Police on Thursday night arrested at least a dozen people who occupied an abandoned building near the UC Berkeley campus as part of a protest in support of Palestinians during the ongoing war in Gaza.
By 7:15 p.m., 12 people had been arrested at the site, according to UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof, on a variety of charges, including vandalism and trespassing.
Police from multiple agencies arrived at the empty building, at the corner of Channing Way and Bowditch Street, about one block from People’s Park, around 6:15 p.m. and gave orders for the protesters to disperse.
The aging wooden structure, owned by the university, is one of several buildings that make up the former Anna Head School complex, the site of a now-closed girls school. On Wednesday, between 10 and 20 protesters occupied one of the buildings, which was badly damaged in a fire in 2022.
“This is not nonviolent civil disobedience. The suspects are trespassing and vandalizing an unsafe, boarded-up, fire-damaged building next to People’s Park,” Mogulof said in an email Thursday.
UC Berkeley officials said the protesters cut fences, sprayed graffiti on the structure, and broke windows.
Shortly after 6 p.m., officers from the California Highway Patrol and other agencies began setting up barricades in the area. Police ordered the protesters to leave, saying they could be arrested, and that force would be used, including potentially pepper spray and tear gas.
By 7:45 p.m., after clearing people from the front yard, police raided the brown wooden structure. Protesters chanted “Free Palestine!” and “We are all Palestinians.”
The activists had erected tents in the front yard of the building, hung Palestinian flags, and attached a banner that said “Avenge Al-Shifa” on the front of the dilapidated structure, an apparent reference to Al-Shifa Hospital, a medical complex in Gaza City that Israeli troops destroyed last month as part of their invasion of Gaza after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,100 people.
Israel said Hamas had been using the hospital as cover, and that it had built tunnels under it. The Palestinian Minister of Health, Mai al-Kaila, described the Israeli actions as a “crime against humanity.”
Another dispersal order just issued, police asking people to move west and disperse within 15 minutes. More officers with batons and less lethal launchers have just moved into the yard of the UC Berkeley protest house. “Free Palestine” chants pick up. “We are all Palestinians.” pic.twitter.com/9RkSEMa1DQ
— The Berkeley Scanner (@BerkeleyScanner) May 17, 2024
On Thursday night, officers from the Alameda County Sheriff’s office, along with the San Bruno, Pacifica, Colma, Daly City and San Francisco police departments were on the scene, along with police from UC Berkeley and other agencies.
About 50 demonstrators near the police barricades chanted slogans, including: “Killing children is a crime, bombing hospitals is a crime, killing doctors is a crime, and you’re defending it on our dime.”
Anaya and Joaquin Bridgman, 13-year-old twin Berkeley residents, called the police response ridiculous.
“Kids my age don’t have access to things they need like food and water. People are fighting to live and they’re wasting their money on this,” Joaquin Bridgman said. “It makes me wonder why they’re doing this.”
Their mother, Darca Morgan, said the family was on their way to get frozen yogurt when they saw officers pulling up the site. Morgan said she supports the protestors and would be chanting with them but feels too intimidated by the dozens of officers in riot gear. She and her sons wrote their lawyers’ numbers of their arms in case they were separated.
“I’m shocked and it makes me angry,” said Morgan, who has lived in Berkeley off and on for years, moving back to the city from Daly City three years ago.
Mogulof, the UC Berkeley spokesman, said the full number of arrests and charges likely wouldn’t be available until Friday morning.
The protesters who occupied the vacant building did not release a list of demands. For months, UC Berkeley students and faculty have been protesting Israel and its military response in Gaza. An encampment on campus that had been established April 22 was cleared on Tuesday and Wednesday, following negotiations between a pro-Palestine coalition and administrators.
In a statement Tuesday, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said that she personally supports “government officials’ efforts to secure an immediate and permanent ceasefire.” She added that “such support for the plight of Palestinians, including protest, should not be conflated with hatred or antisemitism.”
Some of the major demands from the protesters, Christ did not deliver, however, including the university divesting from Israel, which she said is up the the UC Board of Regents, or an academic boycott of Israel, which she said she did not endorse.
