“Enforcing Complicity and Silence: The UK’s Plan to Proscribe Palestine Action,” by Peter Hallward, was originally written for Communis. “From Self-Defence to Conquest: From a Right of Self-Defence to the Fact of Conquest” and “Postscript: Why talk when you can kill?” also by Peter Hallward have recently appeared on Communis, reproduced with authorization from Humanity Journal. Featured image: “We Are All Palestine Action.” Photo courtesy of Palestine Action.

“Good arguments can be made in support both of direct action and of civil disobedience, and of more law-abiding forms of mass protest too, along with efforts to combine all three. Huda Ammori’s own years of experience have led her to conclude that ‘no mass movement is going to succeed if its main emphasis is on convincing the political class to stop supporting the Zionist regime. Unfortunately, the political class is immovable. Putting it at the centre of your strategy means you get sucked into a respectability politics which goes nowhere. That’s exactly what we’ve seen over the past eighteen months […].’”

— Peter Hallward

Enforcing Complicity and Silence: The UK’s Plan to Proscribe Palestine Action

As of 1 July 2025 (Updated 21 July)

Not content with aiding and abetting Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine, the UK government is today poised to take a dramatic new step in its long campaign to criminalise opposition to this war. Genocide is the most serious crime any state can commit, and you might think that a government which claims to respect the rule of law would itself want to prevent genocide – but if you think that then you haven’t understood the priorities of the government led by prime minister (and former human rights lawyer) Keir Starmer and his home secretary (and former champion of abolitionists and suffragettes) Yvette Cooper.

Like Israel and the US, the UK has promised to abide by the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. As the name of this landmark convention suggests, as a signatory the UK government is formally obliged by its first article not merely to deplore but “to prevent and to punish” genocide. In its second article, the UN’s convention defines genocide as a crime that includes “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” along with measures intended to prevent members of the group from having or retaining children.

Both the definition and the obligation are perfectly clear. Guided by these principles, over the past eighteen months one investigation after another – by the UN, by the UN’s special rapporteur, by human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, by emergency medical workers like MSF (Doctors Without Borders), and so on – have reached the conclusion that (to cite Amnesty’s report of December 2024) “Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.” As the Special Committee set up by the UN to investigate Israel’s assault on Gaza reported in the autumn of 2024, “Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life – food, water, and fuel,” and “despite repeated UN appeals […], Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population.” All of these actions, the committee concluded, are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” In its first twelve months, the Lancet demonstrated in February 2025, Israel’s assault on Gaza cut average life expectancy in the territory almost in half, lowering it by more than 30 years. Everyone can see that over the course of 2025 the situation has only got worse – much worse. “We are witnessing Israel commit genocide,” confirms MSF, and “the UK Government is complicit in these atrocities.”

It’s also worth remembering several other binding commitments that should concern any UK government. Having signed the 2014 Arms Trade Treaty, the UK knows that it is forbidden (by article 6:3) to authorise any transfer of weapons “if it has knowledge at the time of authorization that the arms or items would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity […] or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which it is a Party.” As a founding member of the UN, the UK is also pledged to respect the rulings of its International Court of Justice (ICJ). Like other UN member states, the UK itself invests this world court with supreme legal authority. In March 2024, in a unanimous decision, the ICJ formally instructed Israel to “take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary.” (On this same occasion in March 2024 the ICJ judges also ruled, by fifteen votes to one, that Israel must “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit” genocidal acts, “including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance.”) As one of the countries that went on to help establish the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002, the UK is further bound to respect the arrest warrants it issued in November 2024, to ensure that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister are indeed put on trial for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare” and for “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

You might think that the obligation to stop war crimes and genocidal violence would trump all other moral and legal obligations. You might think that, like all parties to the Genocide Convention, Keir Starmer and his ministers should want to remember why it especially emphasises prevention. You might think they would understand that it’s one thing to regret mass death from deliberately engineered starvation after it happens, and quite another thing actively to prevent it from happening in the first place. Given the enormity of what’s at stake, you might think that Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper would want to ensure that they and their government are not complicit in genocidal acts. You might even think they would want to support volunteer groups that are trying to investigate the possible grounds of such complicity, and that are themselves acting – as the Genocide Convention commands – to prevent it from taking place.

We might well think that, but it’s clearly not what Starmer and Cooper think.

I

Anyone who lived through the run-up to the US-UK invasion and plunder of Iraq in 2003 will remember the prolonged tragi-comic search for that smoking gun which might have helped to justify such brazen aggression against a sovereign nation. Surely Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction somewhere or other, and perhaps one day he might go berserk and make suicidal use of them. Who knows, anything is possible. To save the world from this grim prospect the US duly undertook to shock and awe the country into alignment with the priorities of empire and international capital. Never mind the fact that the whole government and media campaign about Iraqi WMD was a deliberately contrived pack of lies: a couple of years and hundreds of thousands of dead bodies later the main objective of the invasion had been accomplished, and a relatively independent Iraqi state was less able to get in the way of progress and profits.

Here we are now, twenty-two years later, and members of Tony Blair’s 2003 war government are back in power. In June 2025 the US and Israel dusted off the old script and by bombing Iran took another tilt at their eternal windmill, targeting those not-actually-existing weapons of mass destruction that, as US intelligence readily admits, the Iranians were not actually developing let alone actually intending to use. Back in the idealistic days of 2003 the US and its allies at least went through the motions of looking for evidence, and still took some pains to compile or at least plagiarise “dodgy dossiers” of reports and rumours. Today we live in a simpler world, and in ruling circles it sometimes seems that the difference between actuality and possibility no longer registers at all. Meanwhile, of course, Israel is making very actual and very active use of its own inexhaustible stockpiles of massively destructive weapons, precisely to destroy the entire territory of Gaza and eliminate its population.

If countries like the US and UK are still serious about ferreting out and eliminating WMD then they won’t have to look far before they find them, along with the people making and enabling such criminal use of them.

The largest single manufacturer of Israel’s weapons is the company Elbit Systems. Founded in 1966 by Elron Electronic Industries and Israel’s Ministry of Defense, among other things Elbit Systems today reportedly “provides up to 85 percent of the land-based equipment procured by the Israeli military and about 85 percent of its drones, according to the Database of Israeli Military and Security Export (DIMSE).” Over the years, Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza and the West Bank have provided Elbit with a steady stream of commissions, and the company is proud to promote its armed Hermes UAVs as the “primary platform of the IDF in counter-terror operations.” Elbit’s recent growth helps to explain why Israel remains, “by far, the world’s largest exporter of military drones.” Elbit is also a leading player in Israel’s booming surveillance technology and cyber defence sectors. In an eye-catching swirl of financial data the company website’s homepage currently summarises its results for 2024, listing annual revenue as $6.8 billion and an order backlog worth $22.6 billion.[1]

In September 2004 Elbit set up a UK subsidiary to manage its growing range of activities in the country. As it expanded, in 2007 Elbit Systems UK purchased the military aerospace company Ferranti Technologies, located just east of Manchester, in Oldham. As of 30 June 2025, Elbit UK’s website explains that the company’s operations, “including its separate subsidiary companies, employ over 680 people across sixteen sites in the UK.” The portfolio includes arms factories in Bristol, Leicester and Kent. Although state and corporate secrecy discourage detailed investigation, Elbit UK’s website advertises the production of aerial and maritime drones, artillery, missiles, rockets, “general purpose bombs” and personal equipment like night goggles and HMDs (helmet mounted displays), along with the provision of flight testing facilities, flight training courses, and the development of target acquisition software like “Atlas” (a package that Elbit recommends as “an ultra-light, man-portable and accurate target acquisition system designed for operation by forward observers”). Thanks to their constant deployment in Palestine, Elbit can regularly advertise its products as “combat ready and combat proven solutions.”

II

Co-founded by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard in July 2020, the UK-based group Palestine Action (PA) was set up to undertake non-violent direct action against Elbit Systems UK and associated local suppliers of the Israeli war machine. In January 2022, PA announced that after eighteen months of sustained pressure and repeated occupations of the Elbit-Ferranti factory in Oldham, Elbit had decided to cut their losses, cease production and sell Ferranti Technologies to TT Electronics. Six months later, PA announced that, after “disrupting business by blockading, occupying and defacing the property” on fifteen successive occasions, Elbit had also decided to abandon its London Headquarters. In March 2024, PA further announced that Elbit Systems had been forced to sell off their “Elite KL” factory in Tamworth. On 29 May 2025 PA activists vandalised the London office of the landlords of “Discovery Park,” which hosts Elbit’s Instro Precision weapons factory. PA is also perhaps entitled to take much if not all of the credit for encouraging the UK Ministry of Defence to exclude Elbit Systems UK from military contracts worth £280 million, and for persuading a whole range of other companies (including Fisher German, Kuehne & Nagel, Barclays, APCO, Hydrafeed, L&B Plating…) to cut ties with the company.

As the PA website explains, “Palestine Action takes strategic, sustained and focused direct action against key targets, in order to maximise disruption against key pillars of Israel’s military-industrial complex. We do not appeal to politicians or anyone else to create the necessary changes, as we understand the depth of complicity within most global institutions. Rather than begging those who are complicit to gain a moral compass, we go straight to the source and shut down the production of Israeli weapons.”

Whereas exercises in civil disobedience may involve “breaking the law in order to force a government or institution to create policy changes,” PA’s recourse to direct action “bypasses our complicit government and forces the necessary change ourselves – it doesn’t involve appealing to those who perpetrate Palestinian oppression.” PA’s priority is to “bypass politicians and go straight to the aggressors,” since if you can “stop a weapons factory from running, even for a day, you’ve already achieved something significant. The hope is that the sustained disruption of these firms will hit their profit margins, losing them contracts and ultimately forcing them to shut down.”

Huda Ammori was persuaded to adopt this strategy after working for the more prominent but less confrontational Palestine Solidarity Campaign, pressing for boycott and divestment and trying to win over MPs. As she recently told the Guardian “she left [PSC] after two years after feeling as if ‘you’re constantly banging your head against a brick wall, you’re constantly trying to reason with people, with the facts, and what you get back is nothing and the complicity continues.’”

As of June 2025, PA activists have been involved in hundreds of operations, occupying and damaging buildings associated with Elbit and its associates, and making liberal and photogenic use of what’s become a widely recognised gesture – spraying blood-red paint. “Since we launched five years ago,” Ammori explained to the New Left Review in April,

we’ve engaged in various actions like rooftop occupations and obstructing companies involved in the arms supply chain. After October 7th our work dramatically intensified, both in terms of the number of people who have joined and the scale of the actions themselves. We’ve seen people break into factories and destroy quadcopter drones – the remote-controlled devices that Israel has used to massacre children in Gaza. Activists have allegedly caused millions of pounds worth of damage to Elbit’s Kent factory [and…] more than a dozen companies have now cut ties with Elbit because of the campaign. Both the Israeli Embassy and Elbit itself have complained to the government about the problems Palestine Action is causing, and we’ve begun to see a reduction in the Ministry of Defence contracts given to the company.

III

On 20 June 2025, PA crossed a further threshold when they directed their action towards the UK’s own air force, breaking into the RAF’s Brize Norton base and defacing two Voyager transport and refuelling planes with their signature red paint. Three days later Starmer’s embarrassed home secretary Yvette Cooper announced that she had “decided to proscribe Palestine Action under section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000,” and promised to present a proscription order to Parliament on Monday 30 June. “If passed, it will make it illegal to be a member of, or invite support for, Palestine Action.” Last year UK police invoked the remarkably expansive powers of this Terrorism Act when they arrested PA’s co-founder Richard Barnard, along with journalists Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst.

“The disgraceful attack on Brize Norton in the early hours of the morning on Friday 20 June,” said Cooper on 23 June, “is the latest in a long history of unacceptable criminal damage committed by Palestine Action. The UK’s defence enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this Government will not tolerate those that put that security at risk.” “Since its inception in 2020,” continued Cooper,

Palestine Action has orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions, including key national infrastructure and defence firms […]. Its activity has increased in frequency and severity since the start of 2024 and its methods have become more aggressive, with its members demonstrating a willingness to use violence. […] Its activities meet the threshold set out in the statutory tests established under the Terrorism Act 2000. This has been assessed through a robust evidence-based process, by a wide range of experts from across government, the police and the Security Services.

On Monday 30 June, Cooper and her colleagues duly laid down the law that will ban PA in the House of Commons. They did so by presenting it in the form of a “statutory instrument,” i.e. as a law that members of Parliament cannot amend but only, after a token 90 minutes of debate, approve or reject as a single package. Especially when prepared at the secretive and far-reaching discretion of the Home Office, such instruments are almost never rejected by MPs; the last time the House of Commons rejected a statutory instrument was in 1979.[2] Also on 30 June a high court judge granted PA a last-minute hearing scheduled for Friday 4 July. Such a hearing might in theory help to delay or dilute the effects of the ban, but the director of the Hansard Society (Ruth Fox) “considers it unlikely to succeed, given the broad powers given to ministers over terrorism legislation, and courts’ reluctance to intervene in national security matters.”

Unless something extraordinary happens in the next couple of days, Cooper’s law will be approved and will come into force at the end of this week, i.e. from Saturday 5 July. Perhaps to help smooth its passage, by the time she presented her proposal to Parliament on 30 June the home secretary had added another pair of groups to her target list: when PA is banned as a UK terrorist organisation it will be flanked by the genuinely surreal combination of a white-supremacist neo-Nazi group called the Maniacs Murder Cult (MKU) on one side and the Russian Imperialist Movement (RIM) on the other. “Maniacs Murder Cult, Palestine Action and the Russian Imperial Movement,” Cooper told the House with a straight face, “have each passed the threshold for proscription based on clear national security evidence and assessments.”

MKU and RIM’s commitments to violence and terror are indeed a matter of public record,[3] but since PA expressly limits its actions to disruption and property damage, Cooper has yet to explain publicly what she means by their “willingness to use violence.” Her most damning allegation seems to be a vague allusion, with reference to PA operations against Thales in Glasgow (in 2022), against Elbit in Bristol and against Instro Precision in Kent (in 2024), to “the impact on innocent members of the public fleeing for safety and subjected to violence.”

Cooper also hasn’t yet made it clear how PA’s activities, though undeniably forceful and disruptive, might fall foul of anti-terror legislation per se. If the word “terrorism” is to retain some distinctive meaning, a terrorist operation presumably needs to have some sort of relation to actions that might inspire terror. The first section of the Terrorism Act adopted in 2000 duly associates terrorism with “serious violence against a person,” or with action that poses “serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.” Controversially (and in the face of concerns regularly expressed by civil rights groups), the Act was indeed framed widely and vaguely enough to include “serious damage to property” or to “electronic systems” – but there is obviously no need to have recourse to anti-terror legislation merely to punish acts of vandalism and property damage. As you would expect, from the moment they began targeting Elbit properties PA activists have been “routinely arrested and charged under existing laws for offences such as criminal damage, violent disorder and burglary.” To classify such offenses as terror is an abuse of political speech. “Palestine Action does not disdain the law,” notes Andrew Feinstein,

it is the law’s most fervent defender. Palestine Action activists do not resist arrest. They do not seek mistrials or hide behind technicalities. They undertake their actions knowing that they will have to answer to a jury of their peers. They make the conscious decision to risk their liberty in solidarity with the people of Gaza. They do so not because they reject the law, but because they desperately want it to be applied – to the representatives of a genocidal government who fly secretly to meet with our foreign secretary, to the weapons companies that aid and abet war crimes, and to our politicians who allow mass slaughter. Again and again, Palestine Action’s activists have been found not guilty by their fellow citizens, for the plain and obvious reason that it offends natural justice to jail individuals using non-violent methods to disrupt the annihilation of an entire people.

As far as I know the most serious act of violence associated with PA is an accusation, made by police responding to the group’s attack on Elbit’s premises in Bristol in August 2024, that two officers were assaulted with sledgehammers; eighteen participants in that operation have been charged and are currently awaiting trial. Again, PA activists may or may not be found guilty of assault, but it’s altogether extraordinary to suggest that they have ever planned or undertaken operations that might invite comparison with those dreamed up by the Russian Imperial Movement or the Maniacs Murder Cult, to say nothing of those actually orchestrated by Al-Qaeda or the mercenary Wagner Group.

The real reason for proscribing PA militants as terrorists is of course to eliminate the organisation and to silence its supporters. Proscription means that PA will be lumped in the same class as Islamic State, Boko Haram or the British neo-Nazi group National Action. Proscription means that anyone who is found guilty of being a member of PA, or of “showing support for” PA, faces a maximum penalty of fourteen years in prison. Even token gestures of affinity, like wearing a logo or forwarding a post on social media, could also be punished with prison sentences.

It’s perhaps no accident that Cooper’s decision to ban PA comes at a time when the group’s successes, courage and sheer stamina have begun to attract more and more support from across the pro-Palestinian movement. Recourse to an outright ban might also have something to do with the frustrating pace and outcomes of previous legal undertakings against PA. “The first Palestine Action case to come to court,” notes the Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley,

ended in December 2021 with total defeat for Elbit. The ‘criminal damage’ case was effectively turned into a trial about Israeli war crimes. Three activists who had defaced the UAV Engines factory, an Elbit subsidiary in Shenstone near Birmingham in the English Midlands, were acquitted. Their lawyers successfully argued that while the three had indeed damaged the factory, it was not criminal damage, but rather proportionate action to prevent crimes in Palestine. Other cases went in broadly the same direction and many other criminal damage charges were dropped before reaching court [since] police and prosecutors saw little hope of juries and magistrates siding with an Israeli arms firm.

It may also be no coincidence, as PA suggested in its initial response to Cooper, that the lobbying organisation We Believe in Israel also recently began a campaign to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group; from 2011 to 2024, We Believe was directed by the Labour MP Luke Akehurst, who describes himself as “part of the furniture of the pro-Israel movement in the UK.” Maybe it’s not surprising that Cooper’s arguments in favour of proscription tally closely with those advanced in We Believe’s booklet “Red Line Crossed: The Case for Proscribing Palestine Action as a Terror-Linked Organisation,” published on 9 June 2025. This booklet sets out to show how “Palestine Action’s repeated acts of serious criminal damage, its incitement of others to do the same, and its rhetorical alignment with proscribed groups meet the threshold of concern.” It’s also hard to know whether recent meetings between the government and Israeli embassy officials, and between ministers and representatives of Elbit Systems, might have anything to do with Cooper’s decision; as the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent Haroon Siddique can testify, records of these meetings have been so heavily redacted that they provide no pertinent information at all.

“Palestine Action forces permanent closure of Elbit Systems lobby firm.” Photo courtesy of Palestine Action.

IV

A government whose members still take some of the credit for brokering peace in Northern Ireland shouldn’t need to be reminded that “blacklisting“ groups like the IRA or the ANC (or indeed Hezbollah and the Taliban) as terrorists only serves, to cite Sophie Haspeslagh, to proscribe peace. As the writer Sally Rooney quickly pointed out, prior to Cooper’s proposal proscription “has only ever been used against militant groups either directly involved in or actively advocating violent armed struggle. […] If the government proceeds down this path, any ordinary person in the UK could in theory be sent to prison simply for expressing verbal support for non-violent activism.” (“I can only say,” adds Rooney at the end of her article, “that I admire and support Palestine Action wholeheartedly, and I will continue to, whether that becomes a terrorist offence or not”). Human rights groups were also quick to issue the sort of warnings that have become all too familiar in the UK over recent years. Liberty evoked “the chilling effect this would have on the thousands of people who campaign for Palestine, and their ability to express themselves and take part in protests,” while Amnesty International worried that proscription “puts at risk the free speech rights of many other activists who are deeply concerned about the plight of Palestinians in the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Greenpeace UK’s co-executive director said a ban would “mark a dark turn for our democracy and a new low for a government already intent on stamping out the right to protest.”

Holocaust survivor and veteran Stop the War campaigner Stephen Kapos is perhaps more entitled than most to have a view about the group. “I consider Palestine Action heroic people,” he said on 24 June, “and that’s how they will go down in history, as appropriate resisters.” The solicitors who represent some PA activists have further warned Cooper that

the proposal to proscribe Palestine Action is wholly unprecedented and constitutes an unlawful, dangerous and ill thought out attack on freedom of expression and assembly. […] Whilst some actions of those associated with Palestine Action have involved damage to property, activists do not advocate or intend unlawful violence against the person. A significant number of actions associated with Palestine Action have used entirely conventional campaigning methods such as marches, rallies and demos. It is an authoritarian turn and an abuse of language to label them as a ‘terrorist’ organisation.

Even some of Cooper’s own civil servants are clearly uncomfortable with her proposal. “My colleagues and I were shocked by the announcement,” one senior Home Office official told the Guardian on 28 June:

All week, the office has been a very tense atmosphere, charged with concern about treating a non-violent protest group the same as actual terrorist organisations like Isis, and the dangerous precedent this sets. From desk to desk, colleagues are exchanging concerned and bemused conversations about how absurd this is and how impossible it will be to enforce. Are they really going to prosecute as terrorists everyone who expresses support for Palestine Action’s work to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel as it commits war crimes? It’s ridiculous and it’s being widely condemned in anxious conversations internally as a blatant misuse of anti-terror laws for political purposes to clamp down on protests which are affecting the profits of arms companies.

Meanwhile, back in Gaza, Elbit’s primary client continues to use its drones and weapons in its habitual way. Over the past month “at least 583 Palestinians have been killed and 4,186 injured while waiting for food at aid distribution sites,” and in late June a number of IDF officers and soldiers told the newspaper Haaretz that “they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present.”

A brief chronology of the last few weeks provides a grim summary of the latest headline statistics: on 17 June, at least 59 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded when IDF forces fired on people lining up for food in Khan Younis; on 18 June airstrikes killed 24 people; on 19 June 15 people were killed waiting for aid in central Gaza while 60 people were reportedly killed by airstrikes; on 20 June the IDF killed 24 people… On Friday 27 June the IDF killed another 81 people in Gaza in a wave of overnight strikes, while another 23 were killed on Sunday 29 June. On this same Sunday tens of thousands of people were once again compelled to flee their homes in Gaza City, as Israel issued new warnings of “military operations [that] will escalate, intensify, and extend westward.” By Monday 30 June local medical staff reported that a new round of airstrikes had killed another 60 people; one of these strikes obliterated the bustling Al-Baqa café in Gaza City, killing 41 customers and employees. One of those killed was the filmmaker and photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab, well known as someone who “photographed everything in Gaza City, conveying the suffering through pictures.”

The next day, Tuesday 1 July, more than 170 humanitarian and human-rights groups (including Save The Children, Oxfam, Amnesty international, ActionAid, War on Want, etc.) all combined to sign and publish an extraordinary statement condemning Israel’s calculated policy of mass starvation in Gaza. “The humanitarian system is being deliberately and systematically dismantled by the Government of Israel’s blockade and restrictions,” reads the statement, “a blockade now being used to justify shutting down nearly all other aid operations in favour of a deadly, military-controlled alternative that neither protects civilians nor meets basic needs. These measures are designed to sustain a cycle of desperation, danger, and death.” Earlier this year, note the rights groups, the UN was still able to distribute food and fuel via 400 aid distribution points spread across the full expanse of the Strip; by replacing these with “just four military-controlled distribution sites” run on behalf of the IDF by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the IDF is now “forcing two million people into overcrowded, militarized zones where they face daily gunfire and mass casualties while trying to access food and are denied other life-saving supplies. Today Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families.”

With three of its four sites located along Gaza’s southern border, the whole extra-legal GHF project is clearly designed to funnel the population down to Egypt in the short term and towards “voluntary” deportation in the longer term. Palestinians themselves quickly came to refer to these blood-soaked GHF locations as “American death zones,” “kill zones” or “death traps.” As one desperate father (Kamel Agha) told Mondoweiss, “we go to die to provide for our children – to get even one kilogram of flour,” he said. “We have been dying of starvation,” another father told Al Jazeera. “We have to feed our children who want to eat. What else can we do?”

Daily reports coming out of Gaza now follow a grimly predictable pattern. As more and more people starve, they are of course compelled to run ever greater risks in search of food. So long as international organisations like UNRWA and the World Food Programme were still free to distribute aid via several hundred locations scattered throughout the Strip, the daily struggle to survive did not itself necessarily lead to massed confrontations with American mercenaries and Israeli troops. From late May, however, when the IDF both greatly reduced the amount of food that could be distributed and then channelled it through only four heavily militarised chokepoints, a new routine was established. People are now forced to travel long distances in the blazing mid-summer heat and to converge into huge queues, and since there isn’t remotely enough food to go round they are also forced to arrive early if they can. On average each of the four GHF sites themselves remain open for only a few unpredictable minutes each day. American GHF contractors and their IDF counterparts can then evoke any sort of pretext to fire on impatient or frustrated crowds. Israel has thereby converted Gaza’s last remaining “humanitarian aid corridors” into shooting galleries.

Speaking to reporters on 24 June, UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini said “the newly created so-called ‘aid mechanism’ is an abomination that humiliates and degrades desperate people. It is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.”

Although in recent weeks the UK’s foreign secretary David Lammy has condemned Netanyahu’s administration for depriving Gaza’s population of food and for preparing to expel them from the Strip, in the same statement he reminded his Israeli counterparts that the UK continues to stand by them and remains “unwavering in our commitment to your security.” Although Lammy says he suspended some arms exports to Israel in September 2024, the UK stands accused of continuing to send regular shipments of weapons to the IDF, and of continuing to fly regular reconnaissance and surveillance flights on Israel’s behalf. Although Lammy’s government concedes that their use in Gaza may violate international law, it continues (with the blessing of London’s high court) to export F-35 fighter jet components to Israel. And although Lammy may object to some IDF tactics, the UK continues to host Elbit Systems and other companies associated with Israeli weapon supplies.

Confronted with the vast and devastating range of evidence that testifies to Israel’s genocidal intentions and flagrant war crimes in Palestine, in the summer of 2025 as in the spring or autumn of 2024, David Lammy and Keir Starmer still continue to insist that their close ally Israel is not actually or deliberately committing such crimes. On 2 September 2024 David Lammy made a statement to the House of Commons that continues to frame his government’s policy to this day. While regretting the undeniable violence of IDF operations in Gaza, Lammy was prepared only to acknowledge the risk or possibility that such violence might violate international law. “This government,” he told the House, “is not an international court. We have not – and could not – arbitrate on whether or not Israel has breached international humanitarian law.” Who knows: maybe they have, maybe they haven’t. The most that Lammy is prepared to say is that he recognises there may now be a “risk” that such breaches might occur, presumably at some uncertain point in the future.

In his September 2024 statement and the ensuing parliamentary debate David Lammy had to admit that – since by now the IDF had demonstrably blown much of Gaza to smithereens – “for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there exists a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.” Mindful of this clear risk, Lammy therefore announced “the suspension of around 30 licences, from a total of approximately 350, to Israel.” Acknowledging that this still accounts for only 10% of overall sales, on 2 September Lammy went on to tell the House of Commons that “we might sell many things, but I do not think anyone would suggest that we should not sell a helmet or goggles to one of our closest allies.” A more complete inventory of ongoing UK arms sales to Israel, as CAAT and others quickly pointed out after Lammy’s statement, might also have included those British-made components and spare parts for the F-35 jets that the IDF uses to bombard Gaza on a regular basis, including “ejector seats, rear fuselage, active interceptor systems, targeting lasers and weapon release cables.” No F-35 fighter can fly or hit its targets without these things. Starmer’s government argues that it cannot stop the IDF from acquiring UK-made components as they are designed to be part of an international production programme, and in that sense are not sent “directly” to Israel. Speaking to the BBC about this, University of Sussex professor Anna Stavrianakis, an expert on the international arms trade and UK weapons exports, described Lammy’s decision “to allow for this exemption as ‘an enormous loophole. UK-made parts for the F-35 mostly go to the USA, where they are incorporated into jets bound for Israel.’ [… Since] the White House ‘does not want to stop supporting Israel,’ the UK export bans were quite limited in their effectiveness.” The BBC itself concludes that as of mid summer 2025 it remains “hard to say what the UK is still exporting to Israel under the active licences. Foreign Secretary David Lammy said last year that the ban was not a ‘blanket ban or an arms embargo’ and said it remained essential that Israel could defend itself from attack.”

As for the possibility that Israel together with its “closest allies” might be guilty of genocide per se, during the 2 September 2024 debate in Parliament neither the term nor its application to IDF operations ever came up. “I’m well aware of the definition of genocide,” Starmer himself told the Commons on 13 November 2024, “and that is why I’ve never described this as and referred to it as genocide.”

V

As with Israel’s turn to more naked forms of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion earlier this spring, Cooper’s decision to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group at least has the virtue of making her government’s priorities as clear as they could possibly be.

On the one hand, Cooper and her colleagues continue to stand by a murderous régime that has so far killed more than 56,000 people in Gaza, that has maimed or injured another 132,000, and that is now avowedly trying to starve or expel all of the survivors – a régime that is just as avowedly intent on repeating a variant of this strategy to expel what remains of the Palestinian population of Jerusalem and the West Bank as well. On the other hand, Cooper is about to proscribe a domestic group that has never been accused, by even its most implacable adversaries, of ever so much as trying to kill anyone at all. In other words, Cooper and her colleagues refuse to take any significant action that might actually prevent their close ally from continuing in a project of mass killing and ethnic cleansing, and are instead determined to deploy the maximal extent of their police powers against a group that has engaged in largely symbolic actions to interrupt that project. “The real crime here,” declared PA in response to Cooper, “is not red paint being sprayed on these warplanes, but the war crimes that have been enabled with those planes because of the UK government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.”

By taking this step Cooper and her colleagues have committed themselves to what is already turning into a direct collision course with most of their constituents. Polls undertaken in early June 2025 indicate that “the British public support a full arms embargo on Israel by more than 4 to 1, including 72% of those who voted Labour in 2024.” A further “54% of the British public support Israel being expelled from the UN, with only 16% being opposed.” Hundreds of writers (including Pankaj Mishra, George Monbiot, Yanis Varoufakis, Kojo Karam…) have now signed on to statements, organised by Fossil Free Books and Artists for Palestine, urging Cooper not to ban PA. On 28 June, at the Glastonbury festival, the Irish rap group Kneecap (who have already been charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying the flag of the already-proscribed terrorist organisation Hezbollah at a concert in London last November) led a massive crowd in chants of “free, free Palestine” and “fuck Keir Starmer.” By the time I stopped updating this article on 1 July, more than 78,000 people had signed the PSC’s online petition opposing Cooper’s ban.

By 1 July Yvette Cooper’s inbox had further swollen to include several new collectively signed letters, including one from the Network for Police Monitoring and another prepared by Michael Mansfield KC and other members of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. The latter was co-signed by several thousand other people, including Imran Khan HC, John Kendy KC, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas, Liz Davies, and Haim Bresheeth. (Keir Starmer was himself a member of the Haldane Society until he become director of public prosecutions in 2008). After noting that it’s “unwise to blur the very clear lines between peaceful protest and terrorism by using misleading rhetoric,” Mansfield and his Haldane colleagues reminded Cooper that

in a series of acts contrary to international law, the UK govt appears to be using the RAF Brize Norton base to onward service RAF Akrotiri that in turn is used by our allies and the UK to facilitate what the ICJ has found to be a plausible genocide in Gaza. As a state party to the Genocide Convention, facilitating such a genocide would be a particularly egregious breach of international law, by the UK. The UK government, by simultaneously seeking to criminalise those peacefully protesting this genocide using proscription, is further doubling down on these acts, rather than remedying these errors of judgment, as it should.

Also on 1 July, several UN special rapporteurs for the promotion and protection of human rights (including Francesca Albanese, Irene Khan, Gina Romero and Ben Saul) wrote to Cooper and her colleagues to condemn “the unjustified labelling of a political protest movement as ‘terrorist.’ According to international standards, acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism.”

On this issue as on many others, the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn remains more in touch with grassroots opinion than do Cooper and the other Blairites who drove him and his associates out of the party. “The government’s proposal to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation,” recognises Corbyn, “is as absurd as it is authoritarian. It represents a draconian assault on the democratic right to protest and is a disgraceful attempt to hide the real meaning of violence: the mass murder of Palestinians.” Corbyn’s parliamentary colleague Zarah Sultana likewise takes up PA’s slogan, which has been signed over the past few days by many thousands of petitioners: “We are all Palestine Action.”

“The decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group is beyond satire,” commented an astonished former police chief constable (Meredydd Hughes) on 22 June. “Proscribing a group for peaceful protest – albeit illegal – is a disgrace. It is nearly as disgraceful as the continued UK support for the apartheid, ethnic-cleansing Israeli state. If the home secretary is so keen to proscribe an organisation, why not proscribe the terror group known as the Israel Defense Forces?” “If the UK Government believes those protesting against the atrocities in Gaza are terrorists,” adds former Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf, “but those killing children should be supported and provided with weapons, then this Government has not only lost its way, it has lost its conscience.”

Peterborough offices of CDW, technology suppliers for Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, anonymously targeted by PA activists. Photo courtesy of Palestine Action.

VI

Keir Starmer himself may know a thing or two about this point of principle since he (unlike Yvette Cooper) once had enough of a conscience to oppose the 2003 Iraq war, and even, in his erstwhile role as a human rights lawyer, to defend several principled individuals who took direct action to prevent US bombers based at RAF Fairford from participating in that war. Acting on behalf one of the defendants (Josh Richards), Starmer apparently helped to formulate a distinctive line of defence, “arguing that their actions were justified, morally and legally, because they were aimed at preventing a greater evil – i.e. the war in Iraq and its probable consequences. They were, in short, willing to commit crimes in order to prevent greater crimes.” When the case eventually came before the House of Lords in March 2006, the judge Lord Hoffman acknowledged that “civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country. People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history. The suffragettes are an example which comes immediately to mind. It is the mark of a civilised community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind.”

Back in 1998 Starmer also defended the veteran anti-war campaigner Andrea Needham, who last week told LBC radio that Cooper’s ban would be “unenforceable because of the thousands of people – including herself – who will continue to stand with Palestine Action.” In 1996 Needham and her co-defendants had damaged a BAE Hawk Warplane with hammers in order to prevent its export to Indonesia, whose army was engaged in a ruthless campaign against the people of East Timor. On that occasion Starmer again helped to persuade a jury to find his clients not-guilty by arguing that their disruptive actions were intended to prevent much greater evils. “When he represented us at Strasbourg,” recalls Needham, “he seemed to be very passionate about it. In retrospect, I suspect he was just doing his job because the way that he acts now makes me feel that he really has no moral compass whatsoever. The idea that proscribing an explicitly non violent domestic group, putting them in the same category as ISIS and Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram – I mean if it weren’t actually happening, it’d be laughable.” Activists who targeted RAF bases in order to prevent war crimes from being carried out in Iraq or East Timor have been regularly acquitted, notes Ammori, “but as soon as it’s done for Palestine that’s it, you’re branded as a terrorist.”

The suffragettes are one celebrated example of a group whose regular recourse to property damage and disruption would no doubt suffice to warrant their condemnation and incarceration as terrorists in today’s UK. Another comparison that often comes up are the Women of Greenham Common, who in 1981 began a prolonged series of demonstrations to pressure Thatcher’s government into removing US cruise missiles from the Greenham Common air force base. With extraordinary stamina and courage, over many years the Greenham activists repeatedly blockaded the site and broke through its chain-link fences, activities that today would certainly land them in jail.

Among many other precursors one of the most pertinent is that Underground Railroad which, in its opposition to slavery in the antebellum United States, undertook “damage to property” so serious that in many cases the result was its literal evaporation – i.e. self-emancipation without compensation. Pressed by the slave-owning states to do something about such extra-legal interference with their property rights, in 1850 the US government passed a notorious Fugitive Slave Act that instructed all officials and citizens in the non-slave-owning states to capture any escaped slaves and return them to their owners. Despite obvious differences in scale and context, this analogy may not be as far-fetched as it might first appear. Repeated police efforts to enforce this immoral and unenforceable law were one of the several factors that turned diffuse opposition to slavery into an unstoppable movement to abolish it. Confrontations resulting from attempts to arrest fugitive slaves in Boston, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and many other places directly contributed to the outbreak of the US civil war, a war that soon provided an occasion for that world-changing project of mass self-emancipation which cleared a fragile path towards civic equality and social justice. Rarely has it been more obvious that we all have “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” as Martin Luther King would later say in a related context, for “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Nelson Mandela, himself once proscribed and imprisoned as a terrorist, also understood early on that when confronted with unjust laws “we could do no other than to choose between compliance with the law and compliance with our consciences.” Faced with legally-sanctioned apartheid, Mandela’s exiled comrade Oliver Tambo told the ANC in January 1984, “we should direct our collective might to rendering the enemy’s instruments of authority unworkable.” To pave the way for the kind of egalitarian “society that is visualised in the Freedom Charter,” Tambo added in 1985, “we have to make apartheid unworkable and our country ungovernable.” Back in South Africa itself, a massive and United Democratic Front (UDF) translated this imperative into an imposing political force by organising its own forms of direct action, via rent and labour strikes, school protests, enormous demonstrations, and a sustained boycott of the state’s tokenistic tricameral system. President P.W. Botha soon banned the organisation and by 1987 many if not most UDF activists were in jail – but no amount of punitive intimidation, no amount of prison time or “treason trials”, no amount of police violence and harassment was enough to hold back the tide of mass protest that eventually overwhelmed the apartheid régime.

When Mandela died in 2013, Yvette Cooper remembered him as “an inspiration for the world, not just for a nation.” We also know that Cooper is familiar with many other precursors to Palestine Action since back in 2019 (during the years when her Conservative counterpart Priti Patel was entrusted with the task of cracking down on protest), she took some time to put together a compilation of “women’s speeches that changed the world.” Cooper’s years in opposition had given her a chance to recognise that she had been wrong to support Blair’s push to war in 2003 and wrong to oppose independent inquiries into its conduct. Her government had been “wrong over Iraq – both on the initial decision, because there were no weapons of mass destruction, and on the strategy afterwards.” It was high time, Cooper now wrote, to listen to some people who had been proved right.

Cooper entitled her 2019 book She Speaks. As you might expect from a life-long partisan of “third way” politics, Cooper’s table of contents includes such luminaries as Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, and the book concludes with words from Queen Elizabeth II. The collection also finds space for people like Audre Lorde, Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, however, as well as the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and the abolitionist Sojourner Truth. In her introduction to the book, Cooper explains how she was “horrified by the number of these brave women who have had to face serious threats, abuse or violence from those who wanted them to stay quiet.” Sojourner Truth, for instance, “faced mobs outside the churches where she spoke,” while “the Suffragettes were tortured and force-fed.”[4]

In 2019-20 Cooper knew where she stood. Back then she was struck by how Lorde’s earlier words of warning, “‘your silence will not protect you,’ are resonating with activists around the world and feel relevant and rousing for a new generation.” Cooper duly presented her book as

proof that women will not be silenced. The suffragettes weren’t silenced. Nor were the abolitionists. Nor are today’s campaigners deterred. These women’s stories should be the inspiration to us to challenge the rising tide of hatred and misogyny fuelled by a minority online and offline. Because now there are more of us who are willing to speak out. And there will be more still; women who speak out, and men who support us when we do. The women in this book wouldn’t stay quiet. Their words live on after their speeches and will live on after they have gone. […] They are all women of whom I have thought – she speaks, I must listen.

Amen to that. Perhaps now in the coming weeks and months Cooper will find herself obliged to listen a little more closely to a few other women’s voices, starting with those of Huda Ammori and everyone else struggling for Palestinian liberation.

VII

You don’t have to agree with everything a group does to appreciate its vital and energising contribution to a broad political campaign. Good arguments can be made in support both of direct action and of civil disobedience, and of more law-abiding forms of mass protest too, along with efforts to combine all three. Ammori’s own years of experience have led her to conclude that “no mass movement is going to succeed if its main emphasis is on convincing the political class to stop supporting the Zionist regime. Unfortunately, the political class is immovable. Putting it at the centre of your strategy means you get sucked into a respectability politics which goes nowhere. That’s exactly what we’ve seen over the past eighteen months. Whereas if you take an approach that isn’t based on trying influence the government, you can actually empower people – you can show them that protest isn’t just symbolic, that it can achieve real results.”

Whatever else it might turn out to be, Cooper’s proscription plan is itself a kind of tribute to these results and their impact. Everyone can now see that PA has done more than any other group in the UK to clarify the actual role and purpose of Elbit Systems, and to define their reputation. As Israel’s genocide continues uninterrupted, growing numbers of people can also see that direct action might succeed in achieving what other strategies have so far failed to accomplish. Some of us who are already listening to Ammori and her PA comrades may also remain invested in the transformative potential of mass demonstrations, and may also persevere in strategies that prioritise trying to influence or replace a government. The more Israel and its allies rely on raw military power to achieve their ends, the more obvious it becomes that only overwhelming political pressure could ever compel them to change course. It’s equally obvious, however, that the collective pressure we’ve been able to apply so far isn’t yet remotely strong enough to stop the IDF’s project of murder and conquest.

Israel’s war on Palestine not only continues, it is expanding and accelerating. Everyone who opposes it needs to recognise our obligation to do whatever we can to stop it. Those of us who live in the countries still enabling this genocide cannot evade this choice: consent or refusal. “There inevitably comes a time,” observes the philosopher Frédéric Lordon in a recent blogpost, “when political projects of domination reveal their true nature.” Here and now, after months of bombardment and deprivation, no one can continue to plead ignorance. Actually-existing Zionism now stands fully exposed for what it is: “colonial, racist […], and, when necessary, genocidal.” For anyone with eyes to see, continues Lordon, it’s obvious that there can be

no Zionism with a human face just as there cannot be a secure Jewish state on land taken by force. At this point, the historical alternative presents itself. Either Israeli society persists in its drive towards extermination, laying the ground for its moral perdition, and eventually its downfall. Or it recognises that from the moment it committed the Nakba it was preparing its own catastrophe, and in doing so perceives the sole viable future for a Jewish presencein Palestine: a binational, egalitarian state.[5]

So long as the Israel’s government continues to resist this prospect then as hundreds of my UK colleagues recognised more than fifteen years ago, today’s most pressing prescription remains what it already was in 2014 or 2009: “Israel must lose.”

As Emmeline Pankhurst herself put it in the 1913 speech that Cooper included in her book, a government that is prepared to kill or incarcerate its citizens can certainly dominate them, but it cannot legitimately govern them. So long as people “consent to be unjustly governed, they can be” – but “no power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.”

Notes

[1] References here to the websites of Palestine Action, Elbit Systems and Elbit Systems UK were last checked on 30 June 2025.

[2] According to a parliamentary review undertaken in 2016, “only 17 statutory instruments have been rejected by the two Houses over the last 65 years out of nearly 170,000, including five instruments out of some 23,000 laid before Parliament since 1997.” A note appended to Cooper’s proscription order explains that “a full impact assessment has not been produced for this instrument as no, or no significant, impact on the private, voluntary or public sectors is foreseen.”

[3] As Josiah Mortimer reports in the Byline Times, “the New Jersey Department for Homeland Security says of the Maniacs Murder Cult that in 2023, they co-authored a ‘Kill Guide,’ which ‘provided attack tactics, techniques, & procedures’ with NeoNazi terror group No Lives Matter. The latter calls MKU ‘brothers in arms’ who together can ‘strike anywhere’ through racist killings. In 2020, the US state department designated the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) and members of its leadership as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, ‘the first time in history the Department has designated a white supremacist terrorist group.’ RIM has provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe and actively works to rally these types of groups into a common front against their perceived enemies. RIM has two training facilities in St. Petersburg.”

[4] Given the present circumstances, Cooper’s introduction to Pankhurst’s speech of November 1913 warrants a little further quotation. Cooper relates that “in 2013 I hung a huge framed portrait of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst over the old fireplace in my parliamentary office,” and then goes on to explain why she has such great respect for her:

“Born in Moss Side in Manchester in 1858, Pankhurst became a leading suffrage campaigner and founded the Women’s Social and Political Union to campaign for the right to vote. But faced with immense resistance in Parliament and with progress slow, their tactics became more impatient and more militant. Suffragettes would smash windows and destroy property, and when imprisoned would hunger strike. Many, like Pankhurst, were arrested on multiple occasions. [… Pankhurst’s speech] focuses on why the suffragettes have ‘adopted revolutionary methods’ – using different images and stories to connect with her audience, from US political history to crying babies: ‘That is the whole history of politics. You have to make more noise than anybody else.’ Then, in place of a moral argument in favour of women’s votes, Pankhurst makes a political one – that this is a civil war, waged by women who cannot in the end be beaten because we are everywhere, and because government depends on consent.

Pankhurst vividly describes the appalling torture and force-feeding inflicted by the British state on suffragettes to try to break them, but also the remarkable strength and determination of women who lost their liberty and their health but refused to give in.

Five years after Pankhurst made this speech, the Representation of the People Act finally gave some women the right to vote in 1918, and full suffrage followed in 1928. The British Parliament today is still male dominated, but nearly a third of MPs are women, and the progress we’ve made is only because of the bravery and battles won bywomen over a century ago.” (Cooper, ed., She Speaks, epub, 63.5/458).

[5] “As is often the case,” concludes Lordon, “the apparently utopian is the only genuine realism. There are seven million Jews in Israel; they are not going anywhere, no serious anti-Zionist position is asking them to. The anti-Zionist demand is disarmingly, biblically simple: equality. Equality for all inhabitants, equality in dignity and in rights, equality in the right of return for refugees, equality in everything.”

Petitions in support of Palestine Action are currently posted at https://www.change.org/p/don-t-proscribe-palestine-action and https://palestinecampaign.eaction.org.uk/NoProscription. As things stand, those who want to join Palestine Action or sign up to receive their email updates can do so via https://palestineaction.org/join/.

Updates (relevant to PA’s ongoing application for de-proscription)

Update Wednesday 2 July 2025, 5:40pm. The UK House of Commons has just voted to approve Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine action by 385 votes to 26. A transcript of the 90-minute debate can be accessed via Hansard. The list of MPs who opposed the ban includes six independents (Shockat Adam, Aspana Begum, Jeremy Corbyn, Adnan Hussain, John McDonnell, Zarah Sultana), nine Labour (including Diane Abbott, Imran Hussain and Clive Lewis) and four Greens (Sian Berry, Ellie Chowns, Carla Denyer, Adrian Ramsay).

An hour or so after this vote was confirmed, Amnesty International (AI) issued a statement condemning the UK government’s “decision to ban Palestine Action, under anti-terror laws, as an unprecedented legal overreach. The UK has a deeply flawed and overly broad definition of terrorism which human rights monitors including Amnesty International have been warning about for years. This latest disturbing move only serves to highlight that those warnings were justified.” “Instead of taking draconian measures” to proscribe Palestine Action, added AI UK’s chief executive Sacha Deshmukh, “the Government should be taking immediate and unequivocal action to put a stop to Israel’s genocide and end any risk of UK complicity in it.”

“In the near future,” wrote former ANC member (and well-known critic of the global arms trade) Andrew Feinstein in an editorial for Middle East Eye on 2 July, “there will be museums and memorials to this genocide. Soon, everyone will acknowledge this once-in-a-lifetime horror. Soon, your friends, your family, your children and your grandchildren, will ask: what did you do when Israel was bombing the children of Gaza? […] What will your answer be? In this moment of crisis, did you stand on the side of genocide? Or did you have the guts to defend the innocents of Gaza, to protect British democracy, and to stand up to your own leaders? Did you say, aye, Palestine Action and everyone who supports them are terrorists? Or did you instead say, no. No more. Never again. Not in my name. Choose wisely. The world, and your constituents, are watching. […]”

In addition to putting all pro-Palestinian organisers and campaigners under new and more far-reaching forms of pressure, adds Feinstein, there is no doubt another more parochial and more “ugly dimension to this affair. The decision to proscribe Palestine Action will undoubtedly invite the surveillance of the sort of anti-war, anti-austerity and pro-Gaza candidates who now threaten many of Starmer’s most senior Cabinet ministers.” Among other ministers, Feinstein points to “Wes Streeting, Starmer’s mooted heir-apparent, sitting on a 500-vote majority threatened by Leanne Mohammed – a twenty-something independent who is unshakeable in her commitment to opposing crimes in Gaza, to fighting imperialism and defeating austerity.”

Update Thursday 3 July. The House of Lords today approved Cooper’s proscription without a vote. An amendment expressing regret that “the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation (1) undermines civil liberties, including civil disobedience, (2) constitutes a misuse of anti-terrorism legislation, given that offences such as property damage can be dealt with under other criminal law, (3) suppresses dissent against the United Kingdom’s policy on Israel, and (4) criminalises support for a protest group, thereby creating a chilling effect on freedom of expression” was defeated by 144 votes to 16.

This regret amendment was proposed by the Green peer Jenny Jones, a forceful critic of the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal campaign. “If you want Palestine Action to disappear,” Jones told the House, “then stop sending arms to Israel and giving military support to a foreign government engaged in ethnic cleansing.”

Speaking in support of Jones’ amendment, the Labour peer and veteran anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain likewise pointed out that Cooper’s ban would also have applied to both the suffragettes and ANC leaders. “Remember that Nelson Mandela was labelled a ‘terrorist’ by the apartheid government,” Hain said, as also “by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, by the United States and other Western governments during much of the Cold War. Mandela even remained on the US terrorism watchlist until 2008, many years after becoming South Africa’s first democratically elected president and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. […] Nevertheless, he became a global icon and in 1996 President Mandela addressed both Houses of this Parliament in Westminster Hall.” As for the suffragettes, who are “treated as heroines today” (not least by Cooper and some of her ministerial colleagues), they too “could have been suppressed under this proscription. They used violence against property in a strategic manner to demand voting rights for women as part of civil disobedience protests when their peaceful protests seemed futile. […] They even hid small homemade bombs inside mailboxes and attempted to bomb Westminster Abbey and Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s uncompleted house. Frankly Palestine Action members spraying paint on military aircraft at Brize Norton seems positively moderate by comparison.” The point seems hard to dispute. “This government is treating Palestine Action as equivalent to Islamic State or al-Qaeda,” concluded Hain, “which is intellectually bankrupt, politically unprincipled and morally wrong. Frankly I am deeply ashamed. And that is why I support this regret amendment.”

Meanwhile one of the two RAF planes that Palestine Action spray-painted (if not “damaged beyond repair”, as some media outlets had suggested) on 20 June was reported to be already back in the air. It was tracked making a flight from Brize Norton to Glasgow on Tuesday 1st July and another over the North Sea on Wednesday 2nd July.

Back in Palestine itself, on 3 July Israel again “escalated its offensive in Gaza before imminent talks about a ceasefire, with warships and artillery launching one of the deadliest and most intense bombardments in the devastated Palestinian territory for many months. Medics and officials in Gaza reported that about 90 people were killed” over the night and day of 3rd July, while more than a hundred were killed over the night of 1st-2nd July.

It was further confirmed on 3 July that Israel’s body-count for 2 July 2025 included one of Palestine’s most senior and renowned doctors, the director of Gaza’s Indonesia Hospital, Dr Marwan al-Sultan. He was killed along with his wife, daughter, sister and son-in-law. As his surviving daughter explained, they were all assassinated by a missile which clearly targeted their specific apartment, leaving the rest of their building largely untouched.

“Sultan was an experienced cardiologist and a leading figure in Gaza’s medical community,” notes the Guardian. “He was also one of only two remaining heart specialists in the territory […]. His death means that all of the directors of the hospitals in northern Gaza have either been killed or detained by the Israeli military forces.” “Through 20 months of war,” adds the Washington Post, “the cardiologist had become one of the conflict’s main narrators, describing to the world again and again the horrific scenes in his wards, even as he battled to keep the lights on at the hospital he managed in the north.”

The Indonesia Hospital was forced to suspend operations in May after repeated IDF attacks, and since early June there have been no functioning hospitals in north Gaza at all. According to UN figures, Israel has now killed at least 1,400 healthcare workers in Gaza since this latest phase of its war began in October 2023. According to the US-based NGO Medglobal, more than 180 other medical staff remain in Israeli jails, with many reportedly subject to torture and abuse; their number includes the director of the (repeatedly besieged) Kamal Adwan hospital, Hussam Abu Safiya, who was imprisoned without charge in December 2024.

Amnesty International today released another substantial statement, showing how “Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide. Heartbreaking testimonies gathered from medical staff, parents of children hospitalized for malnutrition and displaced Palestinians struggling to survive paint a horrifying picture of acute levels of starvation and desperation in Gaza. Their accounts provide further evidence of the catastrophic suffering caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on life-saving aid and its deadly militarized aid scheme coupled with mass forced displacement, relentless bombardment and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, reminded Israel that, as the occupying power, it has “a legal obligation to ensure Palestinians in Gaza have access to food, medicine and other supplies essential for their survival. Instead, it has brazenly defied binding orders issued by the International Court of Justice in January, March and May 2024, to allow the unimpeded flow of aid to Gaza. Israel has continued to restrict the entry of aid and impose its suffocating cruel blockade and even a full siege lasting nearly eighty days. This must end now. Israel must lift all restrictions and allow unfettered, safe, and dignified access to humanitarian aid throughout Gaza immediately.”

Like Amnesty, the UN too published a substantial new report today, by special rapporteur Francesca Albanese. This report details some of the many ways international corporations (e.g. Palantir, Volvo, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Pimco, Vanguard, to say nothing of arms companies like Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries or Lockheed Martin…) continue to profit from Israel’s genocide. Albanese observes that “for Israeli companies such as Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, the ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture. The 65 per cent surge in Israeli military spending from 2023 to 2024 – amounting to $46.5 billion, one of the highest per capita worldwide – generated a sharp surge in their annual profits. Foreign arms companies, especially producers of munitions and ordnance, also profit.” Albanese concludes her report with recommendations that urge all UN member states “(a) To impose sanctions and a full arms embargo on Israel, including all existing agreements and dual-use items such as technology and civilian heavy machinery; (b) To suspend or prevent all trade agreements and investment relations, and impose sanctions, including asset freezes, on entities and individuals involved in activities that may endanger the Palestinians; (c) To enforce accountability, ensuring that corporate entities face legal consequences for their involvement in serious violations of international law.” She further “urges the International Criminal Court and national judiciaries to investigate and prosecute corporate executives and/or corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes and laundering of the proceeds from those crimes.”

Also on 3 July, former Labour MPs Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn formally announced their intention to help form a new political party.

Update Friday 4 July. On 4 July, the day after al-Sultan and his family were assassinated, another doctor was murdered in Gaza: Dr Musa Hamdan Khafaja, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Nasser Hospital. “The attack was eerily similar,” observed Ghada Ageel in Al Jazeera. “Dr Musa had also followed the orders of the IDF, fled his home in Khan Younis, and sought refuge in al-Mawasi, another ‘safe zone.’ There, he pitched a tent to shelter his family. That tent became their grave. His wife and three young children – daughters Shaza and Judi, and son Adel, all died.’

The UK’s high court judge Martin Chamberlain today considered the request from Palestine Action’s Huda Ammori for an interim order to delay Yvette Cooper’s ban from taking effect until after the court undertakes a judicial review. “The home secretary is rushing through the implementation of the proscription at midnight tonight,” Ammori argued, “despite the fact that our legal challenge is ongoing and that she has been completely unclear about how it will be enforced, leaving the public in the dark about their rights to free speech and expression after midnight tonight when this proscription comes into effect.”

As widely expected, late this afternoon Martin Chamberlain declined to grant this application for interim relief. Chamberlain said: “I have concluded that the harm which would ensue if interim relief is refused but the claim later succeeds is insufficient to outweigh the strong public interest in maintaining the order in force.”

As the Guardian reports, “Raza Husain KC, representing Ammori, described the proscription decision in the hearing before Chamberlain as ‘an ill-considered, discriminatory and authoritarian abuse of statutory power.’ He said it was ‘absurd’ to label a civil disobedience direct action protest group that does not advocate violence as a terrorist organisation. ‘The main target has been stopping Elbit Systems … which markets itself as the backbone of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],’ said Husain. “As my client says: ‘The aim of terrorism is to take lives and hurt people, that’s the opposite of what we do.'”

In his 26-page written judgement for case number AC-2025-LON-002122, Justice Martin Chamberlain considered the several distinct grounds or arguments put forward by Raza Husain on Huda Ammori’s behalf. Chamberlain accepted that “the claimant’s grounds contain at least one serious issue to be tried, namely that the order is a disproportionate interference with the rights of the claimant and others under Article 10 and 11 ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights],” i.e. with their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and assembly. This was listed as the second of a total of eight grounds put forward by Ammori’s legal team. Chamberlain rejected two of these other grounds outright (ground one, the argument that “the order is ultra vires and/or was made for an improper purpose,” and ground three, the argument that “PA is not ‘concerned in terrorism’”), and he reserved judgement on the remaining five. “It is possible that grounds 4-8 may also raise serious issues to be tried,” Chamberlain admitted, “but these grounds are not obviously well-founded and their ultimate prospects are at this stage difficult to assess.” (In brief: grounds four and five “allege that the Secretary of State [Yvette Cooper] took into account irrelevant considerations, namely the views of the Israeli Government, Elbit Systems and pro-Israel lobby groups, while failing to take into account matters which told against proscription.” Ground 6 holds “that the Secretary of State failed to apply her published policy, which requires her to take into account the nature and scale of an organisation’s activities, the specific threat that it poses to the UK,” and so on. “Ground 7 is that the Secretary of State breached the public sector equality duty in section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 […]. Ground 8 is that the decision was taken in breach of natural justice and/or in breach of Article 6 ECHR because PA was not consulted in advance.”)

As to the further question posed by Raza Husain of whether the Home Secretary was “actually advancing a national security justification for proscription,” Chamberlain was categorical. “In my judgment, there is no doubt that she is.” Summarising Yvette Cooper’s case against them, Chamberlain noted that “PA has orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions, including key national infrastructure and defence firms.” He also drew attention to the fact that “PA has a considerable online presence that has enabled the organisation to galvanise popular support, recruit and train members across the UK and raise considerable funds through online donations.” As enacted by the Home Secretary, observed Chamberlain, “proscription will enable law enforcement to effectively disrupt PA, help to undermine the covert methods it uses and reduce the risk that PA radicalises people wishing to demonstrate legitimate support for the Palestinian cause into becoming members or supporters of the organisation.”

While “it will remain lawful for the claimant [Ammori] and other persons who were members of PA prior to proscription to continue to express their opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere,” Chamberlain acknowledged that “there is no doubt that there will be serious consequences if the order comes into effect immediately and interim relief is refused. If individuals choose to continue to express their support for PA […] they will incur criminal liability. It will be for them to decide whether to do so. This, however, is the intended effect of the order. It is how it achieves its aim of disrupting the activities of the proscribed organisation.” Chamberlain duly decided against granting interim relief, clearing the way for Cooper’s order to come into immediate effect.

Chamberlain’s decision to uphold Cooper’s proscription “means Palestine Action will become the first direct action protest group to be banned under the Terrorism Act. […] Another hearing is scheduled for 21 July when Palestine Action will apply for permission for a judicial review to quash the order. In the meantime, and unless the judicial review is successful, membership of, or inviting support for, the group will carry a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.”

Earlier today Martha Spurrier, a human rights barrister and former director of Liberty, provided the Guardian a useful overview of the imminent legal process and its implications. “If the government prevails,” she explained, “that is not the end of the story – but the route to overturning the ban becomes significantly harder. The minute the order is effective it is strengthened by being the status quo. The deference shown to the government on national security issues is enormous.”

Cooper’s ban of Palestine Action is now cleared to come into effect at midnight tonight. From now on information about Palestine Action may become more difficult to access. Useful websites should include Netpol (Network for Police Organising) as well as campaigning groups like Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War, along with outlets like Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, Declassified UK, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, etc. UK groups opposed to PA’s proscription currently plan to take action to defy the ban every Saturday. The next nation-wide rally for Palestine is currently organised for Saturday 19 July, i.e. two days before the high court hearing scheduled for 21 July.

Late on 4 July it was also reported that a new direct-action group had already emerged to pick up where Palestine Action has now been forced to leave off, under the aptly chosen name of “Yvette Cooper.” The group spray-painted some trucks belonging to Time Logistics, a company they accuse of collaborating with the Israeli arms industry. “If you want to ban Palestine Action,” proclaimed the group on social media, “you’ll have to proscribe Yvette Cooper too.”

Update Saturday 5 July. An initial group of 29 people were arrested in London at a midday demonstration opposing Cooper’s ban, organised by the campaigning association Defend Our Juries. The group gathered under the statue of Gandhi that overlooks one side of Parliament Square, holding signs that read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Reverend Sue Parfitt (aged 83) was one of those arrested; as she and the other protestors were taken away by scores of police she derided Cooper’s ban as “total nonsense.” According to the HJA criminal defence lawyer Francesca Cociani, writes Huw Lemmey in the LRB, “the arrest of Rev. Parfitt under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act means that she will be tried before a district judge and won’t have the opportunity to appear before a jury at all. All of this amounts to a devastating attack on freedom of conscience.”

Sue Parfitt subsequently told Al Jazeera that after they were arrested the 29 protestors were released on bail, on condition that they undertake not to enter the borough of Westminster and “not to take part in any rallies supporting Palestine Action.” The police will tell them whether or not they will be charged under the Terrorism Act on 2 October. “If we were to be found guilty we would be liable to up to 14 years in prison,” adds Parfitt. “That’s why we have to contest this law, it’s perfectly ridiculous. This is a peaceful organisation.” (It is perhaps worth adding here, to draw on an interview she gave a few months ago, that after training as a social worker and a family therapist, back in 1994 Sue Parfitt was one of the first women to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. By now her longstanding recourse to civil disobedience, notably as a member of the direct-action group Christian Climate Action, has led to her being arrested around 30 times. “Being a Christian,” says Parfitt, “means we are called to follow Jesus, whatever the cost. And Jesus was continually in breach of the law because he was calling out the evils of his day within the civil and religious authorities.” As Parfitt told the Church Times in September 2024, “I am shocked by the draconian sentences given to peaceful, committed, loving people who are only trying to enable life on earth to continue.” Now 83 and a widow with no direct dependants, Parfitt does not find such sentences intimidating. “It is an honour to still have a meaningful role to fulfil, and a part to play in showing love in action towards my fellow human beings.”)

Asked to justify the arrests, the head of London’s police force, commissioner Mark Rowley, said that Parfitt and other members of Defend Our Juries were guilty of showing support for an “organisation committing serious criminality […]. The law doesn’t have an age limit, whether you’re 18 or 80. If you’re supporting proscribed organisations, then the law is going to be enforced.” As a gathering of “priests, teachers, health workers, human rights lawyers,” explained the group’s Tim Crosland, “we’re [here] refusing to be silenced. Because it goes to the core of what we believe in: that we oppose genocide – I didn’t think that was that controversial – and we support the people who resist genocide.”

It is worth remembering that there was a time when this point was indeed uncontroversial, and even considered a matter of far-reaching and non-negotiable principle. Though it has been said over and over (and already mentioned at the beginning of this article), it’s worth reminding Cooper and Starmer once again that, like the US and Israel, the UK is one of the 153 countries that have signed the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. By adhering to this document, the UK accepts that genocidal acts, in addition to killing members of a distinct national or ethnic group, include “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” As a signatory to the convention, the UK is categorically obliged “to confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”

If there is to be any justice for Palestine, in due course Cooper and her colleagues will need to demonstrate, to their own citizens and to the world’s criminal court, how exactly they respected this binding obligation once their ally Israel initiated its patently genocidal assault on Gaza in October 2023. Perhaps on the same occasion they could also explain to the world why exactly their government should retain its permanent veto power on the UN’s security council. For the time being self-declared impunity may remain an imposing “fact on the ground” but it is not a defence.

Over the past few months the former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer has occasionally expressed regret about the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza but he has consistently and pointedly refused (e.g. on 19 May 2025, 4 June, 11 June) to characterise Israeli actions as genocidal. He is clearly not prepared to budge from the position he summarised in the House of Commons on 13 November 2024: “I’m well aware of the definition of genocide, and that is why I’ve never described this as and referred to it as genocide.” When in late June 2025 Starmer’s government was required to fight off a legal challenge to its ongoing sale of F-35 parts to Israel, lawyers acting for his administration likewise argued that “the evidence available does not support a finding of genocide.” Contradicting the documented conclusions of the UN and of perhaps every credible human rights group on the planet, Starmer’s lawyers even told the judges that “the government assessment was that…there was no serious risk of genocide occurring.”

Update Sunday 6 July. Some 80 people were reported killed and 300 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza today, including 18 displaced people living in the crowded tent encampments of al-Mawasi. Meanwhile doctors in Gaza told the Guardian that “hundreds of babies are at risk of death amid a critical shortage of baby milk, as Israel continues to restrict the humanitarian aid that can enter the beleaguered strip.” “I can’t begin to describe how bad things are,” said Dr Ahmad al-Farra, the head of paediatrics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. “Right now, we have enough formula for about one week. But we also have infants outside the hospital without any access to milk. It’s catastrophic.”

In the first half of 2025, noted the Lancet back in early June, the UN had already reported more than 10,000 cases of acute malnutrition in children in Gaza, including 1,600 cases of life-threatening or severe acute malnutrition. More than 100 children are now being admitted every day into Gaza’s remaining hospitals for malnutrition treatment, while untold numbers are prevented from receiving any sort of medical attention. Scores of children have already starved to death in Gaza over the last several months. “This whole generation is being targeted,” said al-Farra. “They will suffer from memory problems, developmental delays… And the problem is even if nutrition becomes available later on, the damage is permanent.” “When you see babies start to die,” another doctor told the Guardian, “panic and alarms should start to flare. Essentially, children are the first to die in starvation crises.”

Update Monday 7 July. Today Netanyahu’s defence minister Israel Katz announced plans “to establish a ‘humanitarian city’ on the ruins of Rafah, which would eventually house the entire population of the Gaza Strip.” An Israeli newspaper provided a summary of his proposal. “The idea of the zone, according to Katz, is to accommodate initially some 600,000 Palestinians who have been living in the Mawasi area on the coast since they were displaced from elsewhere in the Strip, after screening them to ensure Hamas operatives are not among them. Palestinians will not be allowed to leave the zone, he said. According to Katz’s vision, the entire civilian population of Gaza – more than two million people – would eventually be congregated in the zone […]. Katz also emphasized his ambition to encourage Palestinians to ‘voluntarily emigrate’ from the Gaza Strip to other countries, saying this plan ‘should be fulfilled.”’

Some details of related plans for “Humanitarian Transit Areas” and a “Trump Riviera” in Gaza – plans developed by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and its associates in Boston Consulting Group, along with some input from staff at the Tony Blair Institute, all bundled together in a document entitled “The Great Trust” – were simultaneously made public by Reuters, the Financial Times and other news outlets. A detailed investigation by Tareq S. Hajjaj in Mondoweiss shows how, after taking over the food and aid distribution system in Gaza on behalf of the Israeli army, the GHF has in effect already laid some of the foundations for Katz’s new humanitarian deportation zone “by cultivating a local network of companies and organizations to collaborate in its operations. The organizations that refused have been shut down.”

Ongoing investigations undertaken by Forensic Architecture (FA), Sky News and the Guardian, meanwhile, not only confirm how the spatial arrangement of GHF sites is designed to herd the population towards Gaza’s southern border and into Katz’s new “humanitarian city,” they also demonstrate how the sites’ erratic opening times are rarely announced in advance and are clearly arranged to create maximum confusion and frustration. FA’s analysis shows that between 29 May and 4 July, “the average duration of openings at GHF stations was just 23 minutes.” By mid July, the Guardian calculated that this average duration had been reduced to a mere 11 minutes, while Sky News found that the GHF “sites typically run out of food within just nine minutes. In a quarter of cases (23%), the food is finished by the time the site was due to officially open.”

Katz’s scheme was immediately condemned in the most emphatic terms by a wide array of lawyers and civil rights groups. The Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard (author of the forthcoming book Occupied from Within) told the Guardian that Katz’s proposal was “an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that. It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip. […] While the government still calls the deportation ‘voluntary’, people in Gaza are under so many coercive measures that no departure from the strip can be seen in legal terms as consensual.” Professor Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, likewise characterised this new IDF proposal as a plan to establish “a concentration camp or a transit camp for Palestinians before they expel them.”

Writing in Haaretz a couple of days after Katz’s announced his humanitarian city, the prominent author and columnist Gideon Levy mused that the leaders of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would “never have believed that anyone would dare conceive of such a diabolical plan 80 years after the Holocaust.” “Israel no longer has any moral right to use the word ‘humanitarian,’” continues Levy:

Whoever turned the Gaza Strip into what it is – a mass graveyard and a wasteland of ruins – and treats it with equanimity has lost all connection to humanity. Whoever sees only the suffering of the Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip and fails to see that every six hours the Israel Defense Forces kills as many Palestinians as there are living hostages has lost all of their humanity. If 21 months of seeing the death of babies, women, children, journalists, doctors and other innocents was not enough, the ghetto plan should be turning on all the warning lights. Israel is behaving as if it is planning genocide and expulsion.

On 11 July another set of sixteen Israeli experts in international law published an open letter denouncing Katz’s proposal as a clear war crime, and urged “all relevant parties to publicly withdraw from the plan, renounce it and refrain from carrying it out.”

The senior UK human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy KC described the Katz plan in similar terms. “What is being contemplated,” she told the BBC, “is the creation of a mass concentration camp […]. To take it to a level where you force people out of the places that they live in and force them into camps, a concentration camp, is absolutely not in accordance with law, but it seems that law doesn’t matter anymore.” Kennedy added that “I have now moved to a position where I believe that we’re now witnessing a genocide taking place before our eyes. I was very reluctant to go there because the threshold has to be very high. There has to be specific intent for genocide. But what we’re now seeing is genocidal behaviour.”

Omer Bartov, a former IDF soldier and a leading figure in comparative genocide studies, further explained to the Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi that what is now happening in Gaza has no 21st-century precedents. “I don’t know of any comparable situation […]. The argument that the IDF is conducting a war in Gaza is simply cynical; there is no war in Gaza. What the IDF is doing in Gaza is demolishing it. Hundreds of buildings are being bulldozed every week.” Entire towns and villages are being erased in order to facilitate the population’s “voluntary congregation” in Israel’s humanitarian transit zone.

The Israeli foreign ministry subsequently informed the BBC that “the notion that Israel is creating concentration camps is deeply offensive and draws parallels with the Nazis.”

For his part, on the evening of 7 July, while having dinner with Donald Trump at the White House, Netanyahu reaffirmed his support for Trump’s “brilliant vision. It’s called free choice. You know, if people want to stay, they can stay. But if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.” In other words, whoever wants to stay in a place with no food, water, fuel, shelter, hospitals, schools, electricity, etc., should be given every opportunity to do so. Netanyahu himself – a man accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court – seized the opportunity provided him by his White House dinner to nominate his host for the Nobel peace prize. “This I didn’t know,” said Trump in response. “Wow. Thank you very much.”

Meanwhile back in the UK it was announced today that the trial of Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Ben Jamal and Stop the War’s Chris Nineham, originally due to take place on 7 July, has now been postponed till 23 February 2026. According to Stop the War, the judge changed the trial date because of last-minute attempts by the prosecution “to bolster their case, and their refusal to disclose material which could be useful for the defence.”

Nineham and Jamal are two of the main organising figures behind the enormous national pro-Palestine demonstrations that have regularly taken place in London since October 2023. On 18 January 2025, Nineham and Jamal were arrested at the end of one of these demonstrations, when police implausibly accused them, along with a few others, of allegedly straying from the demonstration’s permitted route. Last week government prosecutors announced that they are now also charging Stop the War chair Alex Kenny and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Sophie Bolt.

Speaking outside the court on 7 July, Jamal explained that the arrests were part of the government’s “broader repression of our movement, a repression that has led to people taking direct action, within a noble tradition, being seen as terrorists. […] Public pressure is building because people no longer believe the lie that is protecting Israel from accountability. We will not stop until the whole edifice of oppression that Israel imposes on the Palestine people comes crashing to the ground.” Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union (which is the UK and Europe’s largest teachers’ union, with more than 440,000 members), confirmed that “our union stands in absolute solidarity with Ben and Chris against their charge,” adding that Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action is “absolutely abhorrent.”

Update Tuesday 8 July. The IDF killed another 95 Palestinians in Gaza today, while a report released by Euro-Med Human Rights monitor demonstrated how surviving Palestinians now have proportionally “less space than that allocated to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.” “After 21 months of continuous Israeli assault, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are confined to less than 15 per cent of the enclave,” notes Euro-Med. “The population is trapped in this narrow space under constant bombardment and blockade, deprived of water, food, shelter, and healthcare, and effectively barred from returning to their destroyed or restricted areas of origin. This is part of a deliberate policy that reflects a genocidal process by Israel to uproot the people and erase their physical and demographic presence through mass killing, forced displacement, starvation, and systematic destruction of life.”

From the end of May 2025 “up until 7 July,” observed a UN spokesperson in Geneva, “we’ve now recorded 798 killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and 183 presumably on the route of aid convoys.”

As many tens of thousands of children slowly waste away, their parents continue to face what Oxfam and Amnesty International describe as “an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families.” “We’re in that point where people have been reduced to such a level of deprivation,” the surgeon Victoria Rose told the New York Times on 8 July, “that they’re prepared to die for a bagful of rice and a bit of pasta.”

In another marked contrast with the governments led by Trump, Starmer and Merz, the Colombian president Gustavo Petro today urged all UN member states to implement “concrete legal, diplomatic and economic measures that can halt Israel’s destruction [of Gaza] and uphold the foundational principle that no state is above the law. […] If we fail to act now, we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu’s government.” “The choice before us is stark and unforgiving,” Petro concludes: “we can either stand firm in defence of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict, or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics […]. For the billions of people in the global south who rely on international law for protection, the stakes could not be higher. The Palestinian people deserve justice. The moment demands courage. History will judge us harshly if we fail to answer its call.”

Also on 8 July, writing for the UK Constitutional Law Association, barrister Nour Haidar considered the “constitutional implications of widening the legal understanding of terrorism” as entailed by Yvette Cooper’s proscription of PA. Haidar describes Cooper’s decision to ban the group as “a chilling example of executive power.” Since Cooper’s “decision collapses the distinction between violence against the person and violence against property,” Haidar argues that “this represents a seismic break with constitutional norms regarding how the state regulates the fundamental rights to freedom of thought and conscience, freedom of expression, and the right to freedom of assembly.” It is easy to see how measures taken against PA in particular might soon be generalised to apply to all forms of direct action in general, including by groups like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil. “A constitutional right to dissent,” Haidar concludes, becomes a merely “theoretical right if the practical avenues for expressing dissent are criminalised. […] The Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action is the first step in stripping away a long-standing collective right to disruptive but not deadly dissent.”

Update Wednesday 9 July: Israeli forces killed at least another 74 people in Gaza today. “The scenes are truly shocking,” said the director of nursing (Dr Mohammed Saqr) at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, “they resemble the horrors of judgment day. Sometimes within just half an hour we receive over 100 to 150 cases, ranging from severe injuries to deaths […]. About 95% of these injuries and deaths come from food distribution centres – what are referred to as the ‘American food distribution centres.’”

Meanwhile over in the US, Trump’s State Department announced sanctions against UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Albanese has very publicly and forcefully condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal ever since the spring of 2024. “Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent,” she wrote in a landmark report of 26 March 2024: “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group.” The ongoing “genocide in Gaza,” she added, “is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians.” As noted above, Albanese’s most recent report to the UN (published on 3 July 2025) again drew unwelcome attention to the many Israeli and international corporations, including Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin, that continue to make a great deal of money out of Israel’s genocidal assault.

On 9 July Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio duly announced that enough was enough. “Albanese has directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel,” wrote Rubio, “without the consent of those two countries. […] Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West. […] She has recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives. We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

Coincidentally, 9 July 2025 also marked the twentieth anniversary of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In 2005 the BDS appeal was backed by “an alliance of more than 170 Palestinian parties, unions, refugee networks, NGOs and grassroots associations,” and it “asked international civil society organizations and people of conscience to ‘impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.’” The goal was to condemn and undermine Israel’s “regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and military occupation at the grassroots and institutional level.” As the BDS website observes, “many academic associations, faculty unions, student governments and unions, university departments as well as tens of thousands of international academics now support the academic boycott of Israel.”

As one of its co-founders Omar Barghouti explained on 9 July in an anniversary interview with Mondoweiss, “BDS was inspired by a century of Palestinian popular resistance initially against British colonialism and then Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine,” and it was “also inspired by many liberation movements, especially the South African anti-apartheid movement, and of course justice movements like the civil rights movement in the United States. […] We decided that, at a minimum, in order for Palestinians to exercise our inalienable right as an indigenous people in our homeland to self-determination, three rights must be achieved. An end to the military occupation, an end to the system of racial domination, segregation and apartheid, and the right of refugees to return and receive reparations. Without those three rights, we cannot exercise self-determination.”

BDS activists further recognise, Barghouti adds, that “Palestinians cannot reach liberation, freedom, justice, equality without cutting the links of international complicity with Israel’s regime.” The first and most profound obligation for anyone who wants to act in real solidarity with Palestine is thus “to do no harm and to stop […] the harm done in your name. If you’re a citizen of the United States and you know that your government is deeply implicated in all the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, including the ongoing genocide […], then what is your responsibility? That means that anyone in the U.S. should compensate for the government speaking on their behalf by joining BDS, by highlighting the complicity in their unions, in their schools, in their universities, in their hospital, wherever they work.” And “when we say ‘Palestine frees us all,’” Barghouti concludes, “we really mean it. In the struggle to stand with Palestine, people have discovered the limits of their so-called liberal democracies, their universities that were supposedly democratic. […] They’ve discovered their governments to be mainly oligarchies, not so much democracies. They’ve discovered the corruption in the political class, the economic class, and the military-industrial conflicts. Those discoveries will push younger generations to really demand change and lead change.”

Update Thursday 10 July. At least 82 people were reportedly killed in Israeli strikes today, including a group of families who were waiting in line for nutritional supplements at a clinic in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. This clinic is run by the US-based aid group Project Hope, which describes it as “a place of refuge in Gaza where people bring their small children, women access pregnancy and postpartum care, people receive treatment for malnutrition, and more.” This morning, said the group’s CEO Rabih Torbay, “innocent families were mercilessly attacked as they stood in line waiting for the [clinic] doors to open. At least 15 people were killed – 10 of whom were children – and many more are injured. Horrified and heartbroken cannot properly communicate how we feel anymore. This is a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, and a stark reminder that no one and no place is safe in Gaza, even as ceasefire talks continue. This cannot continue.”

As IDF attacks on Gaza continue to escalate and expand, Gaza’s own healthcare system continues to contract and crumple. On 10 July a detailed report in Haaretz documented “the system’s imminent collapse.” Only a third of Gaza’s hospitals still continue to function at all, and two of its largest remaining hospitals (Al-Shifa and Nasser) “have now announced that they will soon shut down. […] Gaza now has roughly half the number of hospital beds it did before the war, fewer than 50% of its operating rooms, just a third of its CT scanners, and none of the seven MRI machines that once existed in the Strip.” As a result of Israel’s blockade on fuel, warns the director of Al-Shifa hospital, within a matter of days “operating rooms throughout Gaza will stop functioning, oxygen stations will shut down, and all blood supplies will become unusable. In other words, no hospital will be able to function as a hospital.” Haaretz notes that “most of Gaza’s hospitals have been attacked and captured more than once since the war began. In November 2023, the IDF took control of Al-Shifa Hospital, returning again in March 2024. Nasser Hospital was seized in February, vacated, then retaken in June. Kamal Adwan Hospital was also captured twice before being fully evacuated in December.” In the remaining Gazan hospitals that are still semi-functional the situation is now “apocalyptic: doctors are struggling to keep thousands of wounded and ill patients alive inside partially destroyed buildings, without adequate equipment or medication, without clean water, and amid a collapsing electrical grid.”

Also on Thursday, in the UK, a group of 60 Labour MPs sent a letter to their foreign secretary David Lammy “warning they believed Gaza was being ethnically cleansed. They are urging the foreign secretary to take immediate steps to prevent the Israeli government from carrying out its Rafah plan, and to go further and recognise Palestinian statehood immediately.” According to the Guardian, signatories include the co-chairs of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, Sarah Owen and Andrew Pake, along with Liam Byrne, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, Stella Creasy, Clive Lewis, and Diane Abbott.

Similar calls for a return to familiar proposals for a two-state solution are likely to grow louder in the coming weeks and months as images of starving people and demolished towns circulate more widely and become more difficult to ignore or downplay. If international pressure on Israel intensifies then the most likely outcome will be a return to that 1990s-era “peace process” which, by holding out the promise of a tiny (and hopelessly compromised and fragmented) Palestinian state at some indeterminate point in the future, helped to divide and disarm Palestinian resistance to Israeli domination in the present.

On 28 May 2024, Norway, Ireland and Spain recognized the state of Palestine, joining eight other EU countries (and more than 140 countries worldwide) who have already recognised it. French president Emmanuel Macron has long been “determined to advance the implementation of the Two-State solution,” and for several months his government has been working with Saudi Arabia to organise an “International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Palestinian Question and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.” Originally planned to open on 17 June 2025, the conference was put on hold when on 13 June Israel abruptly launched its pre-emptive assault on Iran; it is currently scheduled for 28-29 July. During a visit to the UK this past week, Macron again urged Britain to join France and other EU partners “to recognise the state of Palestine and to initiate this political momentum [as] the only path to peace.”

As its ambassador to the UN reiterated in November 2023, the UK itself remains fully committed to its “long-standing support of the two-state solution, which remains the only viable long term solution.” The manifesto that Starmer’s Labour Party prepared for the 2024 general election promises recognition of a Palestinian state “as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution.” In mid-June 2025 Starmer confirmed that “our position on recognition of Palestine as part of the process hasn’t changed for us. I hold very strongly to the belief that the only long-term solution to the conflict in the Middle East is a two-state solution.” In the last couple of days a spokesperson for David Lammy’s foreign office summarised the ministerial line: “we are committed to recognizing a Palestinian state and to doing so when (it) will have most impact in support of a peace process.” When pressed about the timing for recognition, Lammy himself told MPs that “there will be a judgment call, and I’m not going to tie myself to a calendar because it’s convenient for a soundbite. […] There’s a judgment call that, quite properly, you would expect the Government to think very hard about.”

While the UK government continues to think very hard about how it should respond to the ongoing demolition of Gaza and conquest of the West Bank, more principled debate about the pros and cons of a two-state approach has moved on a good deal since it last dominated the headlines, i.e. in the years since this approach was comprehensively discredited over the course of the 1990s. It’s true that immediate, unilateral and consequential recognition of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories might challenge the legitimacy of Israel’s occupation itself, and might further limit Israel’s ability to attack and to colonise these territories with impunity. For many years after 1948 and then again after 1967, it’s also true that many Euro-American diplomats and analysts considered some kind of two-state partition of historic Palestine to be the only feasible way of ending the Israel-Palestine conflict. Some analysts who prioritise what remains apparently feasible over what would be genuinely emancipatory and equitable continue to argue in favour of a two-state approach to this day.

There are good reasons, however, why many former adherents of a two-state solution, including (to mention only people on one side of the historic dividing line) influential and widely respected figures like Avi Shlaim, Gideon Levy and Shlomo Sand, have come to the conclusion that in reality any such “solution” promises only the continuation of Israeli domination under another name. In arguing for an inclusive and egalitarian one-state or shared-state approach, they have moved closer to scholars and activists like Omar Barghouti (author of BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, 2011), Ali Abunimah (cofounder of the Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, 2006), Ilan Pappe (author of A Very Short History of the Israel–Palestine Conflict, 2024), Noura Erakat (author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, 2019), Rashid Khalidi (author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, 2020), Haidar Eid (editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba: One State for All, 2017) and Ghada Karmi (author of One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, 2023). Although this isn’t the place to consider this controversial question in more detail, some of the main arguments in favour of such a shared state approach were clearly and concisely laid out in the brief ‘One State Declaration’ that Abunimah, Barghouti, Pappe and many others signed back in 2007.

There is only one consistently principled position to adopt regarding a democratic state in Palestine or Israel or anywhere else, and it follows from the simple definition of any democratic state as such. A legitimate democratic state is one that treats its every inhabitant as a full and equal participant in its law-making power, without criteria of privilege or exclusion, in keeping with the basic criterion of “one person one vote.” This principle applies to Israel in the same way and for the same reason that it applies to South Africa or the United States, though of course in each case (again for similar reasons and in similar ways) it has required, and will require, massive political pressure to enforce it.

Principles aside, in practice it’s long been obvious (to cite Gideon Levy) that no Israeli leaders have ever accepted the most rudimentary premise of a two-state solution, namely the idea that “the two states would be equal.” It’s equally obvious (to cite Avi Shlaim) that successive Israeli governments have deliberately and “systematically destroyed the basis for a viable Palestinian state,” not least by besieging Gaza and by settling large parts of the West Bank.

Fundamentally, as Levy explained in a January 2024 interview (in terms that resonate with the book-length accounts written by Khalidi, Pappe and Karmi), contemporary arguments in favour of a two-state solution rely in turn on older arguments in favour of the Nakba or catastrophe of 1948. They rely on acceptance of the Nakba as the unavoidable price to pay for founding a settler colony on other people’s land. They rely on the necessity if not desirability of the inaugural and supposedly irreversible expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine as the enabling condition for establishing a durably divided i.e. apartheid régime. They compel Palestinians, as a condition for asking for some sort of fragmentary statehood in the future, to renounce their already-recognised rights of return. “For Palestinians, argued Saree Makdisi in 2012, “one state is infinitely preferable to two, for the simple reason that no version of the two-state solution that has ever been proposed has meaningfully sought to address the rights of more than the minority of Palestinians who actually live in the territory on which that state is supposed to exist.”

Rather than the wars of 1967 or 1973, continues Levy, rather than Oslo 1993 or Camp David 2000, “the decisive moment is 1948. A people came to a populated land and took it over. That’s the core of everything.” The question that Israelis and their allies will need to decide in the coming years, in short, is whether to persist in a project of settler-colonial conquest – or not. A shared-state one-person-one-vote approach might still be unpopular in today’s Israel, Levy concedes, but

at least it’s a solution which might solve all the problems, including the right of return. We are very far away from it, but at least there is a vision. While with the two-state solution, there is no vision whatsoever because [Palestine] will not be a viable state. So, I think that continuing to talk about the two-state solution like 90 per cent of the world is doing – from the Palestinian Authority to the EU, the United States to some [in the] Israeli government – knowing that it’s not possible, is just playing into the hands of the occupation. [… We] shouldn’t judge the one-state solution according to reality today. Sure, according to reality today, it is impossible that Jews and Palestinians will live together. But the idea is to change this reality. The alternative to a one-state solution is continuing the apartheid state. There is no third solution. We have to decide, or we give up.

Update Friday 11 July. The IDF killed at least 30 people today, including ten who were reportedly shot while waiting for food in the Al-Shakoush area northwest of Rafah. The head of UNWRA, Philippe Lazzarini, struggled to find words adequate to the situation. “Inaction & silence are complicities,” he posted on social media. “Under our watch, Gaza has become the graveyard of children & starving people. No way out. Their choice is between 2 deaths: starvation or being shot at. The most cruel & machiavellian scheme to kill, in total impunity. Our norms & values are being buried.”

Also on 11 July 2025, in the embattled and encaged West Bank village of Sinjil, Israeli settlers killed two young men – 23-year-old Mohammed al-Shalabi and the visiting 20-year-old American citizen Sayfollah Musallet. According to his family, the Florida-born Musallet was “brutally beaten to death by Israeli settlers while he was protecting his family’s land from settlers who were attempting to steal it. Israeli settlers surrounded Saif for over three hours as paramedics attempted to reach him, but the mob of settlers blocked the ambulance and paramedics from providing life-saving aid.” As ABC notes, Musallet was the fifth American citizen to be killed in the West Bank since October 2023. “Eight other Palestinians were also slain this past week” in the West Bank, adds Al Jazeera, and the villages east of Ramallah have recently become a particular target of settler violence.

Unlike most other victims of Israeli settlers and the IDF, Musallet’s nationality made it a little easier for his family to draw international attention to both his life and death. His case has even been mentioned by some politicians in Washington DC. Musallet has already joined that relatively small group of Palestinian targets of Israeli violence who have been recorded, in the western media, as individuals with a proper name – for instance scholars like Refaat Alareer and Sufian Tayeh, Hamas militants like Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar, medics like Rifaat Radwan or Adnan al-Bursh, children like Hind Rajab or Yaqeen Hammad.

Update Saturday 12 July. Israeli strikes reportedly killed 139 Palestinians today, including at least 31 people who were shot dead as they tried to reach a GHF distribution site near Rafah, by the southern border of Gaza. The Red Cross announced that on 12 July its field hospital in Rafah “received 132 patients suffering from weapon-related injuries […]; 25 individuals were declared dead upon arrival, six more died after admittance. It is the largest influx of fatalities since the hospital began operations in May of last year. The overwhelming majority of these patients sustained gunshot wounds, and all responsive individuals reported they were attempting to access food distribution sites.” Since the GHF and IDF took over food distribution on 27 May, adds the Red Cross, its field hospital “has treated over 3,400 weapon-wounded patients and recorded more than 250 fatalities. This situation is unacceptable. The alarming frequency and scale of these mass casualty incidents underscore the horrific conditions civilians in Gaza are enduring.”

Today’s death toll brings the official government tally to 58,026 Palestinians killed and another 138,520 wounded, with more than another 10,000 reported missing and presumed dead. (It’s also important to remember, for reasons the Lancet explained earlier this year, that such official figures probably underestimate the actual number of deaths directly caused by traumatic injuries by approximately 40%). According to the UN, 86% of the Gaza Strip now falls within Israeli “militarised zones” or under IDF forced evacuation orders.

In the UK, in a second round of protests organised by Defend our Juries, more than 70 people were arrested today at demonstrations in London, Cardiff, Manchester and Derry, allegedly for holding signs condemning genocide and supporting Palestine Action.

An open letter criticising Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action has also now begun to circulate throughout the country, and is rapidly accumulating signatures. Prepared by a group of trade union leaders, activists and local councillors, including ten members of the UCU’s national executive committee, the letter describes Cooper’s ban as “a major assault on our freedoms.” It argues that “peaceful protest tactics which damage property or disrupt ‘business-as-usual’ in order to call attention to the crimes of the powerful have a long and proud history. They are more urgent than ever in response to Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.” “We affirm our solidarity with Palestine Action in their campaign against proscription,” the letter continues,

and with the organisers of the national demonstrations for Palestine who are also being dragged before the courts. We all share their goal of ending the flow of weapons from Britain to Israel.. Whether we achieve that aim through civil disobedience, or strikes to halt weapons deliveries, mass protests outside arms factories or marches through city centres, boycotts, divestment campaigns and encampments, our movement will decide that for itself. In a democratic society, it should not be the role of the police to interfere in the peaceful exercise of our civil rights, and we will defend those in our movement who are under attack from the government.

The initial list of 940 signatories included activists like Angie Zelter, Suresh Grover and Anne Alexander, labour groups like the Glasgow Trades Union Council and Norwich and District Trades Union Council, dozens of elected politicians, academics, and so on. The singer Charlotte Church explained that she had signed the letter “because history shows us that when people stand up to injustice, those in power often reach for the same old playbook: label dissent as dangerous, criminalise protest, and try to silence movements for change by branding them as extremists or terrorists. From the suffragettes to the civil rights movement, what was once condemned as radical disruption is now celebrated as moral courage. We must remember this pattern – and refuse to let our rights be eroded by fear. This is not new, and we will not be silenced.”

Update Sunday 13 July. The IDF reportedly killed at least 92 Palestinians today, including more than 50 people in Gaza City. An Israeli strike on the Gaza City market killed at least 17 people, including the renowned surgeon Dr Ahmed Qandil, while another IDF missile killed at least ten people in the Nuseirat refugee camp as they gathered to collect water. A few days after the event, Guardian reporters reconstructed the last hours of two of the children (Karam and Lula al-Ghussain) who were killed by this strike on the water distribution centre. One of the first people to reach the scene recorded what he saw: “Each child was holding a water bucket, lying dead in place, covered in their own blood. The shrapnel had torn through their small bodies and disfigured their faces.”

Writing in the mid-July issue of the London Review of Books, Huw Lemmey distilled the moral case for opposing Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action and for “disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons of war is one way of waging peace: I can only conclude that for the British government, the waging of peace is terrorism. And I believe that the proscription under the Terrorism Act of groups that seek peace through non-violent means is political repression of the freedom of conscience. Resisting the destruction of human life and the perpetuation of a genocide against the Palestinian people is not wrong. It is the law, and this government, that is wrong.”

Update Monday 14 July. Today Israeli strikes killed 117 Palestinians and wounded a further 557, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Having now lost twelve staff to IDF fire, the UK director of Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders (Dr Natalie Roberts) today sent the latest of several detailed letters to the British government. Roberts’ new letter “calls on the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy to acknowledge and condemn the genocide in Gaza and act decisively to end the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed by the Israeli government in Gaza. […] Gaza’s healthcare system has been destroyed, and medical workers, including our MSF colleagues, are systematically targeted by the Israeli military. Due to the siege imposed by Israel and the obstruction of humanitarian aid, more than two million people are currently on the brink of starvation, as part of a calculated strategy aimed at eradicating Palestinian society.” Earlier MSF letters to Starmer’s government have not received a response, so today Roberts reiterated her organisation’s main demands. Like so many other aid and rights groups, MSF calls on the UK to: “Act decisively to end the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed by the Israeli government in Gaza; End all military cooperation with Israel and suspend all arms transfers to its government; End all material and diplomatic support to the Israeli government; Speak out to acknowledge and condemn the genocide in Gaza; Push to end the siege and allow unfettered access of humanitarian aid, including medical supplies, into Gaza.” “MSF has a responsibility to act with moral clarity and humanitarian consistency in the face of mass atrocities,” concludes Roberts: “We ask you, Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy: does the same not apply to you?’

Update Tuesday 15 July. IDF strikes reportedly killed 93 Palestinians and wounded 278 others over the past 24 hours.

In Edinburgh, activists targeting the Leonardo UK weapons factory drove a van into its external fence this morning, and daubed part of the premises with white paint. Members of the group Shut Down Leonardo accuse the company of supplying the IDF with laser targeting systems, systems designed specifically for the F-35 fighter jets it uses to bomb Gaza. Three activists were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 – i.e. they were effectively treated the way police might treat members of Palestine Action. The campaigning group CAAT (Campaign Against Arms Trade) quickly condemned this “abuse of counter terror legislation.” When it refused to grant Palestine Action temporary relief from Cooper’s proscription order on 4 July, notes CAAT, “the Court of Appeal stated that the government was only proscribing Palestine Action and that other groups taking part in direct action at arms companies would not be treated as terrorists. But this was an action by a distinct and separate local campaign group. To treat it as terrorism is a direct contradiction of the Court of Appeal ruling. It is a chilling threat to our civil liberties and our right to protest against genocide profiteers.”

Arguing along similar lines, on 15 July the head of public advocacy at CAGE International, Anas Mustapha, told the New Arab that Cooper’s “ban ‘suppresses legitimate political activism and expression’ and sets a precedent where dissent against powerful interests is labelled terrorism,” with implications that extend far beyond Palestine Action alone. “The wider impact,” said Mustapha, “is the establishment of a climate of fear, silencing of communities and stifling debate on issues like arms exports, foreign policy, and genocide.” Cooper’s ban, added Mustapha, also runs contrary to the UK’s clear obligation to prevent genocide, as entailed by the 1948 Genocide Convention. “Palestine Action had targeted companies involved in supplying weapons used in Gaza – actions that could be seen as fulfilling the duty to prevent genocide. Proscribing it was an act of legal aggression.”

Today Omer Bartov (professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University) published in the New York Times a substantial essay about Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, one that puts it in a wider historical and comparative perspective. Bartov admits that in late 2023 he was still reluctant to characterise IDF war crimes as specifically genocidal, but by mid 2024 it was “no longer possible to deny that the pattern of IDF operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack.” Unlike Lammy and Starmer, Bartov addresses not the mere “risk” but the flagrant actuality of IDF crimes. As the recurring patterns became undeniable, “Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population.” Bartov allowed the mounting evidence to persuade him, in the same way that it persuaded Francesca Albanese, Amnesty International or the government of South Africa:

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

While the ongoing horror in Gaza may still be “described by most observers as war,” Bartov realises this is “a misnomer. […] Today the IDF is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing.” Bartov further recognises that Israel’s status as the perpetrator of genocide in Gaza complicates routine efforts to justify its actions by reference to the history of genocidal violence in Europe. “Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the IDF, the study and remembrance of the Holocaust” may itself now risk losing its hard-won “concern with universal justice.” As far as Israel itself is concerned, Bartov concludes,

perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. […] This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning.

Meanwhile the UK’s biggest trade unions issued a rare collective statement today, signed by the leaders of the TUC, UNISON, NEU, Unite, PCS, UCU, RMT and more than a dozen other unions, condemning the government’s decision to prosecute Sophie Bolt and Alex Kenny (see above, the update for 7 July). Noting that Kenny “has played a leading role in many demonstrations organised in the TUC region covering London and the south-east,” the union leaders denounced the charges as “an attack on our right to protest, which is fundamental to trade unions and the wider movement.”

Meeting in Brussels today, the EU’s 27 foreign ministers refused to agree on a proposal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement, along with its preferential trade provisions. They also rejected punitive measures like an arms embargo and a ban on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “The EU’s refusal to suspend its agreement with Israel is a cruel and unlawful betrayal of the European project and vision,” observed Amnesty International’s Agnès Callamard.

This will be remembered as one of the most disgraceful moments in the EU’s history. European leaders had the opportunity to take a principled stand against Israel’s crimes, but instead gave it a greenlight to continue its genocide in Gaza, its unlawful occupation of the whole Occupied Palestinian Territory, and its system of apartheid against Palestinians. The EU’s own review has clearly found that Israel is violating its human rights obligations under the terms of the Association Agreement. Yet, instead of taking measures to stop it and prevent their own complicity, member states chose to maintain a preferential trade deal over respecting their international obligations and saving Palestinian lives.

Callamard denounced the decision as worse and “more than political cowardice. Every time the EU fails to act, the risk of complicity in Israel’s actions grows. This sends an extremely dangerous message to perpetrators of atrocity crimes that they will not only go unpunished but be rewarded.” At a press conference the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese likewise condemned the EU’s refusal to suspend its Association Agreement as “appalling […]. The fact that it has been renewed in the face of the total destruction of Gaza marks probably the lowest point of the EU towards a policy, the celebration of double standards, and the betrayal of European values.”

Earlier in the day, Albanese addressed an emergency conference of the Hague Group of states in Bogotá, hosted by Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro. The Hague Group describes itself as “a global bloc of states committed to ‘coordinated legal and diplomatic measures’ in defense of international law and solidarity with the people of Palestine.” Chaired by South Africa and Colombia, the group currently comprises some thirty countries, including Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Pakistan and Senegal. In her opening speech to the conference, Francesca Albanese reminded the delegates that “for too long, international law has been treated as optional, applied selectively to those perceived as weak, ignored by those acting as the powerful […]. That era must end. The law must either be universal, or it will cease to mean anything at all.” The time has come to say “enough. Enough impunity. Enough empty rhetoric. Enough exceptionalism. Enough complicity.” In the “hellscape” that is today’s Gaza, Albanese continued,

Israel has dismantled even the last UN function – humanitarian aid – in order to deliberately starve, displace time and again, or kill a population they have marked for elimination. Across all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world. The very few Israeli people who stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid – while the majority openly cheers and calls for more – remind us that Israeli liberation, too, is inseparable from Palestinian freedom. The atrocities of the past 21 months are not a sudden aberration; they are the culmination of decades of policies to displace and replace the Palestinian people. […] Meanwhile political discourse has reduced Palestine to a humanitarian crisis to manage in perpetuity rather than a political issue demanding principled and firm resolution […]. It is not the law that has failed or faltered – it is political will that has abdicated.

Albanese concluded by reminding her listeners of their “obligations under international law –obligations, not sympathy, not charity.” She reminded them UN member states must “immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel,” and must further “make sure that their private sector, insurers, banks, pension funds, universities and other goods, and services providers in the supply chains do the same. […] Negotiating with Israel on how to manage what remains of Gaza and West Bank, in Brussels or elsewhere, is an utter dishonour to international law.”

Update Wednesday 16 July. The Hague Group conference in Bogotá ended today with an unanimous agreement from all 30 participating states “that the era of impunity must end […], along with a unified call for an immediate ceasefire.” Twelve of the participants (including Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, and South Africa) further committed to the immediate implementation of six specific measures (e.g. an end to all provision of arms, restrictions on shipping, compliance “with obligations to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes under international law,” etc.) designed “to break the ties of complicity with Israel’s campaign of devastation in Palestine.” “Today marks an end to the era of the impunity,” declared the executive secretary of the Hague Group, Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, “and the beginning of collective state action by governments of conscience.” “These 12 states have taken a momentous step forward,” added Francesca Albanese. “The clock is now ticking for states – from Europe to the Arab world and beyond – to join them.”

Addressing the closing session of the conference, Albanese told the gathering of ministers “the truth is that Palestine has already triggered a revolution, and you are part of it. Palestine has changed global consciousness, drawing a clear line between those who oppose genocide and those who accept it or are part of it.”

While the Hague Group met in Colombia, in Gaza the health ministry today reported that IDF strikes killed 94 Palestinians and wounded 252 over the past 24 hours. More than twenty of those killed were suffocated or trampled as they waited in line for food in Khan Younis. An editorial in Haaretz observed that “As the Bodies Pile Up, the Israeli Public Remains Indifferent to the Daily Killing in Gaza.”

Back in UK, as a sign of likely things to come, armed police today threatened a solitary peaceful protester (Laura Murton) with arrest under the Terrorism Act of 2000 for holding a Palestinian flag and displaying signs that read “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide.” The officers accused her of supporting Palestine Action. Murton filmed her encounter with the police, during which one officer told her: “Mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated by the government.” He went on to say that the phrase “Free Gaza” was “supportive of Palestine Action”, adding it was an offence “to express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation.” The officer told her she was committing that offence, and so threatened to arrest her unless she gave them her name and address. “I don’t see how anything I was wearing,” Murton told the Guardian’s Haroon Siddique, “how anything I was displaying, anything I was saying, could be deemed as supportive of the proscribed group. I was standing there thinking, this is the most authoritarian, dystopian experience I’ve had in this country, being told that I’m committing terrorist offences by two guys with firearms.” As Siddique reports, “one of the police officers told Murton they were ‘trying to be fair,’ adding: ‘We could have jumped out, arrested you, dragged you off in a van.’”

Commenting on the incident, a Kent police spokesperson said: “Under the Terrorism Act it is a criminal offence to carry or display items that may arouse reasonable suspicion that an individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation such as Palestine Action.” (When some days later this episode was mentioned during PA’s hearing at the High Court, Justice Martin Chamberlain said in response: “This is obviously an officer that doesn’t understand the law at all.” That may well be true – though it’s also true, as the barrister representing PA’s Huda Ammori pointed out, that “neither Kent Police nor the Home Office have apologised or publicly stated that the police action against Ms Murton was wrong.”)

Writing in the New Statesman today, the prominent and unimpeachably conservative barrister and judge Jonathan Sumption (who sat on the UK’s Supreme Court from 2012 to 2018) considered the crucial “question of intent” at issue in Israel’s use of military force in Gaza. Sumption’s dispassionate article provides a useful summary of the legal arguments that have been regularly used in mainstream circles over the past eighteen months to justify characterisation of IDF actions in Gaza as expressly genocidal. “Israel has signed up to the Geneva Conventions of 1949,” notes Sumption:

The Fourth Convention contains extensive protections for civilian populations caught in a war zone. It forbids attacks on hospitals in any circumstances, unless the hospitals are themselves being used to commit acts of war (articles 18 and 19). It forbids the destruction of private property except where this is ‘rendered absolutely necessary by military operations’ (article 53). As an occupying power in relation to most of Gaza, Israel is bound to ensure that food and medical supplies are provided to the population (article 55). The permanent displacement of the population is strictly forbidden (article 49).

Over the years these several provisions have been further “supplemented by a substantial body of binding customary law” – most notably, perhaps, “starvation is specifically banned as a method of warfare” along with “all forms of ethnic cleansing.”

“I have no ideological position on this conflict,” admits Sumption, “I approach it simply as a lawyer and a historian. But I sometimes wonder what Israel’s defenders would regard as unacceptable” levels of violence, if they are currently still prepared to accept ongoing IDF tactics in Gaza as reasonable or proportionate. As things stand, Israel’s assault can only be understood as an exercise in “collective punishment, in other words revenge, visited not just on Hamas but on an entire population. It is, in short, a war crime.”

What about the specific charge of genocide per se, i.e. the accusation that Israeli war crimes are intended to destroy or eliminate the Palestinian population in whole or in part? “The most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy,” concludes Sumption, “is that its object is to induce Palestinians as an ethnic group to leave the Gaza Strip for other countries by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain. A court would be likely to regard that as genocide.”

What may yet discourage some people from accepting this clear judgement, Sumption adds, is the fact that debate on the issue is “muffled by two dangerous falsehoods. One is the idea that this story began with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; the other is that any attack on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic.” As Sumption reminds his readers, a couple of weeks after the attack “António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, pointed out in the Security Council that it ‘did not happen in a vacuum.’ It followed 56 years in which ‘the Palestinians in Gaza had [… seen] their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished.’ He was expressing the self-evident truth that if you persistently treat people like that, hatred, violence and terrorism will eventually be the response. The Israeli ambassador objected to his attempt to ‘understand’ terrorism and demanded his resignation on the ground that his words were an anti-Semitic blood libel. This neatly encapsulated both falsehoods.”

Update Thursday 17 July. The IDF reportedly killed 94 Palestinians and wounded another 367 wounded today. Three peopled were killed and nine were wounded when an IDF tank shell struck the Catholic Holy Family church in Gaza City. In recent years the church became a familiar fixture in western media on account of its links to the pope. The BBC estimated that around “600 displaced people were sheltering inside at the time, the majority of whom were children as well as 54 people with special needs.”

Today the Guardian published a detailed investigation which shows how Europe’s largest missiles maker, MBDA, “is selling key components for bombs that have been shipped in their thousands to Israel and used in multiple airstrikes [in which] Palestinian children and other civilians were killed.”

Haaretz simultaneously published a summary of a study undertaken by Hebrew University’s Geographic Information System Centre, which shows that around 70% of all buildings in Gaza have either been completely demolished or at least rendered permanently “uninhabitable.” In the southern city of Rafah alone, 89% of buildings have been completely or partially demolished, and “since April, an average of 2,000 buildings have been destroyed in Rafah each month.” For some time now, in order to maintain its frantic operational pace the IDF has had to appeal to the private sector to supplement its demolition and bulldozing crews. As things stand, notes the Centre’s director Adi Ben-Nun, the residents of Gaza already have “nowhere to return to. The world they knew and their daily lives are simply gone. The devastation is on every level, from homes that have been demolished to public institutions, workplaces, schools and agricultural lands – everything has been destroyed.” Further Haaretz reports document how “Israel’s military has almost entirely destroyed Khan Younis, the second-largest city in the Gaza Strip, and its environs, an area encompassing 90 square kilometers and thousands of homes. […] It appears that most of the destruction was done by bulldozers and the like. In recent months, the military has greatly accelerated the pace of destruction in southern Gaza, using private contractors that earn a profit of thousands of shekels per building razed.” In 2025 as in 1948, the homes and structures that have sustained one set of people are being thoroughly erased to make space for another.

A parallel BBC analysis of video footage and satellite imagery likewise confirmed that

Israel has demolished thousands of buildings across Gaza since it withdrew from a ceasefire with Hamas in March [2025], with entire towns and suburbs – once home to tens of thousands of people – levelled in the past few weeks. […] Large swathes of [the destruction] have been caused by planned demolitions, both to already damaged buildings and ones that appeared largely intact. Verified footage shows large explosions unleashing plumes of dust and debris, as Israeli forces carry out controlled demolitions on tower blocks, schools and other infrastructure. Multiple legal experts told BBC Verify that Israel may have committed war crimes under the Geneva Convention, which largely prohibits the destruction of infrastructure by an occupying power.

In addition to the wholesale demolition of Rafah, the BBC’s analysis also shows how other once-sizeable towns like Khuza’a and Abasan al-Kabira were systematically demolished or bulldozed into oblivion over the course of June and early July. “In Qizan Abu Rashwan – an agricultural settlement about 7km from the Israeli border – virtually every structure left standing has been demolished since 17 May. One video we verified showed a controlled explosion levelling a cluster of tower blocks. BBC Verify presented the IDF with a list of places in which we documented demolitions,” add the reporters Benedict Garman and Matt Murphy, “and asked it to provide specific military justifications. It did not do so.”

Meanwhile a group of musicians including Brian Eno, Massive Attack, Garbage, Fontaines DC and Kneecap published a statement in support of artists “threatened into silence or career cancellation” by pro-Israel organisations in the UK. “End threats and censorship against artists who speak out against the genocide in Palestine,” said Kneecap. “Speak out. Stand up. We are the majority.” Massive Attack explained that “this collective action is really about offering some kind of solidarity to those artists who are living day after day in a screen-time genocide, but are worried about using their platforms to express their horror at that because of the level of censorship within their industry or from highly organised external legal bodies, terrifying them and their management teams with aggressive legal actions. The intention is clear and obvious: to silence them.”

Update Friday 18 July. As reported by Al Jazeera, today “at least 41 people were killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks, including 10 starving people seeking aid.”

In Glasgow, Scottish police arrested a man for holding a sign that read “Genocide in Palestine, time to take action.” Police confirmed that he was arrested under the Terrorism Act “for displaying a sign expressing support for a proscribed organisation.” Earlier in the week two other people in the Glasgow area were charged with similar offences – one for wearing a T-shirt, the other for displaying a poster.

As for the four people accused of defacing the two Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton back on 20 June, at a hearing today in the Old Bailey they were told that they are likely to kept in jail for another year and a half before their trial even begins. Amy Gardiner-Gibson, Jony Cink, Daniel Jeronymides-Norie and Lewis Chiaramello were all remanded in custody after the Brize Norton action. They have been charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage and to enter a prohibited place “knowingly for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.” Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told the four defendants that (apparently on account of court scheduling constraints) their trial is currently set to begin on 18 January 2027, admitting that “for four young people, that’s an inordinately long time to be kept in custody.”

CAAT (Campaign Against Arms Trade) circulated an email message to its supporters today, noting that “on Monday 21st July, CAAT will be in court to support the Judicial Review seeking to overturn the proscription of Palestine Action.” “Prior to proscription,” observes CAAT,

support for Palestine Action was widespread. It crossed movements, ages, classes and ethnicities. People who wouldn’t themselves climb on top of an arms factory roof supported those that did, including those who don’t attend marches or other campaigning events. This support didn’t disappear overnight. It meant tens if not hundreds of thousands of people woke up on the morning of 5th July as potential terrorist sympathisers, confused and afraid about what this means. This is unprecedented. […] We’re not going to lie and say that this fear isn’t felt by all of us at CAAT. But with this fear also comes determination and affirmation of our commitments to our values and purpose. In September, DSEI – the UK’s largest arms fair – returns to London. We will not let this monstrosity of death and destruction happen without opposition […]. There is a long-standing powerful history of direct action and civil disobedience in the peace and anti-war movement, directly targeting the tools of war […]. CAAT is a proud supporter of this movement, one that long pre-dates Palestine Action, and that will continue post-proscription. So our message is clear. We will continue supporting groups taking action against the arms trade.

Update Saturday 19 July. On Saturday morning at least 32 people were killed and more than 100 injured when Israeli soldiers again opened fire on crowds of starving people as they gathered near two GHF food distribution hubs in southern Gaza. Over the course of the weekend, said the Gaza health ministry, 19 more people died directly of hunger, including a 35-day-old infant who died of malnutrition at Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital. “The mother was touching her body,” Al Jazeera’s correspondent Hind Khoudary reported, “saying, ‘I am sorry I could not feed you.’”

In London, tens of thousands of demonstrators today marched through pouring rain to condemn the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, while across the country more than 100 people were arrested, mainly as participants in another round of protests organised by Defend our Juries. According to a summary of police reports, 55 people were arrested in London’s Parliament Square for holding signs that read “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine action,” and a further eight people were arrested during the mass demonstration itself. Police also arrested 17 people for expressing support for PA in Bristol, 16 in Manchester, and 8 in Truro (including the 81-year-old former magistrate Deborah Hinton and 74-year-old retired charity director Oliver Baines). At things stand the homes of 14 sign-holders have also been raided, adds Defend our Juries, in Cardiff, Leeds, and Bradford.

“Just a few weeks ago being arrested under the Terrorism Act was the stuff of nightmares,” said a spokesperson for Defend Our Juries. “Now it’s a badge of honour that people are wearing with pride – the mark of resistance to genocide and standing firm for our democratic freedoms. This is a major cultural shift. For years, the Terrorism laws and the Prevent programme have been used to divide and rule communities, and to marginalise Muslim communities in particular. Thanks to Yvette Cooper’s hubris, they are now helping to bring us together.”

Meanwhile, at a silent demonstration in Leeds, one of the participants (retired teacher Jon Farley) was handcuffed and arrested on Saturday for holding a sign that reproduced a joke about the government’s proscription of Palestine Action, first published in the satirical magazine Private Eye (issue number 1653). Under the title “Palestine Action” Explained, the graphic reads: “Unacceptable Palestine Action: Spraying military planes with paint. Acceptable Palestine Action: Shooting Palestinians queuing for food.” Police put Farley in handcuffs before he could show them the magazine he was quoting. “‘This is all a bit surreal,’ said Farley, who had never been arrested before. “I clearly wasn’t any kind of physical threat.” He told the arresting officer: “You take the handcuffs off and I’ll show you the magazine because what you’re doing is just daft.” Instead he was detained for six hours and questioned by counter-terrorism police. His bail conditions stipulate that he must not attend “any ‘Palestine Action’ rallies, which, as he pointed out, he had never done. ‘I was just very shocked at first and then relieved, but now I’m thinking, hang on a minute, what happened here? What really concerns me is the whole atmosphere of intimidation.’” The editor of Private Eye, Ian Hislop, subsequently described the episode as “mind-boggling, I mean, ludicrous.”

Defend our Juries and several associated groups have now also announced plans for further and larger protests against Cooper’s proscription of PA to take place on Saturday 9 August, calling on hundreds of people “to come together to all hold up signs saying ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.’ The action will put to the test how many hundreds or even thousands of peaceful citizens the police force are willing to arrest before they will decide the inevitable, namely that the proscription of Palestine Action is absurd and unworkable.”

Update Sunday 20 July. The daily slaughter continued as usual in Gaza today, as officials reported that Israeli fire had killed at least 93 people across the Strip on Sunday and wounded hundreds more. 67 people were gunned down in a single massacre as a 25-truck UN World Food Programme (WFP) convoy crossed into Northern Gaza. “Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza,” said the WFP on social media, “the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies. As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire. We are deeply concerned and saddened by this tragic incident resulting in the loss of countless lives. Many more suffered life-threatening injuries. These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation. This terrible incident underscores the increasingly dangerous conditions under which humanitarian operations are forced to be conducted in Gaza.”

On Sunday the Gazan health ministry again warned that “hundreds of people whose bodies have wasted away are at risk of imminent death due to hunger.” According to the ministry “at least 71 children have died of malnutrition since the war began in 2023, while 60,000 others show signs of severe undernourishment.” Outside the Shifa hospital in Gaza City a woman told the BBC that “the whole population is dying. Children are dying of hunger because they have nothing to eat. People are surviving on water and salt… just water and salt.” “Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached new levels of desperation,” confirmed the WFP. “Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment. Nearly one person in three is not eating for days.”

As more and more photographs of dying skeletons circulate in the press and on social media, “SOS messages are coming in from our starving UNRWA colleagues every day,” wrote the agency’s commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini on 20 July. “How can one respond to such messages of despair? Shames me and doubles the sense of helplessness. All man made, in total impunity. Food is available only a few kilometres away. UNRWA alone has enough stock available outside of Gaza for the entire population for the next three months. We have not been allowed to bring any aid in since 2 March. Political will is needed. Inaction is complicity and makes us lose our humanity.”

Nihad Awad, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (headquartered in Washington DC) likewise denounced western complicity in “the escalating massacres of starving Palestinian women, children and men murdered with US-supplied weapons and with the complicity of our government […]. Western governments cannot claim ignorance. They are watching in real time as innocent civilians are intentionally starved, forcibly displaced, and slaughtered – and are choosing to do nothing. History will long remember the Western world’s indifference to the forced starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.”

In the UK, police today arrested four more protestors for allegedly expressing support for Palestine Action, this time at a rally organised by Liverpool Friends of Palestine. Those arrested include the prominent 74-year-old campaigner against sexual harassment, Audrey White. ‘“There’s two things to be afraid of in this country,” White told the Guardian. “One is that we lose everything we are proud of – the ability to speak out – and the other is that we would ever be involved in a genocide. We look at these visions of children losing their limbs and being blown to bits. We’ve got to say: how can we stop our country’s involvement in this genocide? Everyone has a responsibility to stop horrors like this all throughout history.” Released by the police late on Sunday night, White also said that one of her bail conditions “effectively leaves her ‘trapped in the house’ because it restricts her from entering Liverpool city centre, where she lives. White, who is the secretary of the Merseyside Pensioners Association and cares for her husband who has cancer, said a police officer had told her she was allowed to attend medical appointments but that she could be arrested if she visited a shop afterwards.”

Writing about these arrests in Labour Heartlands, Paul Knaggs characterised them as “a grotesque illustration of Britain’s descent into authoritarian absurdity.” By proscribing Palestine Action, Knaggs writes, Starmer’s government has chosen to equate largely symbolic gestures “with suicide bombs and mass murder.” Why the crackdown on PA? Their real crime is “daring to expose Britain’s cosy financial and military complicity in Israel’s war machine. For that, the full weight of the state comes crashing down.” Audrey White, “who has given her life to workers’ rights, women’s rights, and anti-racism, is being treated like an enemy of the state. […] The very same government that refuses to condemn the bombing of hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza has the gall to arrest British citizens for opposing it. Worse still, they are doing so under laws supposedly designed to prevent terrorism.” Once non-violent direct action falls within their purview, there is nothing to stop such laws from expanding their range of targets. “When dissent becomes terrorism,” adds Knaggs,

we are all suspects. When pensioners with placards are labelled extremists, the democratic contract has been ripped apart. To all MPs still clinging to their consciences: speak up now. To the trade unions who claim to fight for justice: Audrey White is your comrade, defend her. And to those who think they can sit this one out: the machinery of repression, once built, does not discriminate or dismantle. […] The proscription of Palestine Action must be overturned. The Terrorism Act must be reviewed. And those responsible for abusing their powers to suppress protest must be held to account. […] The question isn’t whether we agree with every tactic or slogan, it’s whether we’re willing to defend the fundamental right to dissent. Because if Audrey White is a terrorist, then so is everyone who’s ever stood on the picket line, marched for justice, or dared to say: Not in my name.

Writing for Counterfire on 20 July, Stop the War’s convenor Lindsey German made similar arguments. Keir Starmer’s government has set out to “criminalise support for Palestine and to widen the scope of illegality so that actions which should be regarded as perfectly normal parts of solidarity protests suddenly become illegal.” Why? “Our government and its allies are losing the argument over Palestine, so they want to stop us making it. Opinion worldwide has firmly turned against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In Britain all the attempts to ban, demonise, and attack the solidarity movement have failed to halt the growing number of demonstrations, BDS actions, meetings,” and so on. The government may express regret or indignation in the face of IDF brutality but since it is clearly determined to continue offering them weapons and diplomatic support it cannot tolerate too much direct exposure of its hypocrisy. Drawing on her long experience of organising opposition to Blair’s calamitous war on Iraq, German knows that “we cannot allow the criminalisation of a movement. It will not of course stop with Palestine. Already supporters of non-violent direct action groups are in prison over environmental issues. But this will spread to trade unionists and other campaigns. […] It is an illusion to think that we can campaign over specific issues without taking up the question of civil liberties and protest.” To campaign “against bans and proscriptions” therefore “isn’t a diversion from the struggle for solidarity but an integral part of it, and needs to be seen as such.”

Also on Sunday, in central Gaza the IDF issued forced evacuation orders for 50,000-80,000 people currently sheltering in Deir al-Balah. Deir al-Balah is the most significant remaining hub for international aid and relief efforts in Gaza, and one of the last places of relative safety still left in the Strip. Large numbers of UN aid workers are still based in Deir al-Balah, warned the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and they are “spread across dozens of premises.” “The new order cuts through Deir al Balah all the way to the Mediterranean Sea,” notes OCHA, “further splintering the Strip. It will limit the ability of the UN and our partners to move safely and effectively within Gaza, choking humanitarian access when it is needed most.” More precisely, the area targeted by Israel’s new evacuation order “includes several humanitarian warehouses, four primary health clinics, four medical points, and critical water infrastructure: the Southern Gaza Desalination Plant, three water wells, one water reservoir, one solid waste dumping site and one wastewater pumping station. Any damage to this infrastructure will have life-threatening consequences.”

“With this latest order,” observes OCHA, “the area of Gaza under displacement orders or within Israeli-militarised zones has risen to 87.8%, leaving 2.1 million civilians squeezed into a fragmented 12% of the strip, where essential services have collapsed.”

Update Monday 21 July. Following up on yesterday’s evacuation order, in central Gaza the Israeli army this morning launched a major incursion into Deir al-Balah. Preceded by a series of air strikes, the new ground operation marks a dramatic further escalation in the IDF’s direct assault on all UN facilities and aid workers.

Responding to the bombardment and invasion of their premises, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a statement condemning “in the strongest terms the attacks on a building housing WHO staff in Deir al-Balah, the mistreatment of those sheltering there, and the destruction of its main warehouse.” The WHO’s “staff residence was attacked three times today,” reported the organisation. “Staff and their families, including children, were exposed to grave danger and traumatized after airstrikes caused a fire and significant damage […]. Male staff and family members were handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot, and screened at gunpoint,” and several were detained. “Most of WHO’s staff housing is now inaccessible,” continues the statement. “With the main warehouse nonfunctional and the majority of medical supplies in Gaza depleted, WHO is severely constrained in adequately supporting hospitals, emergency medical teams and health partners, already critically short on medicines, fuel, and equipment.”

Responding to the attack on UN staff in Deir al Balah, the spokesperson for UN secretary-general António Guterres said he “is appalled by the accelerating breakdown of humanitarian conditions in Gaza, where the last lifelines keeping people alive are collapsing. […] UN staff remain in Deir al Balah, and two UN guesthouses have been struck, despite parties having been informed of the locations of UN premises, which are inviolable.” Meanwhile a spokesperson for Deir al-Balah’s al-Aqsa hospital, Khalil al-Daqran, told the BBC that “hospitals can no longer provide food for patients or staff, many of whom are physically unable to continue working due to extreme hunger. Hospitals cannot provide a single bottle of milk to children suffering from hunger, because all baby formula has run out from the market.”

UNRWA staff pointed out today that Israel’s decision to drastically limit the supply of food to Gaza has now caused prices to increase by 40 times. UNRWA again reiterated that food already stockpiled in its warehouses located just outside the Strip could feed “the entire population for over three months.”

As the daily numbers of people dying of hunger in Gaza start to catch up with the numbers of those killed each day by Israeli shooting or bombing, IDF planners are entitled to congratulate themselves on this patiently planned and carefully engineered outcome: their deliberate campaign of mass starvation has now truly begun to yield its long anticipated results.

Alex de Waal (director of the World Peace Foundation and author of the 2017 book Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine) discussed the situation today on Democracy Now! “I’ve been working on this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years,” de Waal told Amy Goodman, “and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.” We have all known, he continues,

from expert reports by the United Nations, by the independent Famine Review Committee, by many others, exactly how this situation would unfold. […] It takes about 60 to 80 days for an adult to die of starvation. It’s entirely predictable, foreseeable. A child will die much more quickly, and particularly a young child without infant formula, without clean water, without maternal care, etc. We knew this was going to happen […], it is entirely unsurprising, exactly as was predicted. And the only conclusion that one can come to is that Israel is doing this deliberately. They know exactly what they are doing, and this is intended.

Oxford University’s consultant surgeon Professor Nick Maynard is currently volunteering with Medical Aid for Palestinians at Nasser hospital in Gaza, and today sent the Guardian an update on the unfolding malnutrition catastrophe. “Every day I watch patients deteriorate and die,” Maynard writes, “not from their injuries, but because they are too malnourished to survive surgery. The surgical repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, then they die. It is happening repeatedly, and it is heartbreaking to watch. Four babies have died in the last few weeks in this hospital – not from bombs or bullets, but from starvation.” Again the critical issue is whether Israel’s enabling allies will intervene to prevent mass death – or not. “I cannot believe we have come to a point,” Maynard continues,

where the world is watching as the people of Gaza are forced to endure starvation and gunfire, all while food and medical aid sits across the border just miles away from them. The enforced malnutrition and attacks on civilians will kill thousands more if not stopped immediately. […] The UK government’s continued complicity in Israel’s atrocities is unconscionable, and I do not want to spend another day operating on children who have been shot and starved by a military our government supports. History will judge not just those who committed these crimes, but those who stood by and watched.

“From inside Nasser hospital,” Maynard says, “I am telling you: this is deliberate. This is preventable. And this must stop now.”

Meanwhile in southern Gaza, this afternoon the health ministry accused undercover Israeli soldiers of abducting one of the Strip’s few remaining hospital directors, Marwan Al-Hams (the head of Gaza’s field hospitals), in an operation that also killed the local journalist Tamer al-Zaanein.

The situation has now become so monstrous and so gruesome that this morning even a rattled UK government signed on to a statement endorsed by 30 other (mostly European) countries, including France, Ireland, Australia, Japan, and Canada. “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” writes this group of foreign ministers. “It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid. The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.” The statement further opposes “any steps towards territorial or demographic change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” including the long-anticipated E1 settlement plan in the West Bank.

“The situation on the ground in Gaza is intolerable on so many levels,” added Keir Starmer himself in remarks to the House of Commons liaison committee, “and we make that absolutely clear in all our exchanges with Israel and with other countries. Whether that’s the deaths of those that are queuing for aid, whether it’s the plans to force Palestinians to live in certain areas or be excluded from certain areas, they are all intolerable and absolutely wrong in principle.”

Starmer’s foreign secretary David Lammy also had a long-awaited statement ready for the House of Commons, which he read out at 6pm this afternoon. “The new Israeli aid system is inhumane and dangerous,” Lammy said, “and it deprives Gazans of human dignity. It contradicts long-established humanitarian principles. It creates disorder that Hamas are now exploiting, with distribution points reduced from 400 to just four. It forces desperate civilians, children among them, to scramble unsafely for the essentials of life. It is a grotesque spectacle, wreaking a terrible human cost.” After associating Israel with a whole “litany of horrors,” Lammy also reminded the House that he of course remains a “steadfast supporter of Israel’s security,” and so regrets the fact that the Israeli government’s current “actions are doing untold damage to Israel’s standing in the world and undermining Israel’s long-term security.”

What then followed in the House of Commons was a discussion that few people could have imagined even a few short months ago.

As mentioned above (§IV), at no point in the parliamentary debate that followed David Lammy’s statement on 2 September 2024 did any participant mention the word “genocide,” and when Lammy addressed the House of Commons on 21 July 2025 he again scrupulously avoided any reference to genocide or actually-occurring war crimes. By this stage of Israel’s operation to clear Gaza of its inhabitants, however, some of Lammy’s fellow MPs are less willing to toe the familiar line, and during the debate on 21 July no less than ten of them (in order: Kit Malthouse, Stephen Flynn, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, Carla Denyer, Jeremy Corbyn, Ellie Chowns, Patricia Ferguson, Tahir Ali, John McDonnell and Cat Eccles) raised the question of genocide specifically. “It really does begin to look as though there is genocide unfolding before our eyes,” observed one of the session’s less confrontational speakers, Patricia Ferguson: “I realise that the Foreign Secretary will want to take a legalistic view of that, but to those of us looking at it from a moral and logical point of view, there can be no other words for it.” Responding to one bitterly indignant question after another, Lammy could only remind his colleagues that his government’s “long-established position is that it is for the international courts to make any determination of genocide.” Meanwhile, says Lammy, “I think the most important thing that the UK Government can do is press to get that ceasefire, press to get an alleviation of the suffering, and, of course, to do everything we can to see the hostages returned.”

As MPs on both sides of the House made repeated and emphatic reference to ongoing Israeli war crimes, Lammy invariably fell back on the same rather perplexing argument that he and Starmer have been making for many months now, i.e. ever since ICJ rulings, UN assessments and human rights’ reports made it impossible, over the course of 2024, simply to ignore genocide charges altogether. Despite all the accumulated and accumulating evidence to the contrary, Starmer and Lammy do not accept that actual war crimes or actually genocidal acts are actually being committed by their close ally and trading partner Israel. Instead, in July 2025 as in September 2024, the most that Lammy will say is that he recognises there may now be a “risk” that some criminal acts might be committed, presumably at some indeterminate point in the future. Repeated reference to merely possible risks is presumably “legalistic” enough, to invoke Patricia Ferguson’s turn of phrase, to insulate Lammy and his colleagues from complicity in any actually-committed acts. In particular, such reference is presumably intended to ward off any suggestion that Lammy and his colleagues might be guilty of failing to honour their obligation to prevent genocidal acts from occurring.

Lammy was perhaps less prepared for the riposte of former Tory minister Kit Malthouse. “Like others in this House,” said Malthouse.

I am frankly astonished at the statement of the Foreign Secretary. At a time when we have got daily lynchings and expulsions on the West Bank, and dozens being murdered as they beg for aid, I am just beyond words at his inaction – and, frankly, complicity by inaction. He said himself that there is a massive prison camp being constructed in the south of Gaza and he knows that leading genocide scholars from across the world are ringing the alarm bells, yet he has the temerity to show up in this House and wave his cheque book as if that is going to salve his conscience. Can he not see that his inaction and, frankly, cowardice are making this country irrelevant? Can he also not see the personal risk to him, given our international obligations – that he may end up at The Hague because of his inaction? Finally, frankly, I make an appeal to Labour Back Benchers: we cannot get your leadership to change their minds; only you can, if you organise and insist on change.

Lammy dismissed these unwelcome remarks as an affront to his dignity. “I understand the fury that the right honourable Gentleman feels,” he said, “but I have to tell him [….], I have to tell him that it demeans his argument when he personalises it in the way that he does. It is unbecoming, and not something the House expects, particularly of its more senior Members.”

A little further on in this rather heated parliamentary session, the Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi pursued the most urgent question confronting Lammy and his colleagues. “Ministers say it is for the courts to decide whether genocide has occurred in Gaza,” Dhesi observed,

but the genocide convention is aimed primarily at prevention, and the International Court of Justice has already found that there is a plausible risk of genocide and advised that all states must act collectively to prevent it. While the occupying Israeli forces are accelerating the building of illegal settlements in the west bank, the scenes in Gaza are horrific, with almost 1,000 people killed by the IDF while just seeking aid. We are seeing starvation being used as a weapon, the forced displacement of Gazans and mass civilian death, and senior Israeli officials are using dehumanising language while proposing to concentrate Gazans into a mass detention camp. So I ask the Foreign Secretary: when will the Government take decisive action, with international partners, to prevent genocide?

To this Lammy responded: “My honourable Friend prays in aid the law in terms of plausibility in breach of international humanitarian law. If he looks at my statement back in September, he will see that I assessed that there was a clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law. It is for that reason that I suspended [some] arms sales” to Israel. Unsatisfied, the (formerly Labour now independent) MP John McDonnell again pressed Lammy on this same point. “On 11 June last year,” he noted, “the Government reported that they saw ‘no serious risk of genocide’ in Gaza. All this time on, and after the statements that the Foreign Secretary has made, can I be clear: is he saying tonight that the Government accept that there is a plausible risk of genocide? If he is not, will he instruct his officials to undertake an immediate review and report to Members as rapidly as possible? If there is a plausible risk of genocide, that would place legal duties on the Government – and all of us, I believe – to act accordingly.” Lammy again stuck to his script. Our “long-established position,” he repeated, “is that it is for the international courts to make any determination of genocide. Our assessment is there is a clear risk of a breach of international humanitarian law.”

Keir Starmer’s ministers may wring their hands over risks and possibilities, but in the meantime (observed the Labour MP for Dulwich, Helen Hayes) actual “children are being starved and shot in front of our constituents’ eyes. They are watching illegal settlers systematically and strategically undermine the Palestinian state. […] International humanitarian law is being broken in front of our eyes, on an hourly and daily basis. Our constituents are asking what this Government are doing to stop it, and they are asking that because it is unbearable and they can see that the current approach is not working.” Another Labour MP, Dawn Butler, asked her foreign secretary: “Where is our humanity? […] Tell me what words I need to say to him to get our Government to take real meaningful action? Tell me what to say and I will say it.” Lammy has a ready answer for his worried colleagues. “I would say to my honourable Friend that we do need humanity, and everything that this Government have done has been to ensure that there is humanity and to ensure the dignity of the Palestinian people and the hostages that are still underground.”

To the several MPs who urged him to announce immediate UK recognition of a state of Palestine, Lammy again gave another familiar reply: “I do not believe in all honesty that recognition would change the situation on the ground.” In response to equally urgent questions (e.g. from the Green MP Ellie Chowns) about “a full arms embargo, an end to all military co-operation, a full ban on all settlement goods, sanctions on all those responsible for genocide,” etc., Lammy reiterated that “the UK Government are not complicit in any actions that would breach international humanitarian law.”

The independent MP for Birmingham Ayoub Khan also remained unconvinced. Since the IDF already engages in the actual “killing of innocent people,” in the actual shooting of children and the detention of doctors, etc., it appears that as far as Lammy and Starmer are concerned “there are no red lines. Will the Foreign Secretary please tell us from the Dispatch Box: what are the red lines? What will cause this Government to take proactive steps?” What might cause this Government to take steps that might fulfil the UK’s obligation not merely to deplore but to prevent genocide? All such IDF actions, said an unflappable Lammy, cannot yet be characterised as actually-occurring war crimes; rather they “fall into the category of the assessment that I made back in September last year, that there was a clear risk of a breach of international humanitarian law.”

Like Khan, McDonnell, Hayes and so many others, anyone who listened to today’s extraordinary parliamentary debate is now thoroughly entitled to ask: if today’s IDF practices of mass starvation, systematic demolition and indiscriminate shooting in Gaza still merely risk a breach of humanitarian law, as Lammy so consistently argues, what then might Israeli soldiers have to do, in the eyes of His Majesty’s Government, in order to actually breach it?

*****

On 21 July Palestine Action’s Huda Ammori also had her scheduled hearing in London’s High Court. Represented by the barristers Raza Husain KC and Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, Ammori is applying for a judicial review that might quash Cooper’s proscription order. Justice Martin Chamberlain today told her that he will make a decision on this application on 30 July.

Arguing for Huda Ammori, Raza Husain said Yvette Cooper’s decision to ban Palestine Action on 5 July is “repugnant to the tradition of the common law and contrary to the ECHR [European Convention on Human Rights].” He called it an “authoritarian and blatant abuse of power […]. The decision is so extreme as to render the UK an international outlier.” Cooper’s ban, argued Husain, is “inconsistent with the honourable history of civil disobedience on conscientious grounds in our country.” In the written submissions they prepared for the hearing, Ammori’s lawyers also pointed out that prior to Cooper’s decision to ban the group, her ministry’s own intelligence assessment (carried out by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre) had found that the vast majority of PA’s activities were lawful. “On ‘nature and scale,’” they said, “the home secretary accepts that only three of Palestine Action’s at least 385 actions would meet the statutory definition of terrorism,” a definition which itself (given the notoriously expansive terms of the UK’s Terrorism Act) offers only “a dubious assessment” of what might deserve this label. Husain said it was for the court to consider “whether that’s sufficient or whether it’s de minimis (too small to be meaningful) for a group that’s been going for five years.” (A couple of days after this hearing, Declassified UK published some revealing extracts from these intelligence analyses and other internal Home Office assessments of PA).

Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh drew further attention to the effects that Cooper’s proscription has already had. “Dozens and dozens of people have been arrested for protesting – seated and mostly silent protest,” she said. As the Guardian reported, “among the cases she highlighted were protesters near the BAE Systems factory in Samlesbury, Lancashire, who were stopped by police who asked them to remove shirts reading ‘Free Palestine’ because they might have breached the proscription order. She said a man in Leeds was arrested for carrying a placard reproducing a graphic from Private Eye magazine,” i.e. the one that read “Unacceptable Palestine Action: Spraying military planes with paint. Acceptable Palestine Action: Shooting Palestinians queuing for food.” (“It’s unclear if Private Eye is going to have a knock on the door themselves,” added Ní Ghrálaigh, “seeing as they were the ones who published it”).

Responding for Cooper’s Home Office, James Eadie KC “said that an ‘exceptional case’ would be needed for Palestine Action to be permitted to challenge the Home Secretary’s decision at the High Court, rather than through the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission [POAC], a specialist tribunal.” According to the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent Haroon Siddique, Eadie “accepted it was true that most of Palestine Action’s activities were not terrorism but said: ‘The incidents are serious and they’re escalating.’ He focused almost exclusively on process, telling the court in written submissions: ‘Parliament has prescribed the alternative and appropriate remedy, namely an appeal to POAC as the appropriate mechanism for challenging proscription; POAC’s procedures are better suited to such a challenge; and there is no good reason for going behind that process in the present case.’”

Meanwhile, as of 21 July, the online open letter affirming “solidarity with Palestine Action in its campaign against proscription” (see above, 12 July update) has gathered 1359 signatures. These now include the general secretary and the national president of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union along with a growing number of collective endorsements from organisations like the National Education Union‘s national executive committee (which represents almost half a million teachers in the UK) and UCU branches at Dundee and Kingston. Activists involved in the ongoing campaign to overturn Cooper’s ban also encourage participants to report instances of police repression to the European Legal Support Centre European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), which exists to “empower Palestine advocates across mainland Europe and Britain through legal means, monitoring, research, and advocacy efforts.”

*****

Twenty-two months into this latest phase of Israel’s long war on Palestine, it’s hard not to be reminded yet again of Omar El Akkad‘s famous post on social media, written just a couple of weeks after it began back in October 2023 (and subsequently read more than ten million times). “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” As Gideon Levy suggested on 20 July, the initial question of genocidal “intent” was resolved long ago and no doubt it’s now just a matter of time before the architects of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza start to account for themselves by appealing to an older and thoroughly combat-proven line of defence: “we were only obeying orders.”

Over the past several weeks in particular, the debate over Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action has arguably done more than anything before it to sharpen public discussion in the UK of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank. At this point the UK’s Labour government has made its priorities perfectly clear, and they are likely to remain so over the coming months.

On the one hand, Starmer and Cooper’s administration may occasionally condemn IDF violence but it continues to offer Israel “unwavering“ and “steadfast“ material, economic and diplomatic support. The annual value of UK-Israel trade continues to exceed £5 billion. The British arms industry remains closely inter-connected with those of Israel and the US, and the UK continues to host Elbit Systems UK and associated companies. The IDF continues to use munitions and components made by these companies to conduct its war of extermination and forced displacement in Gaza. Incredibly, Starmer and his lawyers continue to justify the ongoing provision of a wide range of UK-made F-35 components to the Israeli air force not only on the grounds that “the evidence available does not support a finding of genocide,” but also that “there was no serious risk of genocide occurring.” To this day, Starmer stands by his refusal ever to “describe or to refer” to what is happening in Gaza as genocide.

No matter how many people are actually starved, bombed or shot to death, no matter how many UN officials or human rights groups name this genocide for what it is, Starmer and his ministers still adamantly decline to characterise IDF actions as genocidal – presumably because this might amount to tacit admission of their own complicity in Israel’s flagrant war crimes.

On the other hand, Yvette Cooper’s Home Office and police force also continue to persecute some of the most direct and most effective forms of action yet undertaken by British citizens to respect their country’s categorical obligation “to prevent and to punish” genocide. To accomplish this, Cooper has taken the altogether unprecedented step of treating non-violent direct action specifically as terrorism, thereby tossing supporters of Palestine Action into the same legal category as members of violent groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Thanks to Cooper’s proscription of PA, growing numbers of people in the UK are being arrested simply for holding signs or wearing T-shirts, and they are being arrested not merely under the (already draconian) terms of 2023’s Public Order Act – they are being swept up on grounds laid out by the far more chilling and punitive Terrorism Act of 2000.

As so many other critics from across the political spectrum have already pointed out, with respect to all kinds of political, environmental and trade union mobilisations, if Cooper and Starmer can get away with criminalising even such harmless expressions of dissent then there will be nothing to stop their administration from cracking down on other non-violent forms of opposition and defiance as well.

One of the several questions that will be decided in the coming months is already very clear: will we let them get away with this, yes or no?

Featured image: “We Are All Palestine Action.” Photo courtesy of Palestine Action