NEW YORK (Dispatches) — As students protesting the Israeli war on Gaza at universities across U.S. dug in Saturday and vowed to keep their demonstrations going, some universities shut down encampments.
With the death toll mounting in the war in Gaza, protesters across the U.S. are demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict.  
Early Saturday, police in riot gear cleared an encampment on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston while several dozen students shouted and booed at them from a distance, but the scene was otherwise not confrontational.
At the University of Pennsylvania, interim President J. Larry Jameson called for an encampment of protesters on the west Philadelphia campus to be disbanded, saying it violates the university’s facilities policies.
The protesters say they are drawing attention to the war in Gaza, where an Israeli war has martyred over 34,400 Palestinians, displaced about 80% of the population and pushed hundreds of thousands of people to the brink of famine.  
Israel and its supporters including U.S. President Joe Biden and some American lawmakers and media pundits have branded the protests as antisemitic, while critics of the occupying regime say it uses such allegations to silence opponents. 
Organizers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.
At Columbia University, where protesters have inspired pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country, negotiations continued with those at the student encampment.
The encampment-style protests first began at Columbia University in New York City, where students had set up around 50 tents on the campus’ south lawn.
The university’s senate passed a resolution Friday that created a task force to examine the administration’s leadership, which last week called in police in an attempt to clear the protest, resulting in scuffles and more than 100 arrests.
Decisions to call in law enforcement, leading to hundreds of arrests nationwide, have prompted school faculty members at universities in California, Georgia and Texas to initiate or pass votes of no confidence in their leadership. 
California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, gave protesters who have barricaded themselves inside a building since Monday until 5 p.m. Friday 

to leave and “not be immediately arrested.” The deadline came and went. Only some of the protesters left, others doubled down. After protesters rebuffed police earlier in the week, the campus was closed for the rest of the semester.
In Colorado, police swept through an encampment Friday at Denver’s Auraria Campus, which hosts three universities and colleges, arresting about 40 protesters on trespassing charges.
Organizers at Ohio State University said that pro-Palestinian demonstrators were beaten and tased by police.
At the University of Texas-Austin, video footage showed police grabbing a journalist from the crowd, and then throwing him onto the ground before arresting him.
Students representing the Columbia encampment said that they reached an impasse with administrators and intend to continue their protest. After meetings Thursday and Friday, student negotiators said the university had not met their primary demand for divestment.
Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, faced significant criticism from faculty Friday, but retained the support of trustees.
A report by the university senate’s executive committee, which represents faculty, found Shafik and her administration took “many actions and decisions that have harmed Columbia University.” Those included calling in police and allowing students to be arrested without consulting faculty, misrepresenting and suspending student protest groups and hiring private investigators.
One of the major demands of these protesters is for their respective schools to divest investments from Israel or from companies that are profiting off of the Zionist regime’s war in Gaza and Israel’s wider abuses against Palestinians.
Another one of the demands is for schools to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, which they say have played a key role in Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Pfizer College in California recently shut down its study abroad program with the University of Haifa after concluding that the partnership did not align with the college’s core values.
In France, students at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, which counts President Emmanuel Macron among its many famous alumni, students blocked access to a campus building and classes went online as the wave of protests reached overseas.
Universities where faculty members have initiated or passed votes of no confidence in their presidents include Cal Poly Humboldt, University of Texas at Austin and Emory University.