Violence breaks out as police transfer in on 1,500 individuals protesting towards authorities’s proscription of anti-genocide group.
Printed On 6 Sep 2025
London police have arrested a minimum of 150 protesters throughout violent clashes at a rally calling on the UK’s authorities to elevate a ban on the Palestine Motion group.
Defend Our Juries, the marketing campaign group that organised the rally on Saturday, mentioned about 1,500 individuals participated within the demonstration exterior the UK Parliament in London, risking arrest beneath terrorism legal guidelines.
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“Met police brutally assault protesters and throw them to the bottom, while they mass arrest others for holding cardboard indicators which say: ‘I oppose genocide. I assist Palestine Motion’,” Defend Our Juries posted on X together with a video depicting the clashes.
BREAKING: Met police brutally assault protestors and throw them to the bottom, while they mass arrest others for holding cardboard indicators which say:
“I oppose genocide. I assist Palestine Motion” pic.twitter.com/Ivzfcz2YNk
— Defend Our Juries (@DefendourJuries) September 6, 2025
The Press Affiliation, a UK information company, reported that police drew their batons in the course of the clashes, and one protester was seen with blood streaming down his face behind a barrier after being arrested.
The company additionally reported that police had screaming arguments with demonstrators and had water and plastic bottles thrown at them whereas a number of protesters fell over in a crush at one level.
London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed that about 150 individuals had been arrested for a variety of offences, together with assaulting a police officer and expressing assist for a proscribed organisation.
“Officers policing the Defend Our Juries protest in Parliament Sq. have been subjected to an distinctive degree of abuse together with punches, kicks, spitting and objects being thrown, along with verbal abuse,” the Met mentioned on X.
‘Chilling impact’
The protests are the most recent in a sequence of rallies denouncing the UK authorities’s resolution in July to ban Palestine Motion beneath the Terrorism Act 2000.
The ban got here after members of the group broke into an air drive base in southern England the earlier month, inflicting an estimated 7 million kilos ($9.4m) of harm to 2 plane.
Membership in or assist for the group, which is supported by outstanding figures like bestselling Irish creator Sally Rooney and Huge Assault singer-songwriter Robert Del Naja, is now a prison offence punishable by as much as 14 years in jail.
Palestine Motion has gained approval from the Excessive Court docket to problem the ban, a ruling the federal government is in search of to overturn. The case is ongoing with a listening to scheduled on September 25.
Huda Ammori, Palestine Motion’s cofounder, has condemned the federal government’s resolution to ban it as “catastrophic” for civil liberties and mentioned it will result in a “a lot wider chilling impact on freedom of speech”.
Kerry Moscogiuri of the human rights marketing campaign group Amnesty Worldwide UK mentioned: “When the federal government is arresting individuals beneath terrorism legal guidelines for sitting peacefully in protest, one thing goes very improper right here within the UK.”
“Criminalising speech on this context is just permitted when it incites violence or advocates hatred. Expressing assist for Palestine Motion doesn’t, in itself, meet this threshold.”
Greater than 700 individuals have been arrested at earlier protests – together with 532 at a London rally on August 9, which marked the most important mass arrest within the capital because the Nineteen Sixties – and 138 have been charged beneath the Terrorism Act.
Mike Higgins, 62, who’s blind and makes use of a wheelchair, returned to protest on Saturday after making headlines over his arrest on August 9.
“What selection do I’ve?” he instructed The Press Affiliation. “Nothing is being completed concerning the genocide aside from by us .”
“And I’m a terrorist? That’s the joke of it.”