NEW YORK: Pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked United States campuses for weeks were more muted on Friday after a series of clashes with police, mass arrests and a stern White House directive to restore order.
Police in Manhattan cleared an encampment at New York University after sunrise, with a video posted by an official on social media showing protesters exiting their tents and dispersing when ordered to do so.
The scene appeared relatively calm compared to crackdowns at other campuses around the country — and some worldwide — where protests over Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip have spread in recent weeks.
University administrators, who have tried to balance the right to protest and complaints of violence and hate speech, have increasingly called on police to clear out the demonstrators ahead of yearend exams and graduation ceremonies.
At the University of Chicago, the school's president said talks with protesters on a compromise had failed and indicated that the university might intervene in an encampment there as a result.
The news came the same day that dozens of American flag-wielding counterprotesters showed up and confronted the school's pro-Palestinian group, but police separated the two sides, local media reported.
More than 2,000 arrests have been made in the past two weeks across the US, some during violent confrontations with police, giving rise to accusations of the use of excessive force.
President Joe Biden, who has faced pressure from all political sides over the conflict in Gaza, gave his first expansive remarks on the protests on Thursday, saying that "order must prevail."
"We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent," Biden said in a brief address from the White House. "But neither are we a lawless country. We're a civil society, and order must prevail."
His remarks came hours after police moved in on demonstrators at the University of California, Los Angeles, which had seen a violent confrontation when counterprotesters attacked a fortified encampment there.
A large police contingent forcibly cleared the sprawling encampment on Thursday morning, while flash bangs were launched to disperse crowds gathered outside.
School officials said that more than 200 people were arrested.
On the US West Coast on Friday, protesters at a University of California, Riverside encampment were set to disband by midnight following a compromise with administrators. The agreement came after similar compromises at New Jersey's Rutgers University on Thursday and Brown University in Rhode Island earlier in the week.
Republicans have accused Biden of being soft on what they say is antisemitic sentiment among the protesters, while he faces opposition in his own party for his strong support for Israel's military offensive.
"There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism, or threats of violence against Jewish students," Biden said.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona echoed the condemnation in a letter to university leaders on Friday, pledging to investigate reports of antisemitism "aggressively," CNN reported.
Meanwhile, similar student protests have popped up in countries around the world, including in Australia, France, Mexico and Canada. AFPIn Paris, police moved in to clear students staging a sit-in at the Sciences Po university.
An encampment has grown at Canada's prestigious McGill University, where administrators on Wednesday demanded it be taken down "without delay."
However, police are yet to take action against the site as of Friday.
The war in Gaza started when Hamas staged unprecedented attacks on southern Israel on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, an AFP tally of Israeli official figures showed.
Israel estimates that 128 hostages remain in Gaza. The Israeli military says 35 of them are dead.
Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed more than 34,600 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, the Hamas-run territory's Health Ministry said.