A California college delays its commencement ceremony amid ongoing demonstrations over Israel's conflict in Gaza

A California college delays its commencement ceremony amid ongoing demonstrations over Israel's conflict in Gaza

Leading Californian institution postponed its commencement ceremony in response to the ongoing demonstrations against Gaza that are occurring on US college campuses.

Citing "new safety measures," the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles canceled the event.

Many campuses have seen the emergence of rallies and encampments in favor of the Palestinians in Gaza, leading to the detention of hundreds of individuals.

To make students leave, universities have called in the police.

However, others are bargaining as well. There was a deadline of Thursday night to remove the campsite at Columbia University in New York City, the site of the demonstrations that started last week.

Talks were going well and will go forward, according to the institution.

After they refused to leave, twenty-eight protestors at Emory University in Atlanta were taken into custody on Thursday.

After the canceled valedictorian speech, tensions at USC

Where are US university demonstrations against Gaza taking place?

According to Emory police, demonstrators "pushed past" security guards stationed at the graduation site on Thursday morning.

Although they said that the releases were in reaction to things being hurled at the police, the force conceded that chemical irritants had been deployed as part of crowd control operations.

Additionally, Atlanta Police acknowledged employing chemical irritants, but they refuted claims that they had shot demonstrators with rubber bullets.

A demonstrator who was seen on camera being taken into custody by the police identified herself as Emory philosophy department head Noelle McAfee.

Ms. McAfee claimed that as police moved in and the demonstrators started to march, she was watching what she called a peaceful demonstration.

"It went from a peaceful demonstration to mayhem in the matter of a minute," she said. She stated that she had frozen and that they had taken her into custody immediately.

Following the order for police to break up a new protest camp by Columbia University administrators, which resulted in the detention of over 100 individuals, the most recent round of campus demonstrations got underway.

Universities have been under pressure from activists to "divest from genocide" and to cease allocating large portions of their endowments to businesses that produce weapons and other sectors that aid Israel's conflict in Gaza.

South Africa has filed a complaint against Israel at the International Court of Justice, claiming that the country is killing Palestinians in a genocide; Israel has dismissed the claim as "baseless."

Yale University protest organizer and law student Chisato Mimura told the BBC that demonstrators were angry at President Joe Biden and Yale administrators for "quite literally funding and equipping the weapons used in genocide."

"What they're doing is totally putting their full weight behind it," she said. "We are well aware of the prominent position they are playing."

There have been accusations of antisemitism against some of the protesters on US colleges. While some Jewish students have participated in the rallies, other Jewish students have claimed to have felt frightened at Columbia and other institutions.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, paid a visit to the school earlier on Thursday. One of the demonstrators removed from the campus by police last week was her daughter, Isra Hirsi.

Ms. Omar told the BBC, "This is a movement that started with only 70 students." "And because Columbia University determined to crack down on these people and violate their First Amendment [rights], this issue has now spread nationally and internationally."

In more recent advancements:

When President Biden arrived at an official engagement in Syracuse, New York, over a hundred demonstrators waving placards that said "Genocide Joe" and other slogans welcomed him.

Northwestern University, which is located close to Chicago, allowed students to set up a camp, prompting the administration to take action to restrict tent use. While police were present on campus and gave demonstrators orders to leave, there were no reports of arrests.

The Uncommitted movement's organizers said that they will camp out with the student activists at the University of Michigan, encouraging Democratic primary voters to reject President Biden.

Students demonstrated in Washington, DC, at American University, Georgetown University, and George Washington University.

Boston's Brandeis University, where a third of the student population is Jewish, said that it will extend its transfer deadline to help students who felt singled out and mistreated at other universities.

The campus of California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, may be closed until next week due to demonstrators occupying facilities, the university said.

There have also been encampments and demonstrations on the campuses of Harvard, Brown, MIT, and Indiana University.

The battle started on October 7, when gunmen headed by Hamas launched an unprecedented offensive on southern Israel, murdering over 1,200 people, the bulk of whom were civilians, and capturing 253 more as prisoners to return to Gaza.

Since then, over 34,180 people have died in Gaza, the most of them women and children, according to the health ministry operated by Hamas in the region.