Pro-Palestinian protesters occupied a building at the University of California, Irvine, on Wednesday, leading university officials to call in multiple police agencies, cancel classes and advise people on campus to shelter in place, a university spokesperson said.

No arrests or injuries were reported as several law-enforcement agencies from Orange County including Irvine police responded to a university request for assistance, a spokesperson for Irvine police said.

The demonstration at Irvine, about 40 miles (65 km) south of Los Angeles, is the latest in a series of campus protests across the United States over the war in Gaza in which activists have called for a ceasefire and the protection of civilian lives while demanding universities divest from Israeli interests.

About 200 to 300 protesters surrounded a UC Irvine lecture hall at a time when no classes were in session, university spokesperson Tom Vasich said. Campus police responded and called for help from nearby agencies, with Irvine police and Orange County sheriff’s deputies among those arriving on campus, Vasich said.

Police in riot gear formed a barricade, and an officer on a loudspeaker warned the crowd that they had formed an unlawful assembly and risked arrest if they remained on site, the Orange County Register reported.

Four adjacent research buildings with potentially hundreds of people inside were locked down and the people inside were instructed to shelter in place, Vasich said. Classes were canceled for the rest of the day, he said.

The lecture hall was near the site of a student encampment similar to those at other universities that have led to mass arrests and clashes with police elsewhere in the country.

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Harvard University again threatened suspensions for pro-Palestinian protesters if they don’t leave a campus encampment, escalating tensions in an impasse that’s left the school as one of the few elite colleges that hasn’t forcibly removed demonstrators.

The Ivy League university has so far resisted calling in the police to clear the encampment, a move that President Alan Garber has said would require a “very, very high bar.” That’s in contrast to other schools that have cracked down on protesters ahead of commencement ceremonies, a marquee event for graduating students, parents and powerful donors.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania cleared similar encampments early Friday, resulting in more than 40 arrests at the two schools, following a police sweep at Columbia University last week.

The protesters want the universities to – among other demands – cut their financial and academic ties to Israel, moves that are aimed at pressuring the country to stop its military operation in Gaza. Israel launched a counterattack that’s killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in the enclave after a deadly Oct. 7 assault on the Jewish state by Hamas. The group, designated a terrorist organization by the US, killed more than 1,200 people and is still holding hostages.

While some schools such as Brown University and Northwestern have agreed with protesters to hold discussions on divestment in exchange for an end to encampments, other rich institutions like Harvard, Columbia and Penn have rebuffed such demands. Garber has said he “will not entertain” calls for divestment.

Rich donors from Robert Kraft to Marc Rowan and Barry Sternlicht have expressed furious opposition over the schools’ handling of the protests. Many university administrators have long viewed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS, movement against Israel as antisemitic because it calls into question the legitimacy of the Jewish state and singles out the policies of one country.

Read more: Colleges Ripped for Agreeing to Hear Israel Divestment Demands

Protesters didn’t resist police action at Penn and MIT on Friday morning, the schools said. Penn said its officers and the Philadelphia Police Department arrested 33 protesters for defiant trespass. Nine students were among those arrested and later released, a Penn spokesperson said, adding that heavy gauge chains and smaller chains that could be used as weapons had been recovered upon a search.

MIT Police arrested 10 protesters. President Sally Kornbluth said she had “no choice but to remove such a high-risk flashpoint at the very center of our campus.”

Harvard is trying to prepare for upcoming campus events on the Yard, where the encampment currently stands, including the main commencement May 23, an event that typically draws more than 30,000 people.

The process of placing protesters on involuntary leave continues to move forward, a spokesperson for the school said Friday. Suspended students wouldn’t be allowed on campus or in Harvard housing, Garber said this week.

“The ongoing protest encampment within Harvard Yard has continued in violation of university policies, creating a significant disruption to the educational environment at a key time in the semester as students are taking finals and preparing for commencement,” the spokesperson said.

The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance slammed “Harvard’s fecklessness” and urged its members to “encourage bold action” by the school’s leadership. The alumni group said the encampment should be disbanded immediately, “by force if necessary,” and the students behind it expelled.

The student group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine said early Friday that Garber rejected a proposal “that would move Harvard forward on transparency and ethical investment” in exchange for taking down their encampment.

The spokesperson for the school said Garber offered to arrange a meeting between students and a member of a shareholder responsibility committee, but only if the protest came to a voluntary end.

“President Garber has made clear the university’s commitment to reasoned discussion of complex issues, including the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “However, as he said, ‘Initiating these difficult and crucial conversations does not require, or justify, interfering with the educational environment and Harvard’s academic mission.'”

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New York:

Pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked US campuses for weeks were more muted 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 video posted to social media by an official 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 Gaza have multiplied 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 year-end 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 counter-protesters 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 United States, some during violent confrontations with police, giving rise to accusations of 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 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 counter-protesters attacked a fortified encampment there.

A large police contingent forcibly cleared the sprawling encampment early Thursday while flash bangs were launched to disperse crowds gathered outside.

Schools officials said that more than 200 people were arrested.

On the US West coast 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 Thursday and Brown University in Rhode Island earlier in the week.

Worldwide

Republicans have accused Biden of being soft on what they say is anti-Semitic 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 anti-Semitism, 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 anti-Semitism “aggressively,” CNN reported.

Meanwhile, similar student protests have popped up in countries around the world, including in Australia, France, Mexico and Canada.

In 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 had yet to take action against the site as of Friday.

The Gaza war started when Hamas militants staged an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

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, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

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