New York police officers were called after protesters took over a room of Columbia University’s Butler Library in a resurgence of the on-campus demonstrations against the institution’s ties to Israel that rocked the nation last spring and inspired similar protests and encampments at colleges and universities country-wide.
Columbia University said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that it was “dealing with a disruption in reading room 301 of Butler Library,” noting that its public safety team was “working to mitigate the situation.”
Columbia did not call in New York Police Department officers until hours after the disruptions began. At 7:10 p.m., the department said it was “responding to an ongoing situation on campus where individuals have occupied a library and are trespassing.”
Around 60 protesters in zip ties were ushered out of the building by officers, an NBC News crew witnessed.
Protesters at Columbia University’s Butler Library in New York on May 7, 2025.CUJewsIsraelis
The school had asked people involved to identify themselves and leave the premises. It said in an evening update that it repeatedly asked the protesters for their identification, and said they “were repeatedly told that failure to comply would result in violations of our rules and policies and possible arrest for trespassing.”
The demonstrators were barred from leaving the library without presenting public safety officers with their identifications. A large group of protesters, their faces obscured by keffiyehs, appeared to try to force their way through a set of doors where a group of what appeared to be security officers was standing, video posted to social media shows.
Officers appear to resist and push the group back as someone on a megaphone pleads with the group to, “Stop pushing, please,” the video shows. The speaker says they would let the protesters go if they took out their ID cards, to which the group responds with a resounding, “No!” and a chant of, “Let us go!”
The people involved in the protest refused to identify themselves and leave, the evening update from Columbia said, prompting the call to police.
“Due to the number of individuals participating in the disruption inside and outside of the building, a large group of people attempting to force their way into Butler Library creating a safety hazard, and what we believe to be the significant presence of individuals not affiliated with the University, Columbia has taken the necessary step of requesting the presence of NYPD to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community,” the statement said.
“Requesting the presence of the NYPD is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community,” the statement continued.
Two Columbia Public Safety Officers were injured during what the school called a “crowd surge” as people tried to “force” their way into the library, it said.
The university allowed others in the library who were not involved in the protest to leave the building. In an alert sent to students, it said the library was closed and the area should remain clear.
“Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies; this is especially unacceptable while our students study and prepare for final exams,” Columbia said in a statement. “Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”
Around 3:30 p.m., Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group that calls on the university to divest its ties from Israel, publicized an “EMERGENCY RALLY: ALL OUT TO BUTLER LIBRARY” in a social media post.
The group said more than “100 actionists have reclaimed the main reading room as the Basil-Al-Araj Popular University.” The post called on others to “support, bring noise, and wear a mask.”
“The flood shows that as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will continue to disrupt Columbia’s profits and legitimacy,” CUAD wrote in a post on its Substack. “Repression breeds resistance — if Columbia escalates repression, the people will continue to escalate disruptions on this campus.”
Videos posted by the group Columbia Jewish & Israeli Students show individuals chanting “free, free, free Palestine” as they walk throughout the building. A second video shows a large group of people, many wearing keffiyehs, gathered and loudly chanting in what appears to be the reading room.
Those involved in the protest also appeared to have vandalized structures in the library. Photos posted by CUAD appear to show messages, including “free Gaza” and “we will always come back for Gaza,” scribbled in marker on tables and glass cases.
Outside the library, other groups of masked protesters in various locations around campus continued chanting, videos from the scene showed.
The protest comes just two days after Israel’s security Cabinet approved a plan to seize all of the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the plan an intensive military operation aimed at defeating Hamas.
Gaza remains blockaded by Israel, the longest since the war began in October 2023, as Israel’s total ban on the entry of all goods, including food, fuel and medical supplies, enters its third month.
The protest Wednesday also comes amid the Trump administration’s efforts to block federal funding from some universities, including Harvard and Columbia, over the fact that it says the schools are not doing enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses.
In the Substack post, CUAD offered insight into the protest’s location and meaning.
The group said it “renamed” the library to Basel Al-Araj Popular University as a reference to Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian writer “whose writings on the Palestinian resistance and on the nature of war guide revolutionaries around the world today.”
The group chose Butler Library to rebuke the building’s namesake, Nicholas Murray Butler, a former president of the University who the group called “a shameless Nazi sympathizer.”
CUAD also offered its demands of Columbia, including a full financial divestment from Israel, for police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to leave campus, and amnesty for all “targeted by Columbia University’s Discipline.”
In April of last year, after meeting with student groups amid pro-Palestinian protests on campus, then-President Minouche Shafik said the school would not divest from Israel and that it and the students were unable to reach any agreement at the time to end the protests.
The university announced in March “multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations and expulsions” for people who participated in the protest occupying Hamilton Hall on campus last Spring. It was not clear how many students were disciplined in relation to the event.
It is not clear whether ICE agents are ever-present on Columbia’s campus, as CUAD’s demands suggest, but agents were on the premises at least once in recent months, when they took student protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil into custody at his university-owned apartment building in March. Khalil has been detained in Louisiana since shortly after his arrest and has been fighting his detention and potential deportation in court.
In three statements in the two days following Khalil’s arrest, the university said its policy is to comply with the law but also to require law enforcement operating in its non-public spaces to have a judicial warrant. Khalil was detained without an arrest warrant, the Trump administration later said.
In March, the school agreed to a list of demands from the administration to restore federal funding that it was stripped of. One of the demands was to hire 36 new campus security officers who, unlike previous security officers, will have the ability to arrest students.