Police clear the U. of C protest camp early Tuesday.

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

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

“They started throwing everything in all different directions,” said Iacovetti, a graduate student at the university.

According to the school administration, there were no arrests. Protesters remained in the area and around 8 a.m. re-entered the main square, marked with brown grass areas where tents had stood hours earlier.

Police had delivered printed “final messages” to residents of the encampment, which were later torn up and scattered at the feet of protesters as they hurled their weapons against a barricade and a line of protesters outside a side entrance to the Quad on South Ellis Avenue later Tuesday UCPD officers addressed Morrow.

“If you’re not willing to be arrested, you need to stand down because they’re going to arrest anyone,” Jessica Darrow, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, warned protesters.

U. of C. faculty members gather to support pro-Palestinian student protesters

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

The police erected a yellow plastic barrier and the chants became increasingly angry. Some protesters shouted insults directly into the officers’ faces: “How does it feel to be on the wrong side of history?” they asked. “Shame on you!”

Organizers had spent much of the night preparing for an expected police operation. For the second night in a row, expectations of a clearance had circulated among those camped beneath the Gothic buildings surrounding the university’s main square.

The camp has been located on the main campus of the University of Chicago since April 29th. It is one of many other large-scale student protests across the country calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, including weapons manufacturers that supply weapons to the Israeli military as the Gaza death toll rises. According to the Ministry of Health, more than 34,000 Palestinians were killed.

Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7, in which the group killed around 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. President Joe Biden last week defended the right to protest but insisted that “order must prevail” on college campuses as some members of Chicago’s Jewish community called for 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 ready to intervene, hours before protesters briefly confronted a group of fraternity brothers who tried to placing an American flag near a pole where activists had raised a Palestinian flag.

Alivisatos issued a statement on Tuesday morning saying security concerns had only increased in recent days due to the breakdown of negotiations. There were no arrests in the police operation, the statement said, but there could be disciplinary action against students.

“There were areas where we were able to reach common ground, but ultimately some of the stubborn and inflexible aspects of their demands were fundamentally inconsistent with the university’s principled commitment to institutional neutrality,” Alivisatos said in the statement.

“The university remains a place where dissenting voices have many opportunities to express themselves, but we cannot create an environment in which the expression of some dominates and disrupts the healthy functioning of the community for the rest,” he said.

Protesters expected a police crackdown on Sunday evening and called on activists and organizers to join them in the square, although their preparations waned around 3 a.m. Monday morning.

After the camp was cleared, some students gathered on the steps in front of the administration building. Four hours after the camp was cleared, they expressed their final messages of protest, holding up Palestinian flags and beating drums.

A spokesman for Mayor Brandon Johnson said the mayor and Chicago police are “monitoring the situation.”

After receiving multiple inquiries regarding the University of Chicago Police Department’s (UCPD) intention to evacuate its student encampment at 3 a.m. on Tuesday, May 7, Mayor Johnson and senior staff contacted University of Chicago leadership “To once again raise serious safety and operational concerns regarding this plan – a message that the Chicago Police Department has conveyed to UCPD on multiple occasions,” Ronnie Reese’s statement said.

Jake Sheridan and Sam Charles of the Chicago Tribune contributed.