NYPD Investigating Alleged Columbia Chemical Attack As a Hate Crime

Photo: Shawn Inglima for NY Daily News via Getty Images

Several participants in a pro-Palestinian rally on Columbia University’s campus Friday alleged they were doused with a foul-smelling chemical, an act that the school’s provost said is now being investigated as a possible hate crime.

“After the Department of Public Safety received an initial complaint late Friday night, the University immediately initiated steps to investigate the incident, and has since been actively working with local and federal authorities,” Dennis A. Mitchell, Columbia’s interim provost, said in an email sent to Columbia and Barnard College students Monday. “The New York City Police Department is taking the lead role in investigating what appear to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes.”

The incident took place during a “divestment now” rally on the steps of the Low Library Friday afternoon organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of pro-Palestinian student groups that reemerged after the university suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Maia, a Columbia student, told the Columbia Spectator, that she saw two people, one in an orange jacket, coming up behind rally attendees and spraying them with something. “Once they were closest to me, behind someone that was near me, I heard a little spraying sound,” she said, adding it soon “started smelling really bad.”

According to the Spectator, the university’s student newspaper, at least ten students reported physical symptoms like nausea and burning eyes. Three people said they sought medical attention.

Social-media reports from the incident allege that the chemical used was Skunk, a chemical spray utilized by the Israeli Defense Forces for crowd control. Though it’s nonlethal, a BBC News article described the smell of Skunk in vivid terms: “an overpowering mix of rotting meat, old socks that haven’t been washed for weeks — topped off with the pungent waft of an open sewer.” Members of the school’s SJP chapter also claim the perpetrators were themselves former IDF soldiers who disguised themselves among the crowd by wearing keffiyehs, a scarf that has become a symbol of the Palestinian movement. As of yet, there is no evidence to back up those claims. Columbia’s provost said that the “alleged perpetrators” identified to the school have been permanently banned from the campus as the NYPD continues its investigation.

Tensions have been high on Columbia’s campus since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war last October with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups holding dueling protests, an Israeli student being assaulted outside a library and signatories of an open letter criticizing Israel being doxxed by a truck billboard.