Dozens arrested as Gaza protest cleared at Columbia

Dozens of students have been arrested after police cleared an encampment set-up by pro-Palestine protesters at Columbia University in New York.

The university's president said that the "extraordinary step" came after multiple warnings and was necessary to provide a safe environment.

Among the participants in the protest was Minnesota politician Ilhan Omar's daughter, who has been suspended.

Protests have been held at US colleges since the war in Gaza began last year.

Protestors had constructed an encampment of about 50 tents on campus on Wednesday - and overnight hundreds of students and others had rallied with them.

On Thursday, they were joined by independent presidential candidate Cornel West, who told the students that he stands "in solidarity with human suffering".

In a statement sent to faculty earlier on Thursday, Columbia University president Dr Nemat Shafik said that she had hoped that her decision to authorise the New York Police Department to clear the encampment would "never be necessary".

"The individuals who established the encampment violated a long list of rules and policies," Dr Shafik said. "Through direct conversations and in writing, the university provided multiple notices of these violations."

Additionally, Ms Shafik said that she regretted that "all of these attempts to resolve the situation were rejected by the students involved".

The number of students arrested on campus remains unclear. The BBC has contacted the New York Police Department for comment.

Police intervened in protests around the university on Wednesday, as Dr Shafik testified about antisemitism before Congress.

The Columbia Spectator, a student newspaper, reported that the incident marks the first time mass arrests have been made on campus since Vietnam War protests in 1968.

On X, the platform formally known as Twitter, Ilhan Omar's daughter Isra Hirsi, 21, said that she had been suspended from Barnard College for "standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide" despite never having been reprimanded or disciplined in the three years she has been a student at the private women's university.

Her mother is among the most vocal critics of Israel on Capitol Hill.

One of the organisations that organised the protest, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, said that the suspension of Ms Hirsi and the two other students - identified as Maryam Iqbal and Soph Dinu - means that "they have lost access to their food, housing, and medical centre".

"Two of the three live in student housing and have been illegally locked out with no notice," the statement adds, noting that the suspension is effective immediately.

An email to the students cited by Apartheid Divest, which the BBC has not confirmed, said that the suspension came after the students were involved in an "unauthorised encampment" and have not stopped participating "despite repeated requests from Barnard and Columbia" to do so.

Barnard University told the BBC that it does "not provide information about confidential student conduct proceedings".

A separate Barnard community update sent out on Thursday said only that staff members had asked students to leave and warned them they would be "subject to sanctions" if they failed to do so.

Written warnings were also provided on Wednesday evening, warning of interim suspensions if they did not leave the encampment later the same night.

"This morning... we started to place identified Barnard students remaining in the encampment on interim suspension, and we will continue to do so," the statement added.

Barnard's Student Government Association said in a statement that the suspensions are "illegitimate" and a violation of "the sanctity of the academic institution and its purpose to facilitate open dialogue."

At least one professor - classics lecturer Joseph Howley - has publicly expressed support for the protest, telling the Spectator that "Columbia can either be a world-class place of research and learning, or we can be an institution that resorts to law-and-order responses to protest even when there's no threat to safety or operations, but we can't be both".

"I wish the last few months had left me with greater confidence that the University's response today was about how the students were protesting rather than what they were protesting," he added.

The protest at Columbia comes just days after pro-Palestinian protesters blocked major roads across the country, paralysing access to airports including Chicago's O'Hare International and Seattle-Tacoma International, as well as major thoroughfares such as those crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and Brooklyn Bridge in New York.