Police deployed in force on the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) campus on Wednesday morning after Israel supporters attacked a camp set up by pro-Palestinian protesters.
Witness footage from the scene, verified by Reuters, showed people wielding sticks or poles to attack wooden boards being used as makeshift barricades to protect the pro-Palestinian protesters.
Police were responding to UCLA chancellor Gene Block’s request for support, Zach Seidl, Los Angeles deputy mayor of communications, said on the social media platform X.
The Los Angeles Police Department said on X it was responding to UCLA’s request “due to multiple acts of violence within the large encampment on their campus,” to restore order and maintain public safety. By 5 a.m. they had erected a metal crowd barrier in front of the encampment and the area was quiet.
Footage from the early hours showed mostly male counter-demonstrators, many of them masked and some apparently older than students, throwing objects and trying to smash or pull down the wooden and steel barriers erected to shield the encampment.
Some yelled pro-Jewish comments as pro-Palestinian protesters tried to fight them off.
“They were coming up here and just violently attacking us,” said pro-Palestinian protester Kaia Shah, a researcher at UCLA.
“I just didn’t think they would ever get to this, escalate to this level, where our protest is met by counter-protesters who are violently hurting us, inflicting pain on us, when we are not doing anything to them.”
Demonstrators on both sides sprayed each other and fights broke out.
Another pro-Palestinian student protester, Sophia Sandino, said: “We had people [spraying] us, beating us with bats and sticks, throwing whatever they could to us and none of this law enforcement was here at all. So it’s kind of disappointing that we’re seen as the perpetrators here.”
Katy Yaroslavsky, a Los Angeles city council member whose district includes UCLA, posted on X: “Everyone has a right to free speech and protest, but the situation on UCLA’s campus is out of control and is no longer safe.”
UCLA is part of the University of California system. It has about 32,000 undergraduate students and is located in the residential neighborhood of Westwood just outside of Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.
Last weekend, hundreds of counter-protesters had turned up there chanting support for Israel, hoisting signs and waving blue-and-white Israeli flags.
Supporters of Israel erected a screen that played a video loop of scenes from the Hamas Oct. 7 attack. The two sides taunted one another, pushed, shoved and threw punches while campus police struggled to contain the skirmishes.
White House condemns violence, occupation
Protest encampments on campuses have been set up with greater frequency this month in several states in the U.S.in solidarity with students at Columbia University in New York City. There have also been encampments set up at some Canadian campuses.
On Wednesday morning, police were removing an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. Nearly 60 police officers, some with riot shields, arrived and began removing tents and other items, WISC-TV reported.
Video from WISC-TV showed police with riot shields pushing against protesters and the protesters pushing back while chanting slogans, including “Free Free Palestine.” The station said that at least 10 protesters were taken away by police with their hands zip-tied by officers.
Late on Tuesday, New York City police arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators holed up in an academic building on Columbia’s Manhattan campus and removed a protest encampment that the Ivy League school had sought to dismantle for nearly two weeks.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday that about 300 people were arrested.
“We are processing the arrests to distinguish between who were actual students and who were not supposed to be on the ground,” said Adams.
The White House, while expressing support for freedom of assembly, criticized “forcibly taking over buildings” in a statement on Tuesday.
The U.S. protests have been duly noted in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the demonstration antisemitic and intimidating to Jewish students.
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Many Jewish students are among the organizers of the Columbia protest, though, and bristle at allegations of antisemitism.
About 1,200 people in southern Israel were killed in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel led by Hamas, considered a terrorist group by many Western governments. The Israeli retaliatory assault has killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to health ministry figures.