On May 7, protests spread across Europe with mass arrests in the Netherlands, and five days later, 20 encampments had been established in the United Kingdom and across universities in Australia and Canada.

[53][54] The first encampment was dismantled when university president Minouche Shafik authorized the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to enter the campus on April 18 and conduct mass arrests.

[64] A continued crackdown on April 27 led to approximately 275 arrests at Washington, Northeastern, Arizona State, and Indiana University Bloomington.

[68] On April 30, approximately 300 protesters were arrested at Columbia University and City College of New York[69] and pro-Israel counter-protesters attacked the UCLA campus occupation.

[81] Student protesters called on Columbia University to financially divest from any company with business ties to the Israeli government, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

[87][88] In April 2024, the occupations resulted in the closure of Columbia University and Cal Poly Humboldt for the remainder of the semester,[90][91] and faculty members in California, Georgia, and Texas also initiated votes of no confidence.

[96] After demands from protesters, the University of Vermont canceled its graduation ceremony speaker, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

[23] On May 6, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland agreed to end its investments in Israeli companies that are listed on the United Nations Human Rights Council "blacklist" after an encampment on Fellows' Square was erected.

[25] On May 28, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark announced it would cease investing in companies that operate in the occupied West Bank, divesting US$145,810 worth of holdings from Airbnb, Booking.com, and EDreams the next day.

[101] On June 11, the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, agreed to protesters' demands to factor human rights into its investment decisions.

[30] In November 2024, the Institut d'études politiques de Strasbourg said it would break ties with Reichman University in Israel due to its "warmongering" stance on Gaza.

Though police ultimately swept their encampment, the sweep led to backlash and condemnation by faculty and deans and required a day-long shutdown of the campus.

[106] On May 15, members of United Auto Workers Local 4811, the union representing 48,000 graduate students on 10 campuses in the University of California system, voted to authorize a strike because the university unfairly changed policies and discriminated against students who were exercising their right to free speech and created an unsafe work environment by allowing attacks on protesters.

[125] Qatar reportedly contributed $4.7 billion to U.S. academic institutions between 2001 and 2021; Kenneth Marcus of the Brandeis Center suggested this may have affected university administrators' willingness to impose discipline.

[133] Protesters identified a wide range of other ideologies that motivated them, such as antiracism, intersectionality, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, policing, the impact of climate change, and Indigenous rights.

[134] At Columbia, protesters who breached Hamilton Hall wrote Maoist revolutionary slogans ("Political power comes from the barrel of a gun") on blackboards.

[135] One group involved in the protest movement, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, grew more supportive of Hamas and the October 7 attacks over the course of 2024, retracting its apology for a student leader's statement that "Zionists don't deserve to live".

[136] Within Our Lifetime leader Nerdeen Kiswani, who arrived at the Columbia encampment in April, called for Palestine liberation "'by any means necessary', including armed resistance".

[141] Far-right agitators and white nationalists were identified at some protests seeking to sow chaos and violence,[142] and at the UCLA campus occupation, they were among pro-Israeli counter-protesters who attacked the encampment.

[143] Experts raised concern about far-right groups attempting to infiltrate protests to cause harm, and subsequent reactions from militant far-left activists aligned with the anti-fascist movement.

Mayor Eric Adams said that they had seen evidence that outside agitators and "professionals" such as Lisa Fithian and the wife of Sami Al-Arian had given students tactical knowledge and training to escalate their protests.

[171][172] Counter-protesters at the University of Pennsylvania approached the encampment with knives, and in a separate incident sprayed a chemical mixture on protesters' tents, food, and belongings.

[175][176] On May 1, 2024, around 10:50 PM, a pro-Israeli group attacked the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) pro-Palestinian protesters' camp for nearly four hours, attempting to breach the barricades surrounding it.

[177][71][178] The attackers, reported to have come from outside campus,[179] carried Israeli flags and assaulted students with sticks, stones, poles, metal fencing, and pepper spray.

[178] The counter-protesters called for a "Second Nakba", referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, and played the Israeli national anthem and Harbu Darbu on loudspeakers during the attack.

Senator Bernie Sanders, various members of Congress, several labor unions,[210][128][211] hundreds of university staff in the United Kingdom,[212][213] and Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

A Columbia undergraduate said that student organizers learned from the experiences of older generations, calling the movement "completely built" on the legacy of the 1968 protests.

[230] Mark Rudd, who led protests against the Vietnam War at Columbia in the 1960s, said, "For me, it's the most normal thing in the world to look at the murder of 34,000 people and the displacement of close to 2 million in Gaza and say, 'Hey, stop!

[232][233] Former Columbia student leaders from the era of protests against apartheid in the 1980s, including BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti and historian Barbara Ransby, said the "intersecting issues of war, racism and colonialism" were focal points in the movements of 1968, the 1980s, and 2024—and that the similarities are clear among the periods.

[134] New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft said phrases like "Go back to Poland" and "stop killing children", which Columbia University's Chabad chapter said had been yelled at Jewish students, were "further echoes of the forces that helped give rise to the Nazis".