At 6 a.m., police arrived at Beinecke Plaza, where over 250 students were participating in a Pro-Palestine protest. They were given warnings from the university to vacate the area or else they would face law enforcement and disciplinary action. Shortly after, the police arrested at least 47 student protesters. They were charged with misdemeanor criminal trespassing charges.
The protests began because the students wanted their university to divest from military weapon manufacturers that provide weapons to the Israeli military and other companies tied to that state. The Columbia College student council had previously approved a measure asking the university to divest from “companies and academic institutions that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s acts of occupation, apartheid, and genocide,” the Columbia Spectator reported.
After the arrest, about 250 protestors rallied in support of those who got arrested.
By 7:52 am all the other protestors were arrested. After detaining the protestors officers and maintenance workers cleared the tents and removed the activists’ flyers from the plaza walls.
However, the arrests didn’t stop them from speaking up. The crowd soon moved from the Schwarzman Center sidewalk shortly after 8 am and formed a large protest circle that blocked the intersection of Grove and College streets. As the other students were released many joined the blockade.
As more students joined, police blocked off streets on three sides of the intersection.
For almost nine hours, Yale students and New Haven organizers took over the intersection until 5 pm. When the protestors started moving, the New Haven police requested that the intersection be reopened to traffic at 5:30 pm.
“We told Dean Lewis that a meeting could not be productive without equality of access to information,” Patrick Hayes, 24, an organizer of the encampment, wrote to the News. “We told him we were willing to keep a peaceful encampment as Trustees assessed what, if any commitment could be made to disclosure, and that we understood this could take time. We negotiated in good faith, but with no commitment to even assess disclosure of any kind we could not accept the offer.”
Yale students were not the only ones who faced arrests. Over 100 student protesters at Columbia University were arrested for pro-Palestine protests. And on Monday afternoon, the New York Police arrested over 150 protesters.
