The leader of the US House of Representatives has called on the head of Columbia University to resign.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that university president Nemat Shafik has failed to guarantee the safety of Jewish students on campus.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have also called for Ms Shafik’s resignation over police action against the protests.
Recent protests against the war in Gaza, which began at Columbia, have spread to campuses across the US.
Students at the Ivy League university in Manhattan set up a protest encampment a week ago.
On 18 April, the university asked the New York Police Department to clear the camp, and officers arrested about 100 people.
Protesters have since returned to the area with more tents and placards. In response, Columbia officials switched from in-person classes to online and hybrid learning for the rest of the school’s semester over safety concerns.
On Wednesday, Mr Johnson held a news conference at Columbia along with other Republican lawmakers after meeting with Ms Shafik.
The protesters chanted and heckled him throughout his remarks, including chants of: “We can’t hear you.”
The Speaker said that Columbia officials had not acted to restore order and raised the possibility of National Guard troops being called in to break up the ongoing protest.
“This is dangerous,” Mr Johnson said. “We respect free speech, we respect diversity of ideas, but there is a way to do that in a lawful manner and that’s not what this is.”
Page Fortna, a professor of political science at Columbia, told the BBC that she had seen a number of “highly objectionable” incidents during the protests, including an Israeli flag being ripped from a student’s hand and “extremely problematic” comments.
However, Ms Fortna added that she had seen no physical violence against Jewish students on campus and called accusations of widespread antisemitism being made by Mr Johnson and other Republican lawmakers “exaggerated”.”There’s a real difference in the tone of the conversation outside the gates, and what’s actually happening on campus,” she said.
Outside the campus on Wednesday, a masked protester stood on a street corner shouting antisemitic slurs and abuse at students.Several protest camp supporters quickly confronted him, telling him that his remarks “cheapened” their efforts. “This is really detrimental to the movement,” said Caroline Daisy, a Baltimore native who came to New York to support the protesters.
“This is not an antisemitic movement. But outside protesters are a different story sometimes.”
In interviews this week, other demonstrators argued that incidents of harassment of Jewish students had been rare and blown out of proportion by those opposed to their demands.
New York police and school officials have also said “outside agitators” have stirred up the protests.
Speaking to the BBC on Wednesday, Guy Sela, an Israeli Columbia student – and a veteran of the Israel Defence Forces – said that he believes “every Israeli Jewish student” at the university has faced “at least one antisemitic act”, whether verbal or physical, since the protest began.
“I’ve been threatened here, called names like murderer, butcher and rapist, just because I was born in Israel,” he said.
Protests against Israel’s war in Gaza spread across the country after the police arrests at the encampment at Columbia:
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After attempts to keep them out, protesters set up a camp at Harvard University on Wednesday afternoon, and camps were also reported at other Boston-area universities including MIT, Tufts and Emerson
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Police pushed back protesters at the University of Texas in Austin. The Daily Texan, the campus student newspaper, said that around 50 police were on the scene, including officers on horseback
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Police were also seen confronting protesters in chaotic scenes on social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles
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Two students were arrested at Ohio State University in Columbus after a protest on Wednesday
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At the University of California, Berkeley, a camp was set up in Sproul Plaza, a regular site of anti-war and free speech protests. School authorities indicated they would tolerate the camp as long as it didn’t interfere with university operations
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Camps were also reported at other universities including the New School in Florida, the University of Michigan, and the University of Rochester in New York state
Activists have been calling for universities to “divest from genocide” and to stop investing large school endowments in companies involved in weapons manufacturing and other industries supporting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Israel strongly denies any suggestion that it is committing genocide in the Palestinian enclave, though the International Court of Justice has said the accusation was “plausible”.
The war began when Hamas gunmen carried out an unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and taking 253 others back to Gaza as hostages.
More than 34,180 people – most of them children and women – have been killed in Gaza since then, the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry says.
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