The police and pro-Palestinian protesters clashed, and this led to the arraignment of 25 persons at the University of Virginia. The incident came about when the protesters failed to abide by the police’s order to take them down from the campus, which was then declared an “unlawful assembly” because those present attacked the police and did not comply with their instructions.
This event happened while several protests had started on the US campuses for college and university students attending the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. The protests resulted in more than two thousand student’ arrests since mid-April.
Most recently, Virginia State troopers, wearing riot uniforms, moved in on the students occupying the area around the law enforcement training center. They used chemical agents to disperse the protesters.
Increasing claims seen about the deployment of pepper spray and tear gas against the promoters have been raised.UVA is pending the confirmation on the number of people in prison linked to the university community.
The clash was a response to the university sending multiple iterations of letters demanding that the encampments be dismantled, a request that the protesters outright disobeyed. Defying police arrest orders, masked state troopers donning riot shields then confronted protesters’ cries of “shame on you” and “free Palestine” in return.
Facebook and Twitter were alive with videos and photos of police sinking rapidly on the encampments, taking the protesters into custody with zip-ties, and pepper spraying the protesters to silence them.
The university sent a tweet and declared that the protest (in support of Palestine) was finished after the university and the local and state police forces dispersed the crowd. It was decided that way because of multiple policing law breaks by the students and their refusal to follow the university’s memorandum.
However, the arrests at the University of Virginia are a fragment of a bigger trend where the UVa is not the only university that made arrests as more protests about ending ties between the universities and the companies that support the files by the Israeli government go on.
