Above photo: PA Media.
The activist group is being persecuted for its campaign against the Israeli arms industry in the UK.
And British military infrastructure linked to the genocide in Gaza.
The British parliament passed a vote on 2 July proscribing the Palestine Action activist group as a terrorist organization, a move strongly condemned by various groups and individuals as “grotesque,” “chilling,” and an “unprecedented legal overreach.”
In parliament, 385 voted in favor of the proscription, while 26 voted against it.
UK Security Minister Dan Jarvis said in parliament that Palestine Action is not “a legitimate protest group.”
“People engaged in lawful protest do not need weapons. People engaged in lawful protest do not throw smoke bombs and fire pyrotechnics around innocent members of the public. And people engaged in lawful protest do not cause millions of pounds’ worth of damage to national security infrastructure, including submarines and defense equipment for NATO,” Jarvis said.
In response to critics of the move, Jarvis added that “Proscribing Palestine Action will not impinge the right to protest.”
However, others slammed the move, including Labour MP Zahra Sultana.
Zarah Sultana not only stands against the proscription of our group, she declares we are all Palestine Action❤️ pic.twitter.com/IyKzkFHfpC
— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) July 2, 2025
“Let us be clear: to equate a spray can of paint with a suicide bomb isn’t just absurd, it is grotesque. It is a deliberate distortion of the law to chill dissent, criminalize solidarity, and suppress the truth,” Sultana said.
Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn also condemned proscribing Palestine Action as a terror group. “If the order goes through today, it will have a chilling effect on protest,” he said ahead of the vote.
Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive of Amnesty International UK, slammed the move as “unprecedented legal overreach.”
The decision gives UK authorities “massive powers to arrest and detain people, suppress speech and reporting, conduct surveillance and take other measures,” she added, stressing that “Using them against a direct-action protest group is an egregious abuse of what they were created for.”
Palestine Action announced on 30 June that it has launched legal proceedings in an attempt to block the British government’s campaign against it.
Earlier last month, two Palestine Action activists broke into the Brize Norton airbase, the largest UK air base.
On electric scooters, @Pal_action broke into Brize Norton RAF base and sprayed red paint into turbine engines, using crowbars to further damage aircraft suspected of aiding #Israel’s crimes, and then left undetected.
Full story: https://t.co/2SvOm0FepL pic.twitter.com/UEHWfa2J0m— Real Media (@RealMediaGB) June 20, 2025
Video footage showed two activists riding through the base on scooters and spraying two military planes with red paint on 27 June in protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The group was founded in 2020 in response to London’s role in arming Israel.
Since then, it has carried out a campaign of infiltrating arms factories, sabotaging production lines, and shutting down infrastructure tied to Israeli military industry, particularly Elbit Systems – the largest Israeli arms manufacturer in the UK.
As a result of the group’s operations, over $2.4 billion in contracts have been lost.
