Tag Archives: Palestine

The story of a Berkhamsted Quaker arrested for protesting about designating Palestine Action as a terrorist group

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Sue in the pink dress joining the demonstration on July 5. She later was holding a placard when she was arrested. Pic Credit: London Evening Standard.

My view about the Government’s hasty decision to designate Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was disproportionate and unwarranted.

It is saying the people who damage property to protest about Britain’s armed support for Israel are equivalent to the Manchester Arena concert bomber who set out to kill and maim as many people he could enjoying a pop concert. This is plainly a ridiculous comparison. If the authorities want to take action against people who damage planes there are already plenty of laws in this country from criminal trespass to criminal damage that could be used. And it is absurd to say anybody peacefully demonstrating in favour of this organisation should go to jail for 14 years.

So unusually I have given space to one of our local people to describe her feelings about being arrested and bailed for demonstrating in front of Ghandi’s statute in Parliament Square last week. She has distributed this to Quakers and I thought it deserved a wider audience. She has not been charged with anything yet so it is reasonable to report this. Journalists who follow the law more closely than me say the fact she hasn’t been charged is because it will have been referred to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider what to do as there are lesser charges that can be brought. Many of the people arrested were elderly and likely to die in prison if the full terrorism sentence was served.

Here is Sue Hampton’s tale:

I was arrested on July 5 at the feet of Gandi’s statute

I was arrested on Saturday 5th July at the feet of the Gandhi statue in Parliament Square, along with three Christian Climate Action friends, among more than twenty others. We were arrested under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, within hours of the proscription of Palestine Action, for holding a placard that read I OPPOSE GENOCIDE (and) I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION. When interviewed at a police station I told the solicitor that I would like, in answer to each question, to say, “I am a lifelong pacifist, a Quaker and follower of Jesus.” Emotionally I regret to say I took his advice and stuck with “No Comment”. After being kept twelve hours I wasn’t charged but given bail conditions and told to report back to Wandsworth Police Station on October 2nd. In my cell I experienced unusually deep peace as well as profound grief.

Palestine Action is a nonviolent direct action group. The Filton 18, still on remand many months after blockading an arms factory, and those who recently disabled a fighter jet with paint, believe in peace and justice. Many Friends will remember Sam Waldron taking a similar action at an RAF base and being acquitted, and before that, the Ploughshares women who damaged a plane destined for East Timor. My own first arrest some years back was for locking on with two other Quakers to block the road to the London Arms Fair. UNICEF says that 50,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza, yet our government continues to support Israel by supplying parts for missiles, by sharing military intelligence and training Israeli soldiers – while refusing to condemn the war crimes of Netanyahu’s government as genocide. Incredibly, thirteen members of the UK Cabinet, including Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy, have received gifts from that government.

By lumping Palestine Action together with two violent organisations in the proscription bill, our own government skewed the vote. I seriously believe that the outcome would have been different had our MPs been voting separately on each group. Indeed, my own MP has implied that under those circumstances she would have made a different decision. This is not justice. It isn’t honourable. Like the BBC’s biased new coverage and their decision not to show the documentary they commissioned on medics being targeted in Gaza, it’s wrong.

That’s why I took a spare placard on Saturday and sat with my principled activist friends. I hadn’t been allocated one, and if asked in advance I might, or might not, have been daunted by the potential custodial sentence (up to 14 years) but I wanted to support the protest with a badge. Will people be arrested for wearing badges or T-shirts in support of Palestine Action, for sharing posts on social media, for using any public platform to speak the truth that proscribing a nonviolent protest group is unjust? Although an immediate appeal failed to prevent the law being passed, I do believe that the proscription will eventually be declared unlawful. More importantly, a peaceful resolution to the conflict may yet be found, and the real terror will end.

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Film reveals Israel deliberately killing doctors and paramedics in Lebanon and Gaza under guise of attacking Hamas and Hezbollah

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This week the International Court of Justice at The Hague begins a week long public hearing into whether Israel has broken international law in occupied Gaza through its brutal treatment of civilians, medics and aid workers and the Israeli ban on the United Nations aid organisation UNWRA.

Last week I attended a documentary film screening and discussion event organised by the media group Middle East Eye and the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians. The documentary was a searing account of the life and death of paramedics and doctors trying to save lives as Israel bombed the Muslim quarter of Beirut and the villages of Southern Lebanon. The panelists included doctors and volunteers who had worked in Gaza, and an international law expert who made it clear that these attacks were against international law.

The film by Middle East Eye was made with the co-operation of Lebanese workers and an extremely brave woman reporter, Hind Hassan, who embedded herself with emergency ambulance teams going to the latest bombings in Southern Beirut and the surrounding villages at great risk to her own life.

The “double tap” killings

What she discovered was that the Israelis were using a particular brutal bombing technique known as the ” double tap”. First they bombed a building and followed what happened using drones. Then they came back and bombed again just at the moment when ambulances and paramedics arrived to try and rescue victims. The only intention of the second bombing was not to kill Hezbollah but to kill doctors and paramedics at the scene.

The film also showed that many paramedics and doctors slept in Beirut’s hospitals so they could be on call immediately a bomb dropped during the night. The Israeli’s bombed their sleeping quarters killing a number of them. You can watch the video of the film at the top of this article.

The Israeli’s claim the reason they bomb ambulances is that they are used by Hezbollah to transfer arms and missiles not to rescue people – even cartoons are used to illustrate this. The reporter saw no evidence of this when she was working with the ambulance teams and frankly it would odd to load up an ambulance going to a bombed out zone with weapons – they need the space to take back casualties.

The discussion that followed included first hand accounts from medics who had worked in Gaza including Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a renowned humanitarian plastic surgeon, who has worked in conflict zones and in Gaza. He has been banned by Israel from returning to the Gaza strip. Dr Victoria Rose, an NHS plastic surgeon and the chair of the UK’s Specialty Advisory Committee on Plastic Surgery Training, who volunteered to work in Gaza and Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of Human Rights Watch.

Some of the statistics that came out during the discussion were terrifying. All Gaza’s hospitals have either been damaged and destroyed, some 512 schools and 12 universities destroyed, 52,000 people killed and some 5,700 people who are now the lone survivor of once large families. The medics and paramedics have been decimated – there are only two pathologists left alive in Gaza and many teachers and journalists have been killed. if all that is not genocide, what is it? It also suggest that the recent killing of Gaza ambulancemen to be dumped in a mass grave is not some professional mistake but part of a strategy to degrade the country and make it uninhabitable.

As I often do on my blogs there is a full report of the panel discussion on Youtube which I have embedded here. It is over an hour long but it will give a proper flavour of the event.

Video of the panel discussion

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European Court of Human Rights rules against review of the cause of Yasser Arafat’s death

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PLO CHAIRMAN YASSER ARAFAT PICTURE by Yaakov Saar

The European Court of Justice has thrown out an attempt by Yasser Arafat’s widow and daughter to have a case that examined the death of former Palestinian leader who died 17 years ago re-opened again.

As predicted by @NewsEchr the court chaired by a Ukrainian judge decided that his widow’s claIm that there had not been a fair trial in France was ” inadmissible” because it was beyond the power of the court to re-examine the evidence.

Yasser Arafat, who died on 11 November 2004 in France at the Percy Military Hospital where he was being treated following a decline in his state of health at a time when he was in Ramallah, Palestine. On his widow’s request, no post mortem was carried out.

Traces of highly radioactive polonium alleged to be found on Arafat’s belongings


In March 2012 traces of polonium 210, a highly radioactive material, suggesting that Yasser Arafat might have been poisoned, were found on his personal belongings that his widow had recovered after his death. They were entrusted to a journalist from the Al Jazeera television channel, C.S., to be analysed.

On 28 August 2012 the public prosecutor of Nanterre opened a judicial investigation on a charge of premeditated murder

Three investigating judges were appointed and three experts were asked to determine the cause of the decline in Mr Arafat’s health. Their operations took place in the presence of French and Swiss teams, together with a Russian team at the request of the Palestinian Authority.

The French judicial expert’s report concluded that the result of radiological analyses did not prove the existence of exposure to polonium 210. The Swiss report disagreed with the French findings. An additional expert’s report, ordered by the investigating judge, confirmed the findings of the French report.

The dispute began when the applicants wanted to submit another expert report and this was refused by the French judges. This led them to appealing to the European Court of Human Rights because they did not think the trial was fair.

The ECHR said that it couldn’t re-open the case again on a quarrel over the admissibility of evidence, this being primarily a matter for regulation by domestic law. It therefore did not fall within the Court’s remit to substitute its own
assessment of the facts and evidence for that of the domestic courts, its task being to ensure that
the evidence was taken in a manner that guaranteed a fair hearing. The judges ruled the application was “inadmissible” thus ending a long legal fight by his widow and daughter.

Exclusive with @NewsEchr: Murder or death by natural causes? European Court of Human Rights ruling 17 years after Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s death

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Picture of Yasser Arafat by SA’AR YA’ACOV at the time he won the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE in 1994.

Family raise suspicions over his death

As the Middle East is still in turmoil an extraordinary ruling will be made by the European Court of Human Rights concerning events around the death of the Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat nearly 17 years ago.

His family have been suspicious he died from poisoning in 2004 and claim there was not a fair trial looking into this after he died in a French military hospital.

The applicants to the ECHR Suha El Kodwa Arafat and Zahwa El Kodwa Arafat, are French nationals.The case concerns a criminal complaint filed by the applicants, the widow and daughter of Yasser Arafat, who died on 11 November 2004 in France at the Percy Military Hospital where he was being treated, claiming that Mr Arafat had been the victim of premeditated murder.

They claim that the French authorities didn’t give their case a fair trial by refusing to include additional expert evidence.

They wanted an additional expert report on the cause of the decline in Mr Arafat’s health, as they had requested on account of their doubts concerning the origin and traceability of the sample used for that assessment, the methodology applied and the results, which were contradicted by the results obtained by Swiss experts.

They also criticise the refusal to order a fresh expert report on their behalf and to grant their other claims, based on contradictions between the results obtained by the different experts, Swiss and French, from their respective measurements and analyses. In French courts, Arafat’s wife and daughter were unsuccessful with their lawsuits and appeals. In 2017, they appealed to the European Court of Human Rights In French courts, Arafat’s wife and daughter were unsuccessful with their lawsuits and appeals. In 2017, they appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.

The court decision will be announced on Thursday raising an issue that has literally thought to have gone away and could not come at a worse time for Palestinian and Israeli relations. A ruling in their favour might re-open the issue but ECHR News believe they may lose the appeal.