The pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawn in front of Columbia University’s Butler Library in April 2024. Protesters took over a reading room in the library Wednesday. Photo by ProudFarmerScholar, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Louis Keene
May 7, 2025
Students from a pro-Palestinian student group took over Columbia University’s Butler Library on Wednesday, temporarily shutting it down in the run-up to finals.
Eyewitnesses said about 100 people filled a reading room inside Butler, where they chanted, banged on drums and hung banners that read “Strike for Gaza,” “Liberated Zone” and “Free Mahmoud,” referring to Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate in ICE detention.
Video posted to social media showed the protesters streaming past campus security, most of them masked and wearing dark-colored clothing, though the student-run Columbia Spectator reported that security guards pushed several protesters to the ground.
Later video showed a Columbia public safety employee telling protesters they would be required to show student identification in order to leave the library, prompting the protesters to chant, “Let us go.”
Columbia’s Office of Public Affairs condemned the protest and said it was working to mitigate the situation.
“While this is isolated to one room in the library, it is completely unacceptable that some individuals are choosing to disrupt academic activities as our students are studying and preparing for final exams,” read a statement from the office. “These disruptions of our campus and academic activities will not be tolerated.”
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a campus pro-Palestinian group that organized the protest, billed the action as the launch of “Basel Al-Araj Popular University.” Basel Al-Araj was a Palestinian writer and activist who was killed by Israeli police near Bethlehem in 2017.
An Instagram post from the group said at least three protesters had been arrested.
The protest comes as the university seeks to show the White House it is addressing antisemitism on its campus. The school has laid off at least 180 people due to about $400 million in federal funding cuts and is currently weighing a consent decree, a form of government oversight that would allow a judge to monitor the school’s compliance.
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