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US riot police have dismantled an anti-war and pro-Palestinian protest camp at the University of California at Los Angeles, a day after it was attacked by pro-Israel supporters.

At least 200 pro-Palestine protesters were arrested during the pre-dawn raid, led by a phalanx of California Highway Patrol officers carrying shields and batons, early on Thursday.

The protesters tried to block the officers' advance by their sheer numbers, shouting "push them back", while hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists who assembled outside the tent city were heard chanting "Shame on you" at the police.

According to estimates of local television station KABC-TV, 300 to 500 protesters were hunkered down inside the camp, while about 2,000 more had gathered outside the barricades in support.

The raid took place about a day after police watched on as pro-Israel groups violently attacked the encampment. Late Tuesday night, masked counter-demonstrators mounted a surprise assault on the camp, using sticks to beat the peaceful activists.

The assault went on for three hours into early Wednesday morning until police intervened and restored order.

The authorities’ slow response drew wide criticism from political leaders, including a spokesperson for California Governor Gavin Newsom who said "limited and delayed campus law enforcement response" to the unrest is "unacceptable."

The Pro-Palestine demonstrations began at Columbia University in New York City on April 17, and have spread across other campuses in the US in a student movement unlike any other this century.

US police arrested about 2,200 people during pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses across the country in recent weeks, the Associated Press reported.

A tally by the news agency recorded at least 56 incidents of arrests at 43 different US colleges or universities since April 18.

The students are calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and demanding schools divest from companies that support the Israeli regime.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

Tel Aviv has also blocked water, food, and electricity to Gaza, plunging the coastal strip into a humanitarian crisis.

Since the start of the offensive, the Israeli regime has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians and injured 77,816 others.

Iran has urged Muslim countries to cut all relations with the Israeli regime as means of pressuring Tel Aviv to end its ongoing genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian made the remarks on Saturday, addressing the 15th Heads of State and Government Summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Gambia’s capital Banjul.

“Beyond doubt, this time period will also pass by, despite all its hardships and adversities for the Palestinian nation,” he said.

“However, the manner and quality of the role that is played by us, Muslim states, in the face of this crisis will go down in history,” the top diplomat added.

“Undoubtedly, severance of diplomatic and economic ties and [imposition of] practical arms and trade embargo [on Israel] serves as an important means of cessation of its genocide in Gaza and atrocities in the West Bank and the Noble al-Quds.”

At least 34,654 people have died in Gaza since October 7, when the Israeli regime began the war in response to al-Aqsa Storm, a retaliatory operation by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.

Despite the unabated campaign of bloodshed and destruction, the regime has so far fallen short of realizing its goals, including defeating Gaza’s resistance, causing forced displacement of the territory’s entire population to neighboring Egypt, and enabling the release of those who were taken captive during al-Aqsa Storm.

Amir-Abdollahian said Gaza’s developments proved that elimination of the Palestinian resistance “was nothing but an illusion.”

“Because the Israeli regime is not a legitimate government. It is only an occupying apartheid power,” he said, adding, “Passage of time is not going to lend legitimacy to an occupying power.”

The foreign minister asserted that realization of sustainable peace and security in the region was only possible through cessation of the regime’s occupation of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, return of the Palestinian refugees to their homeland, and manifestation of Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

At least 900 protesters have been arrested since the launch of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses across the US, where students are raging against the Israeli regime’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza.

The Washington Post reported the tally on Sunday, the 10th straight day of the protests that began after Columbia University set up an encampment to demand cessation of the war and press the school to divest from Israeli financial interests.

The crackdown then started when university authorities called in the police, a move that sparked more than 100 arrests on the university’s Manhattan campus.

Two other highlights in the crackdown saw police forces rounding up roughly the same number of people at New York University and Emerson College in Boston.

Protests have also erupted across numerous other seats of learning, including Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and California State Polytechnic in Humboldt.

The ensuing countrywide counter-campaign of suppression has seen law enforcement resorting to riot control methods against the protesters.

The methods have featured “the same tools and tactics” that were deployed to confront the thousands-strong protests that sparked across the country after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd four years ago, the daily reported.

“At Emory University last week, Atlanta police said officers used ‘chemical irritants’ to clear an encampment, and a Georgia State Patrol officer was captured on video using a stun gun to subdue a man on the ground,” it said.

Academics have, meanwhile, been banding together throughout the US under the banner of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP).

Earlier in April, the FSJP’s Georgia chapter called on Morehouse College in Atlanta, which invited Joe Biden as its 2024 commencement speaker, to rescind its invitation as a means of objecting to the president’s role in enabling the Israeli genocide.

At Biden’s behest, the United States has been providing the Israeli war with unreserved military and intelligence support.

The US has also vetoed several United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in the brutal military onslaught that has so far claimed the lives of at least 34,454 Gazans, mostly women and children.