraging intimidation and hate speech.
"I've never felt more scared to be a Jew in America right now," said Skyler Sieradsky, a 21-year-old student of philosophy and political science at George Washington University.
"There are students and faculty standing by messages of hate, and standing by messages that call for violence."
Student protesters say they are expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, where the death toll has topped 34,305, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.
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