On Tuesday morning, Swiss police intervened at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) to remove around 50 pro-Palestinian students who had been staging a sit-in for about a week. The students had refused to respond to the university administration’s requests to vacate the premises, according to reports from Swiss media.
A journalist from Keystone ATS News Agency, who was present at the scene, described how about 20 uniformed and plainclothes policemen entered the UniMail building at around 3:00 GMT (5:00 local time). The journalist explained that most of the demonstrators were asleep when they were gathered and taken to the institution’s underground parking lot.
Julie Zog, a journalist working at Lehman Blue station on X platform, wrote that a small group was waiting in front of the entrance to the parking lot, clapping continuously and chanting slogans in support of Palestine or their comrades. She saw students being handcuffed while being placed in police trucks.
The pro-Palestinian student movement began at the University of Lausanne and spread across other universities in Switzerland, including Fribourg, Basel, and Bern, as well as prestigious polytechnic institutes in Lausanne and Zurich. The students were protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza launched in response to an unprecedented attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 inside Israeli territory. On Monday, after negotiations failed, the University of Geneva toughened its tone and announced it would file a criminal complaint against pro-Palestinian students. In a letter addressed to the academic community on Monday, the university administration stated that it understood “the support shown by students towards the victims of conflict in Gaza,” but asked them to leave their protest sites and explore other ways of showing solidarity within the university.
