Police briefly detained an anti-Hamas demonstrator on Saturday after his banner saying “Hamas is Terrorist” was snatched by a pro-Palestinian protester.
The Metropolitan police claimed that the man was arrested for “assault,” and de-arrested after officers “fully reviewed footage provided of the incident.”
It comes as tens of thousands of “pro-Palestine” demonstrators marched across central London calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
According to the footage, a brief altercation occurred after another man snatched his banner. Police officers entered the crowd moments later and took the anti-Hamas counter-protester away from the crowd.
The pro-Palestine crowd could be heard shouting “shame on you” as the man was taken away.
In a statement, the Met said it’s inaccurate to suggest the man was arrested for the content of his banner.
“He was arrested after an altercation was ongoing, and officers intervened to prevent a breach of the peace. He was arrested for assault,” the statement reads.
“Officers then fully reviewed footage provided of the incident, and he was later de-arrested.”
The Met declined to provide more details of the incident.
Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group in the UK. The group provoked the ongoing Israel–Hamas war by attacking Israel on Oct. 7 last year.
Since Oct. 9, a coalition of pro-Palestine campaigners led by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has organised regular marches or demonstrations every week.
There have also been smaller but more aggressive protests and intimidation targeting MPs.
The PSC marches are mostly non-violent, but police have had to keep counter-protesters away from them.
The Met later issued a statement, saying officers had been “keen to avoid the billboard vans becoming a point of tension or conflict” as pro-Palestinian demonstrators were nearby, and said officers had taken “similar actions” and prevented pro-Palestinian protests from reaching the Israeli embassy.
Critics have described the pro-Palestine demonstrations as anti-Semitic “hate marches,” branded central London a “no-go zone for Jews every weekend,” and called on the police to take action over controversial slogans or ban the marches.
The police can ask the Home Office to ban a moving march in rare cases when evidence shows risks of a real threat of serious disorder that the police can’t manage, but it doesn’t have the power to ban static demonstrations.
According to the Met, the policing of demonstrations related to the Israel–Hamas war in London has so far “required 35,464 officer shifts, and more than 5,200 officer rest days to be cancelled, and costs of £32.3 million.”
Ahead of the march on Saturday, PSC director Ben Jamal said activists “will continue to protest until a ceasefire is called, and until there is an end to all UK complicity with Israel’s decades long oppression of the Palestinian people.”
Itai Galmudy, the organiser of a counter-protest, said the pro-Palestinian marches “have ballooned into anti-Israeli hate marches and we think it’s enough. We don’t want to live in fear and we will not accept it.
“We want to exercise our democratic right to stand up and tell them that it’s not okay,” he said.
