Police used stun guns against Gaza protesters

American police on Thursday arrested over 500 students at colleges across the country, who were demonstrating against the war in Gaza and US support for Israel.

In the last 24 hours, there have been images and videos on social media of police using violent means to break up the demonstrations.

A video from Emory University in Atlanta shows police using a stun gun on a black man who is being held down by three police officers.

Witnesses also reportedly said that the police fired a type of non-lethal projectile into the crowd.

The Independent and The Guardian write that the police used rubber bullets, which the police themselves deny, according to the BBC.

The police believe they were met with violence when they were supposed to “secure the campus”.

A student named Alan (22) tells The Independent that the demonstration was peaceful, but that the situation escalated when armed police arrived to disperse the demonstrators.

According to the student, the tension only increased when someone from the Department of Public Safety tried to arrest a person and put him in a car.

– People built a people’s chain around the car and said we wouldn’t leave until they let him out of the car. It just got really tense.

The university’s student newspaper Emory Wheel writes that the police used tear gas against the students.

Spokesperson for the university Laura Diamond says that the protesters were not initially students who belonged to the university, but that some students from Emory joined the protest.

According to the local newspaper Mainline, 18 people were arrested at the University of Atlanta.

On Wednesday, armed police responded to a similar demonstration at the University of Texas, where they used batons to disperse the protesters. 34 people were arrested, including a photographer for local Fox 7 news, writes The Independent.

The American Civil Liberties Union stated that the police “escalated a day of planned, peaceful demonstrations” by deploying police officers in “riot gear”.

At several universities, students have set up tents on campus, including Emory in Atlanta, Northwestern in Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkley and Columbia University in New York.

At Columbia, the students are said to have been ordered to remove the tents on Friday. They must have been notified that the police will intervene if they do not do so voluntarily.

Also at Yale, 45 protesters were arrested last week when they stopped traffic around the private university.

In Syracuse, New York, President Joe Biden was met on Thursday by around 100 demonstrators who shouted “Palestine will never die, Palestine shall be free!”.

One protester held up a sign reading “Genocide Joe”. Another sign read “How do you sleep at night?”.

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