Universities in Australia, France and Canada see Gaza protests

Protests over the Gaza war are sprouting in prominent universities across the world including France and Australia, although at a slower rate compared with in the US, where demonstrations at around 40 facilities have at times spiralled into clashes with police and mass arrests.

Police in Paris entered France's prestigious Sciences Po university on May 3 and removed many of the dozens of student activists who had occupied its buildings in protest against Israel's conduct in its war against the Hamas militant group in Gaza.

France is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel and the US, and to Europe's largest Muslim community.

Unlike in some college campuses across the US, the French protests have been peaceful and there were no signs of violence as the students were brought out of the buildings.

Sciences Po has become the epicentre of French student protests over the war and academic ties with Israel, which have spread across France.

The university was closed for the day on May 3, with a heavy police presence around its main building.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal's office said student protesters had been evacuated from 23 institutions of higher education around the country on May 2.

Sciences Po Lyon, an unaffiliated university in France's third-largest city, and the Lille school of journalism was also blocked by protesting students on May 3, images broadcast by French news channels showed.

Sciences Po's director Jean Basseres on May 2 rejected demands by protesters to review its relations with Israeli universities, prompting protesters to continue their movement with at least one person entering a hunger strike, according to a student speaking on behalf of the protesters.

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The war in Gaza began after Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel on Oct 7 that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel estimates that 129 hostages seized by militants during their attack remain in Gaza. The Israeli military says it believes 34 of them are dead.

Israel's relentless retaliatory offensive on Gaza has killed at least 34,596 people in the Palestinian territory, mostly women and children, according to the besieged enclave's Hamas-run health ministry.

Outside the Sorbonne University, a few hundred metres from Sciences Po in central Paris, members of the Union of Jewish Students in France (UEJF) were setting up a "dialogue table" on May 3.

"We want to prove that it's not true that you can't talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," UEJF president Samuel Lejoyeux told broadcaster Radio J.

"To do that, we have to sideline those who single out Jewish students as complicit in genocide," he added.

In the north-eastern city of Lille, the ESJ journalism school was blocked off.

Students at the city's nearby branch of Sciences Po had their identities checked before they were allowed in via a back entrance to sit exams.

In Australia, hundreds of supporters of Israel and Gaza faced off at the University of Sydney on May 3, as rival demonstrators came eye-to-eye shouting slogans and waving flags.

Still, except for a few heated exchanges, the protest and counter-protest took place peacefully.

Australian police were conspicuously absent even during the protests, which brought about 100 pro-Israel counter-protesters face to face with 400 demonstrators at the pro-Palestinian camp.

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Public order and riot squad vehicles were parked well out of view, on the periphery of the campus.

Similar demonstrations have also sprung up at universities in Canada, including McGill University in Montreal, where students have set up pro-Palestinian protest camps on April 27.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault said on May 2 that the encampment should be dismantled as more students erected pro-Palestinian camps across some of Canada's largest universities, including the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and University of Ottawa.

While McGill had requested police intervention, law enforcement had not stepped in on May 2 to clear the encampment and said in a statement it was monitoring the situation.

There was also a pro-Israel counter-protest in Montreal on the same day. The two sides were kept separate.

For weeks, the authorities on campuses from New York to California have tried to thread the needle between the right to protest and complaints of violence and hate speech, resulting in more than 2,000 arrests in two weeks as university terms end.

At Columbia University, scores of New York City police on April 30 marched onto campus to clear an encampment and arrest demonstrators who had commandeered a classroom building.

Two days later, the New York Police Department said an officer's gun went off accidentally inside one of the university's buildings as police were removing pro-Palestinian protesters from the campus.

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No one was injured during the shooting.

It was the second time in as many weeks that the administration has called on police to control the protests.

Students have been suspended, and threatened with expulsion. Police are now stationed around the clock on campus.

At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), police on the morning of May 2 flattened a pro-Palestinian camp, a day after it was attacked by pro-Israel counter-protesters.

Soon after the UCLA police raid, US President Joe Biden broke his silence on the demonstrations, saying Americans have the right to protest but not to unleash violence.

Similar crackdowns have occurred at colleges across the country, from Arizona State to Virginia Tech and Ohio State to Yale. Police have arrested around 2,000 campus protesters to date.

"There is a level of anger and dissatisfaction that had been there for a while and (the Gaza war) was the spark that caused this huge fire that, right now, political elites don't know how to extinguish," said Professor Clement Petitjean, an American studies professor at the Sorbonne University.

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