
Palestine Action co-founder set to challenge terror ban in High Court
On July 4, Ammori failed in a High Court bid to temporarily block the ban coming into effect, with the Court of Appeal dismissing a challenge to that decision less than two hours before the proscription came into force on July 5.
READ MORE: 'Beyond shameful': Harvie urges SNP to explain secret talks with Israeli diplomat
The ban means that membership of, or support for, the direct action group is now a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison, under the Terrorism Act 2000.
The Labour Government is opposing the bid for the legal challenge to be allowed to proceed, with the hearing before Mr Justice Chamberlain due to begin at 10.30am on Monday at the Royal Courts of Justice.
Cooper announced plans to proscribe Palestine Action on June 23, stating that the vandalism of the two planes, which police said caused an estimated £7 million of damage, was 'disgraceful'.
Four people – Amy Gardiner-Gibson, 29, Jony Cink, 24, Daniel Jeronymides-Norie, 36, and Lewis Chiaramello, 22 – have all been charged in connection with the incident, and are due to face trial in early 2027.
At the hearing earlier this month, Raza Husain KC, for Ammori, said the proscription was an 'ill-considered, discriminatory and authoritarian abuse of statutory power'.
He also said that the Home Office 'has still not sufficiently articulated or evidenced a national security reason that proscription should be brought into effect now'.
Blinne Ni Ghralaigh KC, also representing Ms Ammori, told the court that the harm caused by the ban would be 'far-reaching' and could cause 'irreparable harm to large numbers of members of the public', including causing some to 'self-censor'.
Ben Watson KC, for the Home Office, said Palestine Action could challenge the Home Secretary's decision at the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC), a specialist tribunal, rather than at the High Court.
Mr Justice Chamberlain said that an assessment on whether to ban the group had been made as early as March, and 'preceded' the incident at RAF Brize Norton.
READ MORE: 3 women charged under Terrorism Act after breaching Edinburgh arms factory
Dismissing the bid for a temporary block, the judge said that the 'harm which would ensue' if a block was not ordered was 'insufficient to outweigh the strong public interest in maintaining the order in force'.
He added that some of the 'consequences feared by the claimant' were 'overstated'.
At a late-night Court of Appeal hearing, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, Lord Justice Lewis and Lord Justice Edis threw out a bid to challenge the High Court's decision, finding that there was 'no real prospect of a successful appeal'.
Since the ban came into force, dozens of people have been arrested at protests in cities including London, Manchester and Cardiff, including an 83-year-old reverend.
Over the weekend, more than 100 people were arrested across the UK under suspicion of terror offences at protests against the Palestine Action ban.
There have also been several people charged in Scotland under suspicion of terror offences.
Most recently, an activist was arrested on Friday at a protest in support of Palestine Action in Glasgow for holding a sign which read, "Genocide in Palestine, time to take action".
And on Thursday, The National told how a man was charged under terror law for displaying a poster in the window of his property which read "Support Palestine Action! Free Palestine".
There were two pro-Palestine protests which took place in Edinburgh on Saturday, although no arrests have taken place at the time of writing.
Separately, three women are due to appear in Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Monday morning under the Terrorism Act after a van was driven into the fence of the Leonardo factory in Edinburgh.
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Scotsman
39 minutes ago
- Scotsman
UK out of step with international consensus on Palestinian state
Humanitarian aid is airdropped to Palestinians among the ruins of Gaza City on Monday (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi) The consensus to recognise Palestinian statehood is broad and cross party. Scotland's First Minister John Swinney has called for the formal recognition the state of Palestine and 221 MPs from across all parties in the UK Parliament signed a letter calling for the UK Government to take this step. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... This is a political decision with serious implications. Recognition affirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and gives their representatives standing in international legal and diplomatic forums. It also opens clearer pathways for the international community to intervene, uphold humanitarian law and hold states to account. France is moving in this direction. Spain, Ireland and Norway have already taken the step. Over 140 countries worldwide now recognise Palestine as a state. The UK's position is increasingly out of step with the international consensus and with its own stated commitment to a two-state solution. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The current scale of violence in Gaza and the West Bank reinforces the urgency. UN agencies, international courts and humanitarian organisations have provided consistent evidence of widespread destruction, displacement and loss of life. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has documented the collapse of medical services and repeated attacks on healthcare workers. MSF has concluded that genocide is taking place, as has Amnesty International and other reputable NGOs and individuals. The International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures in relation to allegations of genocide. These are not political claims, but formal findings and warnings issued by some of the world's most credible legal and humanitarian bodies. Israel's actions must be examined with the full force of international law. Recognition of Palestinian statehood strengthens the international legal framework. It supports the work of institutions such as the International Criminal Court and allows for greater coordination of humanitarian aid. It also gives future peace negotiations a more equal and legitimate starting point. Israel has a right to rid itself of the threat of Hamas. But when it became clear that Benjamin Netanyahu was no longer just interested in defeating Hamas and releasing the hostages but making Gaza uninhabitable, I was first in Parliament, on behalf of the Scottish Government, to condemn and call formally for an end to the disproportionate Israeli military action in Gaza. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad That position was taken at a time when UK Government ministers refused to issue the same condemnation and when the Labour leadership remained largely silent and continued to arm Israel. Delay has consequences. The longer it has taken to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation, the more difficult meaningful action has become. The Labour Party must now recognise the cost of that delay and support recognition without further hesitation. There is no credible basis for continuing to treat Palestinian statehood as a future possibility to be granted under political conditions. Legal statehood already exists in the eyes of most of the international community and under the criteria set out in international law. Recognition from the UK would reflect that reality and allow for greater diplomatic and humanitarian engagement. The Scottish Government has made its position clear. With growing international support, the UK Government now faces a choice. Recognition can help re-establish international norms, strengthen legal enforcement, and support a more sustainable approach to peace. Further delay will only weaken the UK's credibility and reduce the scope for constructive involvement. The UK has stood by for too long issuing words of condemnation, the time for action is now. Angus Robertson is SNP MSP for Edinburgh Central and Constitution, External Affairs and Culture Secretary


Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Why Israel is forced to sabotage itself
Israel's recently announced tactical pause in several sectors of Gaza, aimed at facilitating the distribution of humanitarian aid, is not merely a gesture of compassion under fire. It is a tactical adjustment born of necessity and certainly not a shift in moral posture. To understand this move properly is to grasp the complex interplay of military constraint, media manipulation, psychological warfare, and political coercion. The decision to implement a daily ten-hour pause in military activity in areas such as Al-Mawasi, Deir al-Balah, and Gaza City reflects more than an internal policy shift. It reflects the immense, and at times irrational, external pressure placed on Israel by international actors moved not by objective fact, but by a meticulously engineered campaign of imagery and emotion. What has been presented to the world as a humanitarian necessity is, in truth, the product of a questionable narrative manufactured by Hamas and amplified by a complicit media ecosystem. That narrative, relentlessly promoted, is one of famine and mass starvation, with Israel cast as the deliberate agent of human suffering. Images of skeletal children and desperate civilians, often of dubious provenance, have flooded western media Israel has long worked to prevent humanitarian collapse in Gaza, even while engaging in military operations. Hundreds of aid trucks pass into the Strip daily. Calorically and logistically, the supply is sufficient. The breakdown, crucially, is in distribution. Hamas seizes trucks, sells aid at inflated prices and uses hunger as both a coercive internal tool and an international PR weapon. This strategic use of civilian suffering has allowed Hamas to manufacture outrage that in turn translates into diplomatic pressure on Jerusalem. While the starvation narrative is falsely exaggerated, and the depiction of Israeli intent as cruel or indifferent is entirely fabricated, it is also true that some hunger and shortage now exist. These are not the result of Israeli policy but of deliberate Hamas engineering. Any relief Hamas permits will not be due to concern for its population, but because it is extracting a strategic benefit – time to regroup, concessions from Israel, or PR advantage. And it will not hesitate to throttle aid again if doing so serves those ends. The role of the UN and particularly UNRWA further complicates the picture. Israeli and independent sources have long documented the deep infiltration of these agencies by Hamas operatives. In recent weeks, Israel allowed international journalists into Gaza to witness the massive stockpiles of aid the UN had refused to distribute – aid cleared by Israeli checks and held up only by UN inaction. Only once exposed and embarrassed did UN agencies begin moving trucks. The resulting chaos, captured on video, showed the UN's operational dysfunction, contrasting sharply with the more disciplined efforts of the US-Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. High-level sources confirm to me that GHF trucks have never been raided, while UN trucks have repeatedly been hijacked, mobbed, and violently taken over. Numerous videos have documented these episodes, underscoring the vulnerability and dysfunction of UN-led distribution. The political echelon in Israel is under pressure on multiple fronts. President Trump and the US administration have leaned heavily on Jerusalem to show a humanitarian face. Internally, Prime Minister Netanyahu must navigate criticism from both right-wing parties and security professionals. Some argue that the IDF should distribute aid directly, severing Hamas from its stranglehold on civilian life. Others, including sources close to Netanyahu, insist the tactical pause is essential to preserving operational freedom and denying Hamas the international sympathy it craves. These pauses, however, are not cost-free. Colonel (res.) Yaron Buskila, CEO of HaBithonistim, warned that the humanitarian corridors risk creating de facto ceasefires, granting Hamas time to regroup. The structure of the pause itself, daily ten-hour windows from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. in designated areas where IDF operations are scaled back, provides predictable, exploitable gaps for Hamas. While Israel pauses, Hamas does not. It continues to exploit the calm to fortify its infrastructure, rebuild command centres, repair tunnel networks, and reposition fighters. On the propaganda front, Hamas uses the visibility of these humanitarian pauses to bolster its victim narrative, claim the international moral high ground, and deepen the sense of equivalence between itself and a sovereign state. In addition, Hamas will use the lull to study the movements of aid convoys and Israeli logistical patterns, gathering intelligence that allows it to more effectively sabotage humanitarian operations. This learning curve is not theoretical: recent weeks have seen an increase in the lethality and precision of Hamas attacks against Israeli troops, a direct outcome of its ability to study and adapt as operational patterns emerge. The cessation of hostilities for aid delivery becomes a two-pronged weapon: operationally beneficial for Hamas and psychologically corrosive for Israel. The current negotiation framework for a hostage deal further illustrates this asymmetry. Hamas offers a slow drip of some living hostages and bodies of those it has killed, in exchange for a lengthy 60-day ceasefire. This would be a strategic boon that would allow it to rehabilitate while Israel stalls. The demand to shift aid back to UN control and away from the GHF is part of the same plan: to reassert control, regain legitimacy, and cripple Israel's ability to bypass Hamas's influence in Gaza. This is the bitter paradox: to maintain moral and strategic legitimacy in the eyes of its allies, Israel must act against its own operational interests. It must enable aid it knows will be exploited, allow actors it knows to be compromised, and accept international narratives it knows to be false. These tactical pauses are not humanitarian victories. They are defensive moves in a war where images matter more than facts, and where the battlefield extends as much into living rooms and newsrooms as it does into Rafah and Khan Younis. In this arena, Hamas has one comparative advantage: it is not constrained by truth. And too often, neither are its media allies. That Israel continues to function under such constraints is not a sign of weakness but of ethical discipline. Yet discipline is not immunity. And in a war of attrition fought with lies, even the most moral actor can be coerced into a corner.


The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
This trickle of aid is down to the public, not our hard-hearted PM
Some aid was delivered by landing the Hercules on dirt strips. About half was delivered by air drop: flying 15ft above the ground and pushing pallets of grain out of the rear door. Both methods carried significant risk to both the starving on the ground and to the aircrew, and neither could deliver more than a few truckloads of aid each day. But both delivered much more aid than para drop could. Delivering aid by air is difficult, dangerous and extremely expensive; it's appropriate only when there is no other option. In Gaza, the so-called safe area of Al-Mawasi is only 10 miles by road from the Rafah crossing from Egypt; just north of Gaza is a major Israeli port with road access to Gaza just a few miles away. This is one of the worst aspects of the famine in Gaza: unlike in Ethiopia, where access to the famine areas was extremely difficult, in Gaza there is a mountain of aid sitting close by, but kept inaccessible by Israel's actions. The fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is now allowing a trickle of aid into [[Gaza]] is a sign that international pressure on his government has an effect. Most of the pressure here has come from the public and I'm grateful to [[The Herald]], BBC and other media outlets for giving voice to the outrage and despair felt by so many. It's a pity the UK Government is too timid to challenge [[Israel]]. It appears that Mrs Thatcher was more compassionate and more of a leader than Sir Keir Starmer. Doug Maughan, Dunblane. • Instead of the ineffective, totally inadequate, dangerous and distracting air drop of aid, I would suggest that there should be an air drop of EU and UN troops who could then securely – and peacefully – ensure safe passage for the recognised international agencies to deliver the aid waiting at the Gaza border. It's time to call a decisive halt to the atrocities this Israeli Government is perpetrating and to show we mean business by meaningful action. Our Government's mealy-mouthed words won't save lives. William Thomson, Denny. Read more letters William Thomson, Denny. An appalling juxtaposition It is beyond words that the people who knew suffering, as no others did, should starve to death their neighbours – babies, children, mothers, young and old. It is, in fact, beyond comprehension unless you know that the government of [[Israel]] wants the land of Palestine, [[Gaza]], for itself as it always has. It needs the land devoid of population – hence the genocide. All the while, it's mantra has been 'Israel has the right to self-defence'. Since when did starving children, babies, war-weary mothers create a threat to Israel? Sadly, Israel will now go down in history, not for what its people suffered but for the suffering they have inflicted on their neighbours and by their side, Israel's allies, the US and the UK are a party to the war crimes Israel has committed. [[Gaza]] is a wasteland. Its people have been decimated with 60,000 dead and meanwhile Donald Trump plays golf in Scotland and [[Keir Starmer]] and John Swinney drop in for a chat. The juxtaposition of these colliding worlds and the reality of those in Gaza, who are literally starving to death is, indeed, beyond words. Flora Komori, Edinburgh. Onus now on both sides I recently listened to a very moving and blunt speech made by the late former Labour minister Gerald Kaufman in 2009 on the Israel-Hamas conflict. It must have taken a lot of courage to come out and condemn the actions of the side that you effectively belong to. We need more people like him, from both sides, to start speaking out properly and we need a more forceful input from the UN. The first steps are glaringly obvious and must happen immediately to enable proper talks to start. Hamas must release all hostages and the Israelis must cease bombings and allow the food and water supplies to be distributed, immediately. My empathy with Jewish people following the Holocaust is burnt into my soul. As a boy in the 1950s it was truly horrendous to see footage of the camps and realise a so-called civilised nation could carry out the atrocities on such a huge scale over such a short period of time, without any intervention from neighbouring countries. The pictures of starving children in Gaza is the final straw and must surely move all of the western and neighbouring Arab governments to focus on helping to put an end to this horrendous war. They have the means, they need the will to do it now. John Gilligan, Ayr. Thank you, Scotland I would like to applaud the Scottish people for their visible stand against the visit of US President Donald Trump. He is not the type of person that I like representing me as a citizen of the United States. We are better than that. I have never been able to figure out how so many people here could possibly think that he would make a good president. He lies, he cheats, he's a misogynist and a racist. For a country that was supposedly made great by its diversity and equity, he has dismantled every DEI initiative ever put in place. And now he's threatening to defund one of the greatest universities in the world over 'antisemitism'. Being pro-Palestinian has nothing to do with being against the Jewish people. It's about being against the genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government. Donald Trump is fully supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu's government. He is in fact, just a terrible person. Thank you, Scotland, for your unwelcoming stance towards the worst president in US history. Su Joffrion, Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. Former Labour minster Gerald Kaufman (Image: PA) Wind power no benefit to Scotland I am in favour of renewables power, but Alan Simpson has a valid point about the proliferation of onshore wind farms in Scotland ("Rural Scots are right, it is time to pause onshore wind farms. There are more than enough already", The Herald, July 28). Scotland led the way on renewables, especially wind, and for many of us Scots it pointed toward a future of a self-sufficiency of cheaper home-grown power. Given the demise of regional electricity pricing, there is now zero benefit in this for Scotland and the whole thing seems to have been taken over by England's energy needs. Scots will also have to pay extra for the nuclear generators being planned for England. How will the foreign energy companies who are making billions out of Scotland's huge energy potential try to sell this in the future? Their only motive appears to be profit for them, and their Scottish customers are left, literally, out in the cold. Perhaps they could explain why the costs for people who live adjacent to these turbines in rural Scotland are always higher than people in the far south, who have no power generation at all. GR Weir, Ochiltree. • How much research did Alan Simpson do for his column on wind farms? Wind turbines are not made of plastic but steel. They don't necessarily involve disturbing peat either. For example, the wind farm development at Stronelairg near Fort Augustus also includes an extensive peat restoration project. Perhaps Mr Simpson should go and look at it. He might learn something useful that he could share with us. Jackie Kemp, Leith. NatWest folly I was disgusted when I read the headline that NatWest was giving £1.5 billion back to shareholders ("Natwest gives £1.5bn to shareholders as profits boosted by acquisitions", The Herald, July 26) and that the UK taxpayer, who had bailed out the bank (as RBS) 17 years ago to the tune of £45.5bn, was to miss out as the Government had already sold back our shares for around £35bn – a loss to the UK taxpayer of £10.5bn. Think how far that money could have gone to help our infrastructure, schools, hospitals, NHS etc. Who gave the OK to sell off when they did? The bank had turned the corner and if they had waited a few more years we could have recouped the full amount. Fraser Hamilton, Balfron.