In Middle East Eye

On 27 March, some 20 police officers burst in on a group of young women at a Quaker’s meeting house in central London and arrested them on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

The women were activists who had gathered for an open meeting of Youth Demand, a pro-Palestine and climate justice movement demanding an end to UK government arms sales to Israel and new fossil fuel licensing. The group emerged in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.

“It was a publicly advertised talk,” said Lia, 20, who attended the meeting. “It was a low turnout - six people in total.”

The women were sitting in a circle drinking tea when Lia looked up to see a large group of police pressed against the window.

“Their hats were tapping against the glass,” she told Middle East Eye. “Then, there was a big thud. They kicked down the door, and then the whole room was full of police.”

The officers seized the women’s laptops and phones, and led them off one by one, some in handcuffs.

“None of us were resisting arrest,” Lia said.

Three of the women were taken to Bromley police station, the others to Kingston, where they were held incommunicado and interrogated in the middle of the night.

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 stipulates that detainees are permitted an initial phone call, although this right may be delayed in cases relating to serious organised crime, terrorism or espionage.

It is a tactic increasingly deployed against pro-Palestine activists.

Simultaneously, police officers conducted overnight raids on their homes with the keys they confiscated from the arrestees.

Ella Grace Taylor, another one of those arrested, said she came home to find her room ransacked.

“My bed was stripped. All my things were lying across the floor,” she told MEE.

“We were left this piece of paper that acknowledged they’d been there. It said in small print on the back: ‘If you want to know what's been taken, you have to come to the police station.’”

“We’ve all been having nightmares. When we hear a noise outside or a van go past, there is this sense of paranoia,” she added.

The police are still withholding the women’s phones, laptops and university coursework. 

The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities - from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.

The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.

What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings. 

Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.

Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.

Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.

Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months. 

Israeli quadcopters are employing a "bizarre" new tactic of playing audio recordings of crying infants and women in order to lure Palestinians to locations where they can be targeted.

On Sunday and Monday night, residents of the northern parts of Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp woke up to the sounds of babies crying and women calling out for help.

When they went outside to locate the source of the cries and provide aid, Israeli quadcopters reportedly opened fire directly at them.