Waste firm Veolia pays £27k after ‘Yes It’s A Genocide’ banner taken by Greater London Authority was destroyed
The banner was unflurled in Parliament Square in London in December 2024. Photograph: Haroon Siddique/Jiri Rezac/Led by Donkeys
The campaign group Led By Donkeys has received £27,000 in compensation after a giant banner it displayed in Parliament Square saying “Yes It’s A Genocide” was seized by Greater London Authority officials and destroyed.
Representatives of the GLA arrived on the scene in central London and confiscated the 40-metre by 40-metre banner after it was unfurled on 4 December 2024, just over a year after Israel began its assault on Gaza after the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas.
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Ben Stewart, a co-founder of Led By Donkeys, said: “The Parliament Square banner was in collaboration with one of the world’s leading genocide scholars, but still the authorities threw process out the window and simply seized and destroyed our property. Pursuing compensation was never about the money, it was about defending space to protest Israel’s war crimes.
“Palestine protests are treated differently in Britain to all other forms of activism. Direct action is regarded as terrorism and words on a placard are rendered illegal. Over the years we’ve delivered banners, put up billboards and done guerilla projections across the country, but the only time our equipment has been seized and destroyed was when it related to Palestine.”
The banner was videoed from the air and a film created that was posted on social media featuring a voiceover from the renowned Israeli scholar Prof Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust, who said: “This is exactly what a genocide looks like.”
Vote Labour for Genocide.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.
A Palestinian woman reacts as she checks the damages after an Israeli strike hit a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in the Al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip on July 8, 2025. (Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)
A prominent Israeli human rights lawyer condemned the proposal outlined by Israel’s defense minister as “an operational plan for a crime against humanity.”
The Israeli government’s new plan to push all residents in Gaza to live in a camp built atop the ruins of the city of Rafah is drawing heavy criticism from experts who see it as a precursor for ethnic cleansing.
In an interview with The Guardian, Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard accused Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz of laying out “an operational plan for a crime against humanity” with his announcement this week of an initiative to build a massive refugee camp at Rafah from which Palestinians would not be allowed to leave. Katz characterized the proposed camp as a “humanitarian city.”
Sfard said that the entire camp was being built as a pretext for the mass deportation of Palestinians from Gaza.
“It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip,” he told The Guardian. “While the government still calls the deportation ‘voluntary,’ people in Gaza are under so many coercive measures that no departure from the strip can be seen in legal terms as consensual. When you drive someone out of their homeland that would be a war crime, in the context of a war. If it’s done on a massive scale like he plans, it becomes a crime against humanity.”
Dr. Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, picked apart the Israeli government’s claims that the camp in Rafah would be a “humanitarian city” where Palestinian civilians could live safely away from Israeli military operations being conducted against Hamas fighters.
“It is neither humanitarian nor a city,” Goldberg explained. “A city is a place where you have possibilities of work, of earning money, of making connections and freedom of movement. There are hospitals, schools, universities and offices. This is not what they have in mind. It will not be a livable place, just as the ‘safe areas’ are unlivable now.”
Ihab Hassan, a Palestinian human rights activist and director of the Agora Initiative, expressed a similar sentiment in an interview with The National.
“Israel’s Defense Minister Katz isn’t even hiding it any more—he’s openly calling for a concentration camp for Palestinians in Gaza,” he said.
Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of the Refugees International advocacy group, toldReuters that he wasn’t at all buying the Israeli government’s stated humanitarian intentions regarding the construction of the camp.
“There is no such thing as voluntary displacement amongst a population that has been under constant bombardment for nearly two years and has been cut off from essential aid,” he said.
Reutersreported Monday that a $2 billion plan for so-called “humanitarian transit areas” inside Gaza was recently discussed in the Trump White House.
President Donald Trump earlier this year called for the mass removal of Palestinians from Gaza so that the area could be rebuilt as an international beach resort that he described as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
