Swiss police moved early on Wednesday to remove dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters holed up in the University of Bern, the school said in a statement.

Student demonstrations have gathered pace across Western Europe in recent weeks, with protesters demanding an end to the Gaza bloodshed and urging that their universities cut ties with Israel and businesses that support it.

Dozens of demonstrators had been occupying university premises since Sunday night. The students were demanding an “academic boycott of Israel institutions” and ignored a university ultimatum to leave the premises.

Swiss police acted following a request by the Bern university’s management, which had described the student occupation as “unacceptable.”

The last of around 30 protesters left the Bern university early Wednesday. They chanted pro-Palestinian slogans outside the building before leaving the area, a journalist from the Keystone-ATS agency said.

University rector Christian Leumann said in a statement published on Wednesday that he was open to talks but that “an occupation with politically motivated demands does not create an environment for constructive dialogue.”

The student encampment is one of many protests that cropped up on American and European college campuses over the past month amid Israel’s Gaza offensive, sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack, in which the terror group killed some 1,200 people and took 252 hostages into the Strip.

Israel’s subsequent offensive in Gaza has killed at least 35,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 fighters in battle as well as some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

The first to mobilize in Switzerland were students at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), with several hundred occupying a hall at the start of May and demanding an end to partnerships with Israeli universities. The university later responded in a statement that it “considers that there is no reason to cease these relations.”

A small number of universities have seen student groups dismantle their own encampments as many colleges empty out for the summer, while activists on most other campuses have refused to let up, prompting police to carry out arrests.

Police arrested about 125 activists at the University of Amsterdam as they broke up its camp, and German police dismantled an encampment at Berlin’s Free University. Students have also held protests or set up encampments in Finland, Denmark, Italy, Spain, France and Britain.

On Tuesday, Swiss police in Geneva removed around 50 pro-Palestinian protesters from a university there.