Boulder City Council’s Thursday meeting got going with a couple dozen concerned members of the public in the audience. It ended with an empty audience section in the council chambers after a city official ordered the crowd out.

Protesters decrying the Israel-Hamas conflict dominated the meeting’s public comment portion and expressed frustrations later during the meeting, prompting three brief recesses. The third one prompted Mayor Pro Tem Lauren Folkerts to order the chamber cleared, moving the remaining audience members into the downstairs lobby.

Public comments over the situation, and disruptions, have persisted at Boulder City Council meetings as the Middle Eastern conflict continues. The comments boiled over in a December 2024 meeting, which prompted the council briefly to move its regular-meeting proceedings online. Folkerts reiterated decorum rules that speakers are expected to follow for the public comment portion at Thursday’s meeting.

The conflict has sparked protests and heated debates. Opinions surrounding Gaza and Israel appear to have ties to recent apprehensions of college protesters by authorities including U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE.

And those heated emotions didn’t cool off on a snowy Thursday night.Most of the Boulder meeting’s commenters advocated support for Gaza. The Palestinian Ministry of Health recently estimated that Israel’s ground and air campaign has killed more than 50,000 people. That’s since the war ignited in early October 2023, when attacks on Israel killed roughly 1,200 people. Some questioned why the Boulder council wouldn’t issue a statement on Islamophobia as it did on antisemitism.

Boulder’s council opted to not explore issuing a resolution related to the conflict in a February 2024 meeting.

One man who spoke on Thursday pushed back against others’ claims that Israel is committing genocide, a disputed claim. Human rights organization Amnesty International’s research concluded Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, according to the organization.

He finished his comment by calling the protesters racist, sparking pushback and expletives from them.

A small group of protesters stayed for much of the meeting, expressing frustration that council had addressed other topics from public comment but not theirs. Those frustrations spilled over during another council discussion and led to the third and final recess, in which the chamber was cleared. The council is known to address other topics at the end of its meetings, but the council didn’t directly address protesters’ concerns.