Jewish group urges London police to reverse ban on pro-Palestine protest
More than 660 British Jews, including prominent legal, cultural, and academic figures, have called on the Metropolitan Police to reverse a ban on a planned pro-Palestine protest outside the BBC headquarters in London later this week.
The police on Saturday said they would impose the Public Order Act to prevent the pro-Palestine rally from forming outside the BBC because of its proximity to a synagogue.
In a statement, the Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) group criticised the ban as bowing to “partisan campaigning aimed at preventing peaceful and lawful assembly”.
The group said the police faced “strong pressure from pro-Israel organisations” who claimed that Palestine solidarity protests pose a threat to synagogue congregations.
“This evidence-free claim is robustly contradicted by the large Jewish Bloc visible on every major demonstration since the genocide began in October 2023,” the JVL statement noted.
“As Jews, we are shocked at this brazen attempt to interfere with hard-won political freedoms by conjuring up an imaginary threat to Jewish freedom of worship.”
Detained Gaza doctors ‘described horrific conditions’: Physicians group
Israeli forces have detained at least 262 health workers in Gaza, including Hussam Abu Safia, the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital, the most prominent healthcare facility in the besieged territory’s north.
It remains unknown where many of them are.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Naji Abbas, the director of Prisoners and Detainees Department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said the organisation’s lawyers had over the past four months visited 26 of the detained healthcare workers, mainly doctors.
“All of them described a very concerning situation about their brutal arrest, about the torture that they faced during the interrogations, about not knowing till now after months – some of them almost after a year of detention, they don’t know why they are being held till now,” he said from Jaffa.
“All of them described horrific conditions, starvation, den[ial of] medical care,” he added.
Abbas said Abu Safia’s detention is no different from the “arrest of hundreds of medical and healthcare workers in the last year since the start of the war in Gaza”.
He added: “All these testimonies that we collected in … are giving us a very horrific picture … of what Dr Hussam [may be] facing right now.”
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