DUBLIN: A global student movement to occupy university campuses has been gaining momentum and expanding rapidly in recent days, after dramatic scenes that unfolded between pro-Palestinian protesters and police at US colleges. The protests have rocked US campuses for weeks and have spread to countries including Australia, France, Ireland, Britain, Mexico and Canada. The US actions appeared to ease Friday after clashes with police, mass arrests and a stern White House directive to restore order.

Students at Ireland’s prestigious Trinity College Dublin university manned an on-campus protest on Saturday against the Zionist entity’s actions in Gaza, blocking the entrance to a library housing a world-famous medieval manuscript. Student activists described the protest, which began Friday, as a “solidarity encampment with Palestine”, echoing similar protests on US campuses, as some also joined a Saturday march through the city center.

Dozens of students pitched tents on one of the main squares at the university, a Dublin tourist attraction, and piled benches in front of a library that houses the renowned ninth-century gospel manuscript the Book of Kells. Laszlo Molnarfi, president of the institution’s student union, told Irish public broadcaster RTE that the students demand the university sever any relationships it has with the Zionist entity, and the protests would continue until the demands are met.

“The Book of Kells is now closed” for an indefinite period, Molnarfi posted on X, formerly Twitter. “No business as usual during a genocide,” he added, demanding Trinity “cut ties” with the Zionist entity. The message was echoed at the protest march, with social media footage showing hundreds of attendees massed by the university chanting slogans and waving Palestinian flags. “Trinity students have joined the global campus uprising!” the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign organizers said on X.

Police on Friday entered the elite Sciences Po university in Paris to remove dozens of students staging a pro-Gaza sit-in in the entrance hall, as protests fired political debate about the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Demonstrations have struck education institutions in several French cities in recent weeks, echoing the mass Gaza protests that have led to clashes in US universities.

After the evacuation, around 300 people demonstrated on Pantheon Square around 1.5 km from the university in response to a call from student unions. “I’m very moved by what’s going on in Palestine,” said Mathis, 18, a music student at the nearby Sorbonne university who asked not to give his surname. Eric Coquerel, a senior lawmaker for the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party, said the “the government must accept young people mobilizing”. “Instead, they often criminalize, caricature or slander them,” he said.

Sciences Po sites in the French cities of Le Havre, Dijon, Reims and Poitiers have all seen disruption, blockades or occupations. Police also removed students from the Institute for Political Studies (IEP) in Lyon. Around 100 students had occupied a lecture hall at Science Po’s branch in the southeastern city late on Thursday. Law enforcement on Friday removed a dozen students who were blocking the entrance to a university site in nearby Saint-Etienne. And in the northeastern city of Lille, police broke up a student blockade of the ESJ journalism school and deployed outside the nearby Sciences Po building, allowing exams to go ahead.

Hundreds of supporters of the Zionist and Gaza faced off at a Sydney university Friday, bringing echoes of US college protests and Middle East tumult to a campus and continent on the other side of the world. Rival demonstrators came eye-to-eye shouting slogans and waving flags. Still, except for a few heated exchanges, the protest and counterprotest passed off peacefully.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have been camped for 10 days on a green lawn in front of the University of Sydney’s sprawling Gothic sandstone edifice — a bastion of Australian academia. Deaglan Godwin, a 24-year-old arts and science student and one of the camp’s organizers, said US protests were both an inspiration and a warning. New York’s Columbia University, the scene of police crackdowns and mass arrests, inspired “us to set up our own camp”, Godwin said. He said Columbia is “also now a warning, a warning that the government is willing to use quite lethal, brutal force in order to put down Palestinian protesters”.

British-Palestinian doctor and Glasgow university rector Ghassan Abu-Sittah said Saturday he was denied access to France where he was to report on the medical situation in Gaza. Abu-Sittah said on X, formerly Twitter, that he had been invited to give an account to French senators of his experience as a doctor in Gaza since the Zionist offensive there, but had been blocked at Paris’s Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport.

He had already been stopped from entering Germany last month where he had hoped to attend a “Palestinian Congress” along with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who was also denied access. “I am at Charles De Gaulle airport. They are preventing me from entering France,” Abu-Sittah said on X. “I am supposed to speak at the French Senate today. They say the Germans put a 1 year ban on my entry to Europe.”.

In another X post on Saturday, Abu Sitta said that “the French authorities are denying me access to an earlier flight and insisting on sending me on the last flight back” to London, calling the measure “an act of utter vindictiveness”. He said “fortress Europe” was “silencing the witnesses to the genocide while (the Zionist entity) kills them in prison”. Kuwait-born Abu-Sittah spent 43 days in Gaza, notably at the territory’s largest hospital Al-Shifa.

Palestinian advocacy groups said Thursday that the head of orthopedics at Gaza’s largest hospital Al-Shifa has died in Zionist custody, saying he had been tortured during his detention. Doctor Adnan Ahmed Atiya Al-Barsh died at the Zionist Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank last month, the Palestinian Prisoners Affairs Committee and the Palestinian Prisoners Club said in a joint statement.

Barsh, 50, had been arrested with a group of other doctors last December at Al-Awda Hospital near the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. He died on April 19, the prisoners groups said, citing Palestinian authorities. “His body is still being held,” they added. The groups said they had also learnt that another prisoner from Gaza, Ismail Abdel Bari Rajab Khadir, 33, had died in Israeli custody.

The groups said evidence suggested the two men had died “as a result of torture”. They said Barsh’s death was “part of a systematic targeting of doctors and the health system in Gaza”. The health ministry in Gaza said the surgeon’s death amounted to “murder”, adding that it brought to 492 the number of health workers killed in Gaza since the war erupted nearly seven months ago.

In the US, police in Manhattan cleared an encampment at New York University after sunrise, with video posted to social media by an official showing protesters exiting their tents and dispersing when ordered to do so. At the University of Chicago, the school’s president said talks with protesters on a compromise had failed and indicated that the university might intervene in an encampment there as a result.

The news came the same day that dozens of American flag-wielding counter-protesters showed up and confronted the school’s pro-Palestinian group, but police separated the two sides, local media reported. The University of California, Los Angeles, announced that Friday’s classes would be held remotely after police cleared a protest camp there and arrested more than 200 people. More than 2,000 arrests have been made in the past two weeks across the United States, some during violent confrontations with police, giving rise to accusations of use of excessive force.

An encampment has grown at Canada’s prestigious McGill University, where administrators on Wednesday demanded it be taken down “without delay”. However, police had yet to take action against the site. Dozens of pro-Palestinian students from Mexico’s largest university camped out Thursday in solidarity with similar protests that have swept colleges in the United States. Mounting flags and chanting “Long live free Palestine”, the protesters set up tents in front of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) head office in Mexico City. The students called on the Mexican government to break diplomatic and commercial ties with the Zionist entity. – Agencies