The police clear the U. van C. protest camp early on Tuesday

University of Chicago police cleared a pro-Palestinian protest camp early Tuesday morning during a brief raid on the South Side university, organizers said.

About 50 UCPD officers began dismantling tents and makeshift barriers around them around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, protester Christopher Iacovetti said.

“They started throwing everything in every possible direction,” said Iacovetti, a doctoral candidate at the university.

They delivered printed “final notices” to the encampment’s residents, which were torn up and strewn at the feet of protesters later Tuesday morning as they locked arms against a barricade and a line of UCPD officers outside a side entrance to the quad on South Ellis Ave. .

A faculty liaison said the main quad was completely cleared of protesters around 7 a.m. Tuesday. It is not clear how many arrests have been made.

Several dozen protesters were confronted by university police and chanted, “We are the encampment! We are the camp!” along with other slogans calling on the university to disclose and sever its financial ties with Israel.

Organizers had spent much of the night preparing for an expected police raid, and for the second night in a row, expectations that an eviction would take place circulated among those camped beneath the Gothic buildings surrounding the university’s main square .

The encampment has occupied the main building of the University of Chicago since April 29. It is one of several other large-scale student protests across the country demanding the university divest from companies linked to Israel, including arms manufacturers that supply weapons to the Israeli army amid the rising death toll in Gaza. According to the Ministry of Health, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Israel launched its bombardment of Gaza after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, in which the group killed about 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. President Joe Biden last week defended the right to protest but emphasized that “order must prevail” on college campuses as some in Chicago’s Jewish community demanded action at local universities to prevent hate speech.

On Friday, university President Paul Alivisatos claimed the encampment had caused a “systemic disruption” to daily life and announced the university was prepared to “intervene” hours before protesters had a brief confrontation with a group of fraternity brothers who attempted to fly an American flag to be placed nearby. a pole where activists had raised a Palestinian flag.

Protesters expected a police raid on Sunday evening and called on activists and organizers to join them on the Quad, although their preparations halted around 3am on Monday morning.