The march was the fifth major demonstration held in the capital so far this year
London:
Thousands of protesters marched through central London on Saturday calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as Israel continued bombing after Hamas launched a deadly attack on its territory on October 7.
Regular demonstrations against Israel’s military response to attacks have led to dozens of arrests for anti-Semitic slogans and banners, promoting banned groups and attacks on emergency workers.
The march from Hyde Park Corner to the US Embassy was the fifth major demonstration held in the capital so far this year.
March organizer Ben Jamal said before the protest: “We will continue to protest until a ceasefire is declared and until the UK ends all complicity with Israel in decades of oppression of the Palestinian people.”
Last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called on police to take tougher action against protesters, saying the incidents had “evolved into intimidation, threats and calculated violence”.
The Prime Minister said “police have a difficult job sustaining protests” but “we have to draw a line”.
“I say to the police, when you take action, we will support you,” he added.
Itai Garmoudi, an organizer of Saturday’s counter-protests, said the pro-Palestinian demonstrations created a “Jewish no-go zone” in the capital and “quickly developed into an anti-Israel hate march.”
“We will not accept that Jews cannot take to the streets just because someone wants to protest,” he said.
“We think that’s enough. We don’t want to live in fear and we won’t accept it.”
London’s Metropolitan Police also criticized the protests, saying the cost of maintaining such events since October 7 had reached 32.3 million pounds ($41 million).
Karen Findlay, who led policing in London on Saturday, said: “We are obviously operating against a backdrop where we know that anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim concerns remain high in our Jewish and Muslim communities Hate crime and how safe they feel in London.”
A pro-Palestinian British protest group said on Friday that one of its activists had “destroyed” a portrait of Arthur Balfour, a British politician whose manifesto helped found Israel.
Police confirmed they received an online report that a painting at Trinity College, Cambridge University, in southeast England, had been criminally damaged.
Palestine Action, which describes itself as a direct action network of groups and individuals, posted video footage online showing activists spraying red paint from cans onto the artwork and then repeatedly scratching the surface of the framed painting .
The Balfour Declaration is a 67-word letter written by the then British Foreign Secretary to the famous British Zionist Lionel Rothschild in 1917, supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The document is credited with ultimately leading to the establishment of Israel in 1948, which also led to the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians and decades of conflict between the two communities.
The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,160 people, most of them civilians, according to AFP statistics based on official Israeli data.
Hamas also took approximately 250 hostages. Israel believes 99 people in Gaza are alive and 31 dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 30,717 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
