Harvard’s anti-Israel protest tent camp thwarted by 2 a.m. lawn sprinklers
Harvard University’s anti-Israel tent encampment was temporarily thwarted overnight — by a slew of sprinklers going off around 2 a.m.
Dozens of sleeping protesters who were trying to catch some shuteye were disturbed when the sprinklers suddenly turned on in the middle of the Ivy League’s Cambridge campus.
“As protesters spend their first night in the Harvard Yard encampment, the biggest threat to their stay has not come from administrators or Harvard University police officers, but the Yard’s sprinklers,” the Harvard Crimson student-led paper said early Thursday.
The first sprinkler switched on just outside the encampment in Harvard Yard at about 2:30 a.m. as temperatures dipped to 36 degrees.
Then, just before 4 a.m., a sprinkler located in the middle of the tents started spraying out water, prompting students to quickly start handing out buckets.
“Two more sprinklers turned on at the edge of the encampment near Massachusetts Hall,” the newspaper said in a live blog update at 4:05 a.m.
“The sprinklers began to hit tents on the edge of the camp before protesters rushed over to cover the sprinklers with buckets and sit on them.”
More than a dozen tents popped up at the $79,500-a-year college Wednesday after a rally against the university’s suspension of the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.
Trying to stay ahead of planned protests that have already disrupted Columbia and New York University, Harvard locked most gates into its famous yard ahead of classes Monday and limited access to those with school identification.
The school also posted warning signs about setting up tents or tables on campus without permission.
As of Thursday, no arrests had been made.
It comes as anti-Israel protests have ratcheted up on college campuses over the past week.
At Columbia, more than 100 demonstrators were cuffed and hauled away when the NYPD was brought in to break up the encampment.
Students at New York University then set up an encampment, which was also torn down and resulted in more than 100 arrests.
