At least 45 pro-Palestinian Arab protesters were arrested at Yale University on Monday, after police in riot gear stormed the campus during a protest, The Independent reports.
The arrests happened after nearly 200 pro-Palestinian Arab protesters gathered on campus to urge Yale to divest from military weapons manufacturers, student newspaper Yale Daily News reported.
The protesters had been camped out on Beinecke Plaza on the university’s campus for three days.
Police officers first began by warning them that they risked being arrested if they didn’t clear out before handcuffing and arresting people including students, the student paper reported.
Those arrested were removed on Yale University shuttle buses. Journalists from the Yale Daily News were also threatened with arrest if they did not move from the plaza, according to its reports.
On Saturday night, as the protest was ongoing, a Jewish Yale student journalist was stabbed in the eye with a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flag.
Sahar Tartak, the editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, was covering the protest when she was suddenly surrounded by demonstrators.
Tartak told The New York Post she and a friend were singled out for wearing Hasidic Jewish attire as the crowd formed a blockade around them to interfere with their filming.
Tartak said she tried to report the assault to campus police but that they told her there was nothing they could do.
Tensions have been high across some US colleges, schools and workplaces since Hamas’ October 7 terror attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Hamas in Gaza.
The House Education Committee has launched a probe on campus antisemitism. The probe followed a December hearing in which the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT equivocated when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people would be considered harassment on campus.
Harvard President Claudine Gay and Penn President Elizabeth Magill both resigned in the wake of the hearing. MIT President Sally Kornbluth testified at the same hearing but has thus far emerged relatively unscathed, with MIT's governing board expressing its firm support for her.
The investigations began with those three schools, with Harvard’s probe recently escalating to a subpoena from Foxx.
The committee has since added Columbia University and Rutgers University to its probe.
This past Wednesday, Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik testified to the House Education Committee about antisemitism on campus.
Shafik refused to condemn the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as antisemitic during the hearing, or to say that it violates university policy. Instead, she called the chant "hurtful" and said that she would rather not hear it uttered on campus.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Passover in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)