After more than a week of demonstrations in the United States, the White House had also appealed on Sunday to the student movement to hold peaceful protests, after hundreds of people, including students and activists, were taken in for police questioning and in some cases detained.

"We ask those in the encampment to disperse voluntarily. We are exploring alternatives internally to resolve this crisis as quickly as possible," wrote Columbia University President Minouche Shafik in a lengthy press release.

The university leader regretted that negotiations with a group of students since Wednesday had not resulted in an agreement to dismantle a "tent village" of about 200 people on a lawn of the leafy campus, north of Manhattan.

The university presidency indicated over the weekend that it had decided not to call on the New York police to evacuate the camp and arrest students or activists, as has happened in other universities in the country.

This new wave of protests in American universities against the war waged in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas is taking place six months before the presidential elections in the United States, amidst allegations of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and the constitutional right to freedom of expression.

"Many of our Jewish students, and others, have felt an intolerable atmosphere in recent weeks. Many have left campus and that is a tragedy," said Minouche Shafik.

The presidents of Harvard University and UPenn resigned last winter after statements considered ambiguous before Congress in Washington on the fight against anti-Semitism.

The United States, and above all the metropolis of New York, has the largest number of American Jews in the world after Israel, and millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.

The demonstrations are also taking place in France, where today the police intervened at the Sorbonne University in Paris to expel activists mobilized for the Palestinian cause who had set up tents inside the university campus.

According to the France Presse (AFP) agency, about 50 protesters were taken out of the building and then removed in groups, supervised by the police, a few days after a mobilization marked by tensions at another renowned university in the French capital, Sciences Po Paris.

The protests have as their backdrop the invasion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army, where in the last six months more than 34 thousand people have died, mostly civilians, plunging the territory into a serious humanitarian crisis.

The Israeli offensive is a retaliation for the attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which on October 7 killed more than 1,100 people and took about 250 hostages.

Read Also: French police demobilize pro-Palestine protest at Sorbonne Univ. (Portuguese version)