Police remove pro-Palestinian students from Sciences Po University in Paris | Israel War in Gaza News

French police officers entered the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Paris and removed pro-Palestinian student activists who were occupying its buildings to protest Israel’s war in Gaza.

Reporting from the French capital, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler said police on Friday “stormed” one of the buildings and removed more than 50 students who were organizing a demonstration, including some who had begun a hunger strike. .

“They [students] were slowly filtered. They were allowed to leave the premises. It seems like everything went peacefully,” she said.

James, a student at the university, told Al Jazeera that on Friday, the school administrator held another round of negotiations with protesters, but negotiations to move the protest elsewhere on campus failed.

“There were no guarantees that there would be no police intervention after people left their rooms,” he said.

Another student named Lucas, who is studying for a master’s degree, told the AFP news agency that he witnessed how “some students were dragged and others grabbed by the head or shoulders.”

Footage captured by Al Jazeera outside the campus also showed young protesters shouting pro-Palestinian chants as they clashed with police.

Students from the university’s Palestinian Committee had previously told reporters they would face a “disproportionate” response from police, who had blocked access to the site before entering.

They also complained about the lack of “medical assistance” to seven students who began a hunger strike “in solidarity with the Palestinian victims”.

Speaking before the police intervention, a Sciences Po spokesperson said the university was looking for a “negotiated solution to end the impasse” with its students, and that some of its satellite campuses in Reims, Le Havre and Poitiers were also affected by protests.

The university was closed for the day on Friday, with a heavy police presence around its main building.

Epicenter of the protests

Sciences Po became the epicenter of anti-war student protests in France due to the institution’s academic ties to Israel. Last week, students blocked access to the university.

But Sciences Po director Jean Basseres on Thursday rejected protesters’ demands to review its relations with Israeli universities, prompting students to continue their demonstration.

Although the protests spread across the country, they remained on a much smaller scale than those seen in the United States.

Outside Sorbonne University, a few hundred meters from Sciences Po in central Paris, members of the Union of Jewish Students in France (UEJF) set up a “dialogue table” on Friday.

“We want to prove that it is not true that you cannot talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said the president of the UEJF, Samuel Lejoyeux, on Radio J.

“To do this, we must put aside those who point to Jewish students as accomplices in genocide,” he added.

In the city of Lille, in the northeast of the country, the ESJ journalism school was blocked, according to the AFP news agency.

Students from the nearby branch of Sciences Po had their identities checked before being allowed to enter through the back to take their exams.

Around 100 students occupied a classroom at the Science Po branch in Lyon on Thursday night, while a lockdown at a university in nearby Saint-Etienne was cleared on Thursday morning by police.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s office said such protests would be handled with “full rigor”, adding that 23 university facilities were “evacuated” on Thursday.