Thousands marched through central London on Saturday against three years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Britain’s part in sustaining it. Organisers put the turnout at 250,000. The demonstrators demanded an end to British arms supplies to Israel. For the Metropolitan police, even the date was a problem. The state that helps arm the coloniser expects those protesting the slaughter to show greater consideration for the coloniser’s sensitivities.
Demonstrators gathered on the Embankment wearing keffiyehs, carrying Palestinian flags and placards reading “End the genocide” and “Free Palestine”. They held a two-minute silence for Gaza’s dead before the day’s rally in Whitehall. The Palestine Coalition has organised more than 30 mass demonstrations since October 2023. Three years of killing haven’t extinguished the solidarity movement.
Research gives some measure of the lives destroyed. In an update announced in November 2025, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Centre for Demographic Studies estimated that violent deaths in Gaza had likely exceeded 100,000 by 6 October 2025. Their model accounted for incomplete reporting; it didn’t simply reproduce the official count.
Israel’s killing doesn’t stop at the people struck by bombs and bullets. It continues through hunger, contaminated water, untreated illness and the destruction of hospitals. In July 2024, Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf warned in The Lancet that the toll, including indirect deaths, could reach 186,000 or more. Their calculation assumed four indirect deaths for every direct death and included deaths in the months and years ahead, even if the fighting stopped. That warning is now more than two years old.
In September 2024, Edinburgh public-health professor Devi Sridhar projected 335,500 deaths by year’s end if her assumed rate continued. In December 2024, surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who’d worked in Gaza, put the toll closer to 300,000. These were assessments of the destruction of a population, including deaths from deprivation.
Donald Trump spoke in February 2025 of removing Gaza’s entire population, putting it at 1.7–1.8 million. More recently, Moshe Feiglin, who wants to become Israel’s defence minister, claimed that fewer than 800,000 people remained. Against a pre-genocide population of around 2.3 million, those statements imply population losses of 500,000–600,000 and more than 1.5 million respectively. Both men were discussing how to expel the people who remain.
A death register compiled amid devastation can’t be treated as a complete account of everyone killed. Doing so turns the difficulty of documenting Palestinian deaths into an advantage for the state responsible for them. The people whose bodies haven’t been recovered, whose deaths haven’t been registered, don’t cease to exist because a newspaper wants a single authoritative number.
The ceasefire declared a year ago hasn’t stopped Israeli airstrikes. In the West Bank, settlers have intensified their attacks; UN figures put the number killed there by Israeli forces and settlers in 2025 at 230. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband now acknowledges that settlers backed by Netanyahu’s government are carrying out ethnic cleansing. The land from which Palestinians are driven passes into the hands of those expelling them. The settler gains possession; the Palestinian loses a home, a farm, the means of making a living.
Britain’s support for Israel belongs to the same imperialist relationship. Arms firms have a direct commercial interest in supplying weapons. Beyond those contracts lies the British ruling class’s commitment to Israel as an ally within the US-led imperialist bloc. A heavily armed colonial state helps that bloc maintain its power in the region. Palestinian liberation challenges an arrangement which Britain’s rulers have helped sustain.
British workers don’t acquire a common interest with arms manufacturers because both happen to be British. Yet they’re expected to accept the manufacturers’ business and the government’s alliances as the national interest. When they oppose those arrangements, the police arrive to regulate their movements and inspect their placards. Solidarity with Palestine brings them into conflict with their own ruling class. An imperialist government has good reason to fear workers recognising that their interests lie with the people it helps oppress.
Deputy assistant commissioner Carl Galvin explained the police’s concern: “We know Saturday’s event, so close to the third anniversary of the terror attack on Israel, has the potential to have a greater impact on communities than the previous national marches.”
Palestinians are still being killed. Why should opposition to their destruction be suspended, or treated as less legitimate, because of an anniversary observed by the state destroying them? The feelings of the colonisers cannot determine when solidarity with the colonised is permissible. To give them that authority during an ongoing genocide is to require the victims and their supporters to accommodate the perpetrators.
Nor does commemorating 7 October give Israel’s defenders possession of the calendar. Palestinian dispossession didn’t begin on that date, and the people enduring it have no obligation to accept a history which begins with Israeli suffering and pushes everything done to Palestinians out of view. A march against genocide remains appropriate while the genocide continues.
The Met had already appealed to the organisers of an earlier student demonstration to “exercise [their] right to protest on a different date”. About 100 people attended that demonstration anyway, and five were arrested for breaching police conditions. For Saturday’s national march, police prescribed the route, required speeches and music to finish by 5.30pm and the rally to end by 6.30pm. Galvin also announced powers to require the removal of face coverings worn deliberately to conceal identity.
The force reported 20 arrests, including over alleged criminal damage at the Battle of Britain memorial, an alleged Nazi salute and alleged assaults on officers. It also reported arresting people carrying placards declaring support for the proscribed organisation Palestine Action. Those arrests over political expression deserve to be examined in their own right; putting them in a police statement alongside allegations of assault doesn’t answer the objection to them.
It is this movement, whose supporters are being arrested over placards, that Ed Miliband wants to reassure. At Labour’s conference, he declared: “I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people: we hear you, you were right.”
His 8 September announcement proposed a ban on settlement imports and measures against businesses financing or servicing settlement expansion, with the new legislation promised within six to nine months. But he was explicit about the limits: “The sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel.” He justified protecting wider trade through his commitment to the two-state solution.
The liberal Zionist fiction is that Palestinians can be liberated during their coloniser’s continued existence as a Jewish supremacist ethnostate on Palestinian land, and for Miliband this fiction remains a priority. The promised Palestinian state becomes a reason to protect Britain’s relationship with the state obstructing its existence. Miliband wants to restrain settlement expansion because it threatens the partition he believes will secure Israel’s future. Palestinian freedom is discussed on terms set by the preservation of the colonial state.
The new arms policy follows the same course. Miliband announced that licences would be refused for exports contributing materially to the occupation. On 16 September, the government confirmed that not a single additional licence had been suspended or revoked since the announcement eight days earlier. It said this was largely because the relevant licences were already covered by existing suspensions.
Meanwhile, Miliband expressly defended continued British supplies to the global F-35 programme, through which components can reach Israel. He argued that stopping those supplies would jeopardise the programme for NATO and other allies. Here is British imperialism’s calculation in the minister’s own defence of his policy: the military requirements of the alliance justify keeping a supply route to Israel open.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has called for comprehensive sanctions and a full arms embargo. The demand for sanctions on all Israeli trade, alongside a complete two-way arms embargo, confronts the state and economy sustaining the occupation. The army protecting the settlements is also the army bombing Gaza. Its suppliers, and the state financing it, don’t all operate from settlement addresses. A policy designed to preserve their wider commercial relationships leaves that machinery intact.
Miliband has heard the demand to end British complicity. His answer is to tell the people making it that they were right, while assuring the businesses profiting from that complicity that their wider trade can continue.
