New York, April 26 : Hundreds of students have been arrested on US campuses as protests against Washington’s support for Israel are surging sea to sea.

By Wednesday, the protests that started last week at the Ivy League Columbia University campus in New York City where more than 100 students were arrested and their tent encampment cleared had skipped across the nation with more of them detained by police, a rare occurrence in the US where police seldom enter campuses to quell protests.

The students are demanding that the US end its support for Israel, which has been embroiled in a war with Hamas in Gaza leading to the deaths of over 30,000 people, most of them women and children.

They also want the universities to cut ties with Israel and divest the investments of their endowments in arms manufacturers.

Students have been arrested at, among others, the University of Texas-Austin, New York University, Yale, Ohio State University, and the University of Southern California.

And, protest tent encampments have cropped up in dozens of universities including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of California-Berkley, copying the Columbia model.

The protest tents were back at Columbia when Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, came there on Wednesday to denounce the protests and demand the resignation of its president, Nemat Minouche Shafik, asserting that she lost control of the university and lawlessness prevailed.