A Wave of Terrorism-Related Arrests Hits London

By Tiernan Cannon | July 11, 2025 | 10:25am

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Palestine United Kingdom

A Wave of Terrorism-Related Arrests Hits London

Since July 5, 2025, a pro-Palestine campaign group, Palestine Action, has been proscribed as a terrorist organization in the United Kingdom. Supporting the group, therefore, is a criminal offense that comes with the possibility of 14 years imprisonment. Dozens of people have already been arrested for allegedly doing just that.

A demonstration was held in central London on the same day that the proscription of Palestine Action came into effect. Protestors gathered around a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square, located close to the Houses of Parliament. Some of them reportedly held signs that read, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” Twenty-nine people were arrested. Among them was Reverend Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired priest. “The law does not have an age limit,” the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, later said of her arrest.

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Those who were arrested have since been released on police bail, pending further inquiries.

The decision to proscribe Palestine Action was taken after some of its members broke into a Royal Air Force base, RAF Brize Norton, on June 20, where they allegedly damaged two aircraft by spraying it with red paint. Four people were arrested and charged. Nobody was harmed.

Speaking to Al Jazeera to explain why RAF Brize Norton was targeted, Manaal Siddiqui, a spokesperson for Palestine Action, claimed, “These aircraft can be used to refuel and have been used to refuel Israeli fighter jets.” He added that RAF planes have set off from Brize Norton and traveled to Britain’s RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus, where they have then been “dispatched on spy missions” to gather intelligence that is “shared with the Israeli government and the Israeli air forces.”

An investigation published earlier this year, undertaken by Action on Armed Violence and published in the media outlet Declassified UK, found that the RAF had conducted at least 518 surveillance flights around Gaza between December 2023 and March 2025.

Swiftly after the Palestine Action activists broke into RAF Brize Norton, the British home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced that she would seek to ban the group under anti-terror law. She said Palestine Action had a “long history” of criminal damage, and that since 2024 “its activity has increased in frequency and severity.” It would be down to British ministers to vote on whether or not to ban it.

Palestine Action has been active since 2020. It has sought to disrupt the activities of, in particular, Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer with factories throughout the U.K. It allegedly once planned to disrupt the London Stock Exchange, too. Its non-violent tactics have included protest, the occupation of premises, the destruction of property, and vandalism, and they have led to the closure of weapons factories. Some of the group’s members have been arrested in the past, but on several occasions, they have been acquitted by juries. In at least one case, the defendants argued that their actions were justified on the basis of necessity, in order to save the lives of Palestinians.

A couple of reports have emerged in recent years, one by the Guardian and another more recently by Declassified UK, indicating that British officials have been lobbied by the Israeli embassy and the arms manufacturer Elbit Systems respectively to act against pro-Palestinian protestors. Elbit did not respond to Declassified’s request for comment, while an Israeli embassy spokesperson, in response to the Guardian’s report, said it respected the independence of the British judicial system and “under no circumstances would interfere in U.K. legal proceedings.”

The vote to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organization took place in the House of Commons on July 2. But it was not just Palestine Action on the agenda that day. Ministers were asked to vote on banning three separate organizations at once: Palestine Action, the Maniacs Murder Cult, and the Russia Imperial Movement. A “no” vote, therefore, would not only have meant ministers refusing to designate Palestine Action as terrorists, but also the other two groups. It has been suggested by critics that this represented an effort by the government to secure as many votes to ban Palestine Action as possible.

The Maniacs Murder Cult, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, follows a “neo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence against racial minorities, the Jewish community, and other groups it deems ‘undesirables.’” Its alleged leader, Michail Chkhikvishvili, has been accused of planning an attack in New York, in which someone was to dress up as Santa Claus and begin handing out poison-laced candy to Jewish people. Children were allegedly a particular target.

The Russian Imperial Movement, according to the Counter Extremism Project, is a “a fascist group based in St. Petersburg, Russia, that seeks to create a ‘mono-ethnic state’ led by a ‘Russian autocratic monarchy…’” It is “best known for having members and sympathizers linked to violent activity abroad,” while “its militant branch, the Imperial Legion, reportedly has sent fighters to Ukraine, Syria, and Libya.” It allegedly runs training courses on “bomb-making, marksmanship, combat medicine, and small group tactics such as assaulting and clearing buildings.”

The vote to proscribe these three organizations passed by 385 votes to 26. This means that, in addition to bearing the same status as the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement, Palestine Action is today listed alongside groups such as Al Qa’ida, Boko Haram and ISIS. It is the first direct action protest group to be banned under the Terrorism Act.

Membership of, or support for, Palestine Action is now a criminal offense that could lead to a sentence of up to 14 years in jail. Wearing clothes or displaying iconography related to the group, as Novara Media has explained, could “get you up to six months.” The news outlet points towards the case of Kneecap’s Mo Chara as an illustration for how that situation could play out, as he is presently facing a terror charge for allegedly picking up and waving a Hezbollah flag—Hezbollah is a proscribed group in the U.K.—that was thrown on stage during one of the band’s sets in London last November. He will appear again in court on August 20.

The move to proscribe Palestine Action has been met with criticism. A group of UN experts released a statement on July 1 that read, “We are concerned at 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.”

Hundreds of lawyers, acting under the banner of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) lawyers’ group, signed a letter that read, “Proscription of a direct-action protest group is an unprecedented and extremely regressive step for civil liberties. The conflation of protest and terrorism is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Our government has stated that it is committed to respecting the rule of law: this must include the right to protest.”

Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch UK and Amnesty International UK, have criticized the decision to ban Palestine Action, while, in the entertainment world, an open letter has been signed by figures such as Paul Weller, Brian Eno, Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan and others that called on the British government to “withdraw its proscription of Palestine Action and to stop arming Israel.” The Irish author Sally Rooney recently told the U.K. High Court that she is “and will continue to be a committed supporter” of Palestine Action, despite its designation as a terrorist group.

Elsewhere, on July 7, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, told reporters that his government was planning to establish a so-called “humanitarian city” upon the ruins of the Palestinian city of Rafah. The scheme will entail the forced movement of, initially, 600,000 Palestinians into the area, later to be followed by the entire population of more than two million. Legal experts and academics have described the plan as a “blueprint for crimes against humanity.”

The following day, on July 8, the independent journalist and former head of investigations at Declassified UK, Matt Kennard, posted on X. He claimed that, the previous night, a British spy plane had headed towards Gaza to collect intel for Israel. It left RAF Akrotiri at 4.51 p.m., returning to base six hours later. “The British have collected thousands of hours of footage over Gaza for Israel over [the] past 19 months,” he wrote. “U.K. is a participant in the genocide.”

Investigations into the 29 people arrested in London for supporting Palestine Action are ongoing.