Students at a growing number of U.S. colleges continue to gather in pro-Palestinian encampments with a unified demand that Israel end its war on Gaza and that universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

So far, police have arrested hundreds of student protesters at numerous colleges, including the University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University in New York, among others.

The growing unrest on college campuses is also accompanied by a rise in antisemitism.

CNN reports that antisemitic acts have surged across America and particularly on campuses since October 7.

Islamophobia has also run rampant.

The recent surge in protests have in turn inflamed tensions, forcing leadership to decide when free speech on campus crosses a line and becomes threatening, CNN reports.

Several colleges have called the police on protesters, leading to the arrests of hundreds across multiple campuses.

On Wednesday, at the University of Texas at Austin, state troopers in riot gear, including some on horseback, began breaking up a group of protesters shortly after a demonstration.

The arrests on Wednesday in cities of Austin and Los Angeles came as students at Harvard University and Brown University on the east coast also defied threats of action and set up encampments in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Al Jazeera reported that protesters at Columbia University, the epicenter of demonstrations that began last week, said they won’t disperse until the school agrees to cut ties with Israeli universities and commits to divesting funds from Israel-linked entities, among other demands.

Tensions on multiple US campuses were sparked after Hamas’ October 7 attack, where militants killed about 1,200 people and took over 200 hostages. Israel retaliated on Gaza and has over the past six months killed more than 34,000 people.

When did the current conflict start?

CNN reports that the situation escalated last week at Columbia University when the university’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, testified before a House committee about the school’s response to charges of campus antisemitism. A pro-Palestinian protest kicked off on campus at the same time.

Following her testimony, Shafik requested in a letter released by the university that the New York City Police Department remove people who were encamped on the South Lawn of the campus who were “in violation of the University’s rules and policies” and trespassing.

More than 100 people were arrested.

The encampments were organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a student-led coalition of more than 100 organizations, to protest what they describe as the university’s “continued financial investment in corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and military occupation of Palestine.”

Since last Thursday, other college campuses have faced similar protests and encampments, as well as arrests.

Pro-Palestinian encampments have been set up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Emerson College, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley. On Wednesday, police arrested nearly 100 protesters at the University of Southern California after a dispersal order.

Yale University police arrested at least 45 protesters Monday while Harvard University closed Harvard Yard and officials at the school suspended a pro-Palestinian student organization for allegedly violating school policies, CNN reported.

Israel’s military is poised to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah and assault Hamas hold-outs in the southern Gaza Strip city, a senior Israeli defence official said on Wednesday, despite international warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe, Reuters reported.

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said Israel was “moving ahead” with a ground operation, but gave no timeline.

The defence official said Israel’s Defence Ministry had bought 40,000 tents, each with the capacity for 10 to 12 people, to house Palestinians relocated from Rafah in advance of an assault.

Video circulating online appeared to show rows of square white tents going up in Khan Younis, a city some 5 km (3 miles) from Rafah. Reuters could not verify the video but reviewed images from satellite company Maxar Technologies which showed tent camps on Khan Younis land that had been vacant weeks ago.

An Israeli government source said Netanyahu’s war cabinet planned to meet in the coming two weeks to authorise civilian evacuations, expected to take around a month, read the report.

The defence official, who requested anonymity, told Reuters that the military could go into action immediately but was awaiting a green light from Netanyahu.

Rafah, which abuts the Egyptian border, is sheltering more than a million Palestinians who fled the half-year-old Israeli offensive through the rest of Gaza and say the prospect of fleeing yet again is terrifying.

“I have to make a decision whether to leave Rafah because my mother and I are afraid an invasion could happen suddenly and we won’t get time to escape,” said Aya, 30, who has been living temporarily in the city with her family in a school.

She said that some families recently moved to a refugee camp in coastal Al-Mawasi, but their tents caught fire when tank shells landed nearby. “Where do we go?”

HITTING HARD

Israel, which launched its war to annihilate Hamas after the Islamist group’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli towns, says Rafah is home to four Hamas combat battalions reinforced by thousands of retreating fighters, and it must defeat them to achieve victory.

“Hamas was hit hard in the northern sector. It was also hit hard in the centre of the Strip. And soon it will be hit hard in Rafah, too,” Brigadier-General Itzik Cohen, commander of Israel’s 162nd Division operating in Gaza, told Kan public TV.

But Israel’s closest ally Washington has called on it to set aside plans for an assault, and says Israel can combat Hamas fighters there by other means.

“We could not support a Rafah ground operation without an appropriate, credible, executable humanitarian plan precisely because of the complications for delivery of assistance,” David Satterfield, U.S. special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issued, told reporters on Tuesday.

“We continue discussions with Israel on what we believe are alternate ways of addressing a challenge which we recognise, which is Hamas military present in Rafah.”

Egypt says it will not allow Gazans to be pushed across the border onto its territory. Cairo had warned Israel against moving on Rafah, which “would lead to massive human massacres, losses (and) widespread destruction”, its State Information Service said.

Three Egyptian security sources said that military and security coordination between Egypt and Israel over any Israeli incursion into Rafah did not mean approval of it, Reuters reported.

Egypt welcomed the return of Palestinians northwards from Rafah, believing it to be in the interest of the population despite also serving Israeli plans to besiege Hamas in Rafah, the sources added.

Israel has withdrawn most of its ground troops from southern Gaza this month but kept up air strikes and conducted raids into areas its troops abandoned. Efforts by the United States, Egypt and Qatar to broker an extended ceasefire in time to head off an assault on Rafah have so far failed.

Gaza medical officials say than 34,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign, with thousands more bodies feared buried under rubble.

Hamas killed 1,200 people and abducted 253 on Oct 7, according to Israeli tallies. Of those hostages, 129 remain in Gaza, Israeli officials say. More than 260 Israeli troops have been killed in ground fighting since Oct 20, the military says.

H. A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow in international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said he expected the assault on Rafah “sooner rather than later” because Netanyahu is under pressure to meet his stated objectives of rescuing hostages and killing all the Hamas leaders.

“The invasion of Rafah is unavoidable because of the way he has framed all of this,” he said. But it will not be possible for everyone to leave the city, so “if he sends the military into Rafah, there are going to be a lot of casualties”.

Israel has taken significant steps in recent weeks on allowing aid into Gaza, the U.S. special envoy for humanitarian issues said on Tuesday, but considerable work remained to be done as the risk of famine in the enclave is very high.

David Satterfield declined to say whether Washington was satisfied by Israel’s moves, weeks after U.S. President Joe Biden demanded action to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying conditions could be placed on U.S. support for close ally Israel if it did not implement a series of “specific, concrete and measurable” steps.

“Israel has taken significant steps in these last two and a half weeks,” Satterfield told reporters.
“There is still considerable work to be done. But progress has been made.”

The risk of famine throughout war-devastated Gaza, especially in the north, is “very high”, he said, calling for more to be done to get aid to those in need in that part of the tiny, densely populated Palestinian territory, Reuters reported.

The United Nations has long complained of obstacles to getting aid in and distributing it throughout Gaza in the six months since Israel began an aerial and ground offensive against Gaza’s ruling Islamist militant group Hamas.

Israel’s military campaign has reduced much of the territory of 2.3 million people to a wasteland with an unfolding humanitarian disaster since October, when Hamas ignited war by storming into southern Israel.

The head of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said on Tuesday that the daily average number of trucks entering Gaza during April was 200 and that there had been a peak on Monday of 316.

There was also now a focus on garbage collection, he added, especially in southern Gaza, in a bid to avoid disease outbreaks as the warmer weather approaches.