Police officers arrested 13 people on Wednesday after pro-Palestinian protesters barricaded themselves in the office of the president of Stanford University and demanded that administrators meet several demands, including a vote by the university trustees on whether to divest from companies that are said to support Israel’s military.
The administration offices, located in Building 10, were cleared within about three hours, according to Dee Mostofi, a campus spokeswoman, who said that there was “extensive damage.” Several sandstone walls and pillars on the exterior of buildings on the university’s historic Main Quad were marked with graffiti that criticized the police, Stanford, Israel and the United States.
Protesters had entered the building around 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, and university police officers arrived at the scene after they were alerted of the occupation, according to Ms. Mostofi. The building houses the offices of the university’s president, Richard Saller, and provost, Jenny Martinez, among others.
One officer was injured during the arrests, Ms. Mostofi said, adding that any students who were arrested will be suspended and those who are seniors will not be allowed to graduate.
“We are appalled that our students chose to take this action, and we will work with law enforcement to ensure that they face the full consequences allowed by law,” Ms. Mostofi said in a statement.
Wednesday is the final day of classes for the spring quarter at Stanford. A security guard stationed on the Main Quad warned students who were bicycling or walking to their last classes of the academic year that they would see disturbing graffiti. The spray-painted slogans included “Pigs Taste Best Dead” and “Death 2 Israehell.”
Shortly after the morning arrests, law enforcement officials began dismantling a Pro-Palestinian encampment that had stood since late April on a campus plaza, as well as a pro-Israel display that had been established nearby. Sheriff’s deputies and other campus workers loaded tents, flags and other belongings from the encampment onto idling trucks.
A gathering of students, several of them wearing kaffiyehs, watched the dismantling. Students there said the university administration had acted in a cowardly fashion by not warning them that the camp would be removed or telling them how they could retrieve their belongings. None of the students agreed to be quoted by name.
Aaron Schimmel, who was associated with the pro-Israeli camp on the other side of the plaza, said that the university had waited far too long to take down the pro-Palestinian camp, which he said was filled with “children living out the fantasy of being freedom fighters.”
Mr. Schimmel, a 27-year-old graduate student from Los Angeles, said he was pursuing a doctorate in Jewish history. He wears a yarmulke, and said he had not been harassed in his day-to-day life on campus, but had been shouted down at the dueling camps.
“Many of us have felt targeted, harassed, intimidated, by these protesters,” he said of the pro-Palestinian camp. “The university should have taken a much stronger action earlier on to prevent this from happening.”
Pro-Palestinian protests and the reaction to them have roiled college campuses across the country this spring, and more than 3,000 people have been arrested or detained.
The situation, on the whole, had been calmer at Stanford than at other large universities in California. In recent weeks, a melee erupted at the University of California, Los Angeles when counterprotesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment, and demonstrators occupied an administration building for a week at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.
Most encampments at other campuses have been cleared by law enforcement officers or have been dismantled by protesters who reached agreements with administrators as the academic year came to a close.
At Stanford, a protest group that called itself the People’s University for Palestine encampment, said in a statement early Wednesday that its members had occupied Building 10 and intended to remain there until the university met several demands. The group called on the Stanford Board of Trustees to consider next week whether to divest from companies — including Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin and Chevron — that the protesters say provide material and logistical support to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
The protesters also demanded that Dr. Saller support the divestment proposal, disclose all of the holdings in Stanford’s endowment and drop all disciplinary measures against Pro-Palestinian student activists.
“As students, we should be spending our finals season studying for exams, preparing our summer plans or reminiscing the end of another school year,” the group said in the statement. “Instead, we are forced to protest. We stand in grief and rage as we witness our Palestinian classmates lose their homes and families.”
