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Police in London arrested over 360 anti-Israel protesters on Saturday as throngs of people intentionally violated a new ban on support for a particular pro-Palestinian group.
The U.K. Parliament passed a ban on public support for Palestinian Action early last month after members of the group broke into a Royal Air Force base and vandalized aircraft. The U.K. ban states that supporting the organization is akin to supporting terrorism, and therefore illegal.
The anti-Israel protesters in London this weekend argue the ban is an illegal infringement on freedom of speech. London Police arrested at least 365 people before the demonstrations ended.
More than 500 protesters filled the square outside the Houses of Parliament on Saturday, many daring police to arrest them by displaying signs reading, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” That was enough for police to step in.
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“We are confident that anyone who came to Parliament Square today to hold a placard expressing support for Palestine Action was either arrested or is in the process of being arrested,” the police force said in a statement.
The protest’s organizer, Defend Our Juries, said it intended for the protest to show that the new law was impossible to practically implement.
“The police have only been able to arrest a fraction of those supposedly committing ‘terrorism’ offenses, and most of those have been given street bail and allowed to go home,” Defend Our Juries, which organized the protest, said in a statement. “This is a major embarrassment to (the government), further undermining the credibility of this widely ridiculed law, brought in to punish those exposing the government’s own crimes.”
The protest comes just one day after the Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, marking an escalation in Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas.
The office said the Security Cabinet had adopted, by vote, five principles for concluding the war which include: the disarming of Hamas, the return of all hostages – living and deceased, the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, Israeli security control in the Gaza Strip, and the establishment of an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.
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“A decisive majority of Security Cabinet ministers believed that the alternative plan that had been submitted to the Security Cabinet would neither achieve the defeat of Hamas nor the return of the hostages,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said.
Asked in an interview with Fox News ahead of the Security Cabinet meeting if Israel would “take control of all of Gaza,” Netanyahu replied: “We intend to, in order to assure our security, remove Hamas there, enable the population to be free of Gaza.”
Fox News’ Bradford Betz and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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