There is a clear difference of opinion between the University of San Francisco and the last remaining Gaza encampment protesters there, as the protesters agreed to move out on Monday, but the university started hauling their tents anyway.
If you’re interested in what’s going on with the Gaza protest encampment at the University of San Francisco, and you search on “USF Gaza protest,” you’re likely to see results showing a different USF Gaza protest some 3,000 miles away at the Tampa campus of the University South Florida, which also goes by the initialism “USF.” That Florida protest brought violent skirmishes and police using tear gas, whereas the University of San Francisco encampment has been far more peaceful over the course of the past couple weeks.
(There was, simultaneously, a separate encampment at San Francisco State University, which also seemed to resolve peacefully two weeks ago.)
But that uneasy peace seems to have broken Monday. While the remaining protesters with tents pitched at the university’s Welch Field say that told university officials that they agreed to leave Monday, the university disputes this. The Chronicle reports that school employees started clearing the tents Monday morning, before the protesters could pack things up themselves.
“We had just woken up,” student organizer Susu Steyteyieh told the Chronicle. “The camp was still full. … They didn’t give us a warning.”
For their part, the university claims that the some 50 remaining tents were “abandoned property,” and the people staying in them had left. (USF is now officially on summer break.) The university said the tents would be stored for the students to pick up, or they would be donated if not picked up.
The USF protest was not as large or long-running as the UC Berkeley Gaza encampment, but had grown to about 100 tents earlier this month. School officials offered the protesters an amnesty deal if they left by 3 pm last Tuesday, prior to last Saturday’s graduation ceremony, but many protesters defied that deadline and remained camped at Welch Field.
Yet this whole thing may be moving toward a peaceful resolution, perhaps as early as today. University spokesperson Kellie Samson told the Chronicle that the protesters “agreed to pick up their remaining belongings by Tuesday morning."
Update: Samson reached out to SFist to clarify that "The protesters did not notify university officials that they were moving out. USF staff began packing unoccupied tents and abandoned property [on Monday] with the intention of storing all items for pickup or donation. When staff was approached by a few students who arrived at the field, they informed staff then that they intended to remove the encampment and vacate the field that day. They had not informed staff of this until that moment."
Image: @monishabajaj via Twitter
*This post has been updated with comments from university spokesperson Kellie Samson.
