Dozens of helmeted police officers entered the Columbia University campus in the heart of New York City and began evicting a building that had been barricaded by pro-Palestinian student protesters.
AFP journalists saw police officers climb to the second floor of Hamilton Hall from a truck with sleepers and disappear inside, while the Columbia Spectator student newspaper reported that arrests were being made.
Hamilton Hall was barricaded at dawn by students who vowed to fight any eviction while protesting the rising death toll from Israel's war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The action took place at a time when university administrators in the US are struggling to contain pro-Palestinian demonstrations on dozens of campuses.
The demonstrations - the largest and longest-running unrest to rock US university campuses since the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s - have already led to several hundred arrests of students and other activists.
Many have vowed to continue their actions despite suspensions and threats of expulsion.
"We will stay here, drawing on the lessons of our people (in Gaza) who stay put and hold on even under the worst conditions," a protester wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh headscarf, who declined to give her name, told reporters outside the hall earlier in the day.
As she spoke, protesters were seen using ropes to lift crates of supplies to the second floor of the building, apparently signaling that the students were going home.
President Joe Biden's White House sharply criticized the occupation of Hamilton Hall, with a spokesman saying it was "absolutely the wrong approach."
"This is not an example of peaceful protest," the spokesman added.
The protests pose a challenge for university administrators trying to balance the right to free speech with complaints that the rallies are devolving into anti-Semitism and hate speech.
The unrest has swept across American institutions of higher learning like wildfire, with many protesting students setting up tent camps on campuses from the East to the West Coast.
At Columbia University, demonstrators vowed to stay until their demands were met, including that the school divest itself of all financial assets tied to Israel.
The university rejected the demand, and President Minush Shafiq said earlier that negotiations with the students had failed.
Columbia University has warned that students occupying the building are in danger of being expelled.
In a press release last night, the university stated that people in the tent camps and in Hamilton Hall numbered "in the dozens," while nearly 37,000 people study at Columbia University. / BGNES
