Police launch violent crackdowns on Gaza protests at colleges across the US: ‘We’re terrified of another Kent State’

Police in riot gear have violently broken up peaceful Gaza solidarity protests at college campuses across the country, arresting over 500 people in the process.

Images of armed police beating students, throwing them to the ground and using tear gas to disperse the protests have flooded social media in the past few days as the protests continued to spread.

One video from Emory University in Atlanta on Thursday showed police using a taser on a Black man who was being restrained by three officers on the ground. Witnesses also reported police firing some kind of non-lethal projectile into the crowd.

Local outlet Mainline reported that 18 people had been arrested at the Atlanta university. A spokesperson for the university said the initial crowd of protesters who gathered on the campus “were not recognized as members of our community and were disrupting the university as our students finish classes and prepare for finals.”

“Some members of the Emory community later joined the initial group,” said the spokesperson, Laura Diamond, adding that multiple police warnings for the crowd to disperse were ignored.

The Atlanta Police Department said in a statement that its officers “were met with violence” when they were “securing the campus.”

Alan, a senior at the University of Southern California, said that a peaceful protest on the university campus on Wednesday had escalated suddenly when armed police arrived to disperse student protesters with rubber bullets and riot gear.

The 22-year-old said tensions had risen suddenly after members of the USC Department of Public Safety (DPS) had attempted to arrest an individual and put him in a car.

“The students blockaded the car and told them that they can arrest him and they’re not leaving until he’s out of the vehicle,” Alan told The Independent.

“People built a human chain arm around the car and they said we’re not leaving until you get him out of the car. It just got very tense.”

Police arrested 93 people during its USC crackdown.

Dozens of state troopers — many of them armed with automatic weapons — used batons to disperse protesters at the University of Texas in Austin on Wednesday, where 34 people were arrested, including a photographer for local Fox 7 news.

The American Civil Liberties Union said state officials “rapidly escalated a planned day of peaceful demonstrations by deploying law enforcement in riot gear against students and the press.”

“The First Amendment guarantees people in Texas and across the nation the right to protest, including those who advocate for Palestinians,” Caro Achar, engagement coordinator at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement.

“Public officials don’t get to forcefully suppress the voices of people they disagree with,” she added.

Despite the arrests and police violence, the national protests show no sign of dying down.

The student demonstrations, which began at Columbia University in New York last week, have largely focused on calls for universities to cut ties with any companies doing business with Israel in protest over the war in Gaza.

They spread across the country when the NYPD forcibly removed students from a sit-in protest, after the university’s president requested police disperse them.

More than 100 students were arrested and subsequently suspended from Columbia last Thursday. One student told The Independent they had been held by the NYPD for eight hours following their arrest, during which time their hands were zip-tied.

Far from quelling the protests, the scenes of police violently rounding up students have spurred similar demonstrations at campuses across the country. The Gaza protests have drawn comparisons to the student-led demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the 1960s that defined a generation, and whose shadow still looms over American politics today.

Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a PhD student at Columbia, said he feared a repeat of the bloody crackdowns that marred that era.

“We’re terrified that there’s going to be a second Kent State at Columbia,” he said, referring to the killing of four unarmed college students at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970 during protests over the Vietnam War.

Student protests over the war in Gaza have been common across college campuses since the war in Gaza broke out in October, following a surprise Hamas attack that killed 1,200 in Israel. The resulting war has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and aid blockages have resulted in famine conditions in northern Gaza, creating a humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of schools, and all of Gaza’s 12 universities, have been damaged or destroyed since the Israeli attacks began.

By Thursday, hundreds more arrests had been made on college campuses from coast to coast, including 108 at Emerson College in Boston, 47 at Yale University, at least 120 at New York University and nine at the University of Minnesota.

The Independent has approached the White House for comment on the arrests.