Palestine Action: We're spreading ‘intifada' in prisons

Telegraph

4 hours ago

Jailed Palestine Action activists are radicalising other prisoners in pursuit of their cause, the movement has boasted.
The group – which will be proscribed as a terrorist organisation within days – said the 'resistance lives on the streets, in cities, in towns and in prisons' in a meeting accessed by The Telegraph.
On a call with potential recruits, the host of the meeting said members of the organisation are 'spreading intifada', an Arabic word for uprising.
This week, The Telegraph revealed that Palestine Action was plotting to target RAF bases across the country in a wave of attacks.
At a direct action 'workshop' for people wanting to join the organisation, at which the RAF plans were discussed, a member of the group quoted the words of an anonymous former prisoner.
The former prisoner said: 'In locking me up, the British state made a miscalculation. They thought that by imprisoning me, they would halt the British resistance to Israel's genocide. But while you can imprison a revolutionary, you cannot imprison a revolution.
'The resistance lives on the streets, in our cities and our towns, and in our prisons too. I brought the intifada with me to the prison and I remain steadfast and determined now I am free – just as Palestine, too, will be.'
In total, the group says it currently has around 19 members imprisoned in the UK. The majority of those are the 'Filton 18' who are currently remanded in custody awaiting trial in April next year.
Members of the group allegedly drove a modified prison van into the Israeli arms company Elbit's research, development, and manufacturing hub in Filton, Bristol. Two responding police officers and a security guard were allegedly injured in the incident.
Further arrests were made at a protest in Trafalgar Square this week during a demonstration against Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's plans to proscribe the organisation.
On Thursday, the Telegraph exposed a list of Palestine Action's next targets. Tactics discussed included breaking into factories and hitting 'everything you can find with a sledgehammer', as well as setting up autonomous cells able to target military bases without detection.
A slide in the call identified three RAF bases most suitable for attack – RAF Cranwell and RAF Barkston Heath, both in Lincolnshire, and RAF Valley, in Anglesey, North Wales. It also recommended action against defence companies believed to be supplying arms to Israel, including a drone factory in Leicester.
There have been growing fears of radicalisation in prisons more generally over the past decade, partly because of the presence of a large number of Islamist gangs.
Hashem Abedi, one of the terrorists behind the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, attacked three prison officers with makeshift weapons and hot cooking oil at HMP Frankland in County Durham in April. Two officers were left with life-threatening injuries.
The incident came just days after reports that Frankland, the high-security prison where Abedi is serving life, has become 'overrun' with Islamist gangs threatening to attack or kill other prisoners if they did not join up.
After a surge of law enforcement activity in the UK in the early 2000s following the 9/11 attacks in the US and the July 7 bombings in London, the number of Islamist extremists in custody for terror-related offences increased sharply.
The increase in Islamist terrorist prisoners came at the same time as a rise in the overall number of Muslims in jails across England and Wales – 99 per cent of whom are being held for non-terror offences.
The number has nearly trebled, from 5,500 in 2002 to almost 16,000 in 2024, and now represents 18 per cent of the prison population, compared with 8 per cent two decades ago.
In 2022, a report by Jonathan Hall KC, the reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, found that faith-based self-segregation by prisoners had provided a 'fertile base for violent Islamist activity'. It said attacks on non-Muslim inmates, staff and the public were 'encouraged'.
The report said charismatic or violent prisoners acted as 'self-styled emirs' to radicalise the wider Muslim prison population, exerting control through a network of 'enforcers' over access to prayer meetings, the prison kitchens and showers.