The UK Government is preparing to designate Palestine Action as a proscribed organisation, effectively making it illegal to be a member of the group, the UK Defence Journal understands.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is expected to lay a written statement before Parliament next week, initiating the process of formally banning the group under counter-terrorism legislation.
The move follows a break-in at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, during which military aircraft were vandalised with red paint by pro-Palestinian activists.
The incident, which took place on Wednesday, involved members of the group Palestine Action breaching security at Britain’s largest airbase and damaging two RAF Voyager aircraft.
Using electric scooters to access the base, the activists sprayed red paint into the aircraft engines with repurposed fire extinguishers and reportedly used crowbars to inflict further damage. Red paint was also spread across the runway. The activists evaded immediate arrest.
Here’s the footage from the recent incident at RAF Brize Norton in which two Voyager aircraft were damaged by spray paint and crowbars by Palestine Action members. These aircraft, despite claims made by the group, aren’t involved in Israeli operations. pic.twitter.com/7OnnedZBoV
— UK Defence Journal (@UKDefJournal) June 20, 2025
The Ministry of Defence condemned the incident. A spokesperson said: “We strongly condemn this vandalism of Royal Air Force assets. We are working closely with the police who are investigating. Our Armed Forces represent the very best of Britain. They put their lives on the line for us, and their display of duty, dedication and selfless personal sacrifice are an inspiration to us all. It is our responsibility to support those who defend us.”
Palestine Action claimed responsibility, stating that “by decommissioning two military planes, Palestine Action have directly intervened in the genocide and prevented crimes against the Palestinian people.” The group further alleged that: “From Cyprus, British planes collect intelligence, refuel fighter jets and transport weapons to commit genocide in Gaza.”
This claim is factually inaccurate on multiple counts. The United Kingdom is not supplying weapons to Israel for use in Gaza, and the RAF Voyager aircraft in question are not involved in operations supporting the Israeli military. Defence sources stress that these tankers primarily support Operation Shader, the UK’s long-running mission against Islamic State (Daesh) in Iraq and Syria. In addition, the aircraft contribute to Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) missions, providing aerial refuelling for RAF Typhoons that protect British airspace.
Moreover, the technical claim that RAF tankers are refuelling Israeli aircraft is not only unsubstantiated but physically impossible. RAF Voyagers use a probe-and-drogue system for aerial refuelling, which is compatible with UK and NATO aircraft. In contrast, Israeli fast jets require flying boom refuelling, a fundamentally different method used by US and Israeli tankers. The two systems are incompatible.
A source familiar with RAF deployments described the attack as “utterly pointless,” noting that the group’s assumptions demonstrate a lack of understanding about how UK military aviation functions. “The aircraft targeted are not used in support of Israeli forces. The UK operates independently and Israel has no requirement for British tankers – they operate their own fleet.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the attack disgraceful, writing: “The act of vandalism committed at RAF Brize Norton is disgraceful. Our Armed Forces represent the very best of Britain and put their lives on the line for us every day. It is our responsibility to support those who defend us.”
Shadow Armed Forces Minister Mark Francois warned of the wider implications, stating: “There are also serious questions for the MoD to answer about how ‘protesters’ – who might even have turned out to be armed terrorists – were able to gain access to what is supposed to be a secure RAF airbase.”
Image via Palestine Action.
Good, now we just have to hunt them down. This group has caused no end of trouble in Scotland.
I think we owe them a vote of thanks. In the SDR, Brize Norton was identified as an especially vulnerable single point of failure. A couple of weeks later protesters ride in on motorbikes with fire extinguishers full of paint. Let’s just be grateful they weren’t full of explosives, take it as a timely warning, instigate some security and not continue to put all our eggs in one undefended basket.
Security services need to stamp these scum out immediately.
MI5 must know who their members are. Arrest the lot. Haul them. Prosecute them for being part of a terrorist organisation.
Anyone not a UK citizen deport with immediate effect.
Come on HMG time to do what’s right. These people are the enemy within and do not deserve the privilege to be freely living and roaming around in British society
There used to be a crime with the rather odd name of treachery referring to acts of sabotage. Not sure whether it still exists but was on a par with treason but for foreign nationals.
I would go further than just deporting non or dual-citizens.
.
.
Convict ALL (no leniency) and rather than send to prison, at the taxpayers expense, send all of them one-way to Gaza, since they love the place so much, sparing all expense (military transport…ironically); make any citizens stateless, with the (2nd) irony not lost on me 🙃
Yep. I’d go with that outcome. Never going to happen.
Security services seem to not secure anything.
The ECHR will stop arrests and prosecution. Only native English people tweeting get their collar felt by the law….it’s the new religion in the UK….native English people bad…all others good…Our judges have all been captured by left wing activism fully aligned with Islamists, Anarchists and all sundry of other morons, weirdos and freaks… The UK is in terminal decline and those voting Labour, Liberal democrat, and Conservatives are to blame….will the last sensible, sane person leaves the UK turn off the lights when you leave…
Well, I don’t vote for any of those…😄
Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out…
Thanks for the comment Matt…. When the Labour government are kicked out (which they surely will be as they are a complete and utter shambles in everything) and we finally have a proper centre right party (the fake Tories will be toast) hopefully we can get the issues fixed that people like you created. As always it’s best never to let morons from the left run anything more than a bath and even then they should be supervised when they do. It’s always down to more intelligent centre right people to fix the issues created by utopian lefties. if the UK had followed up Thatcher with someone sensible other than the complete moron John Major and if the devious sociopaths Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had not been elected then we wouldn’t be in the current sectarian nightmare that we have now. Unfortunately the extreme far/hard left have aligned with political/radical Islam to create Islamo-Leftism which is the greatest threat to western democracy since the national socialist left wing government of Germany in the 1930s (yes national socialism was a left wing socialist party the only difference from the communist being that their focus was socialism within a nation state but it was still socialism – managing people, industry with big government). The alignment of the hard extreme/far/hard left with political/radical Islam has led to great injustices and cover-ups as we have seen in places like Rotherham. The irony is that many of these lefties that do these things are the supposed elite/intelligent upper middle class or managerial class in the UK. The managerial class pretend to be nice people but underlying this facade is a horrible ugliness inside that wants to destroy everything to build their own supposed utopian paradise…which often degrades into a dystopia as the UK is now. That’s why I believe in minimal government, minimal taxation, strong borders and immigration, strong on law and order, freedom of speech, strong on defence, free trade, and private industry/property which is the classical liberal approach to government (the liberal democrats are nothing of the sort). As President Ronald Reagan said the most terrifying phrase in the world is: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help…”
Mi5 seem to put most of there effort into try to convince us that far right groups are the biggest treat to our way of life so I’m not so sure they will know who they are
I dont think so.
The Police CT Command that work with the Security Service have highlighted the right, obvious PC nonsense, but I don’t recall MI5 saying as such?
So far this century the far right (Leave/Reform/Neo-Nazis combined) have murdered one MP and Islamists have murdered one MP.
No one else has tried.
They wouldn’t know all of them. One thing PA has been effective at is partitioning its volunteers. A simple example is if they were to target a defence manufacturer in location X, they would most likely only block access/egress, therefore keeping the local police response light. Their splinter teams then go after the suppliers to these companies. It is these companies that generally cannot afford the increased security levels. Once the splinter sabotagers knock over the supplier, the OEM comes to a standstill. The PA group is very well supported by the Good Law Project. The lawyers move heaven and earth to minimise any sentence the court will give. Maybe the government needs to look into who is funding such groups and their lawyers.
Could have done without the crowbars.
No riot shields and dogs like there were in Rotherham?
If we have decided to play lifeboat for the world’s poor, we can’t continue to operate as if this is still a homogenous population with no fifth columnists as was the case prior to about 1990. Can’t have effectively unguarded military assets when the enemy is already within
I love how you seem to skip over the Troubles…
Indeed. The difference of course being that was a domestic conflict with no contagion from the outside, versus the case here which is an external conflict we are totally divorced from spilling over into our country because we have imported millions of people with foreign allegiances
Apart from supplies and support from everyone from Libya to the US and doing vastly more damage and death.
Good but can we also hire the odd security guard with a torch who could pop out at night and see if the aeroplanes are still there.
DOSSERS
Shambolic, embarrassing, enough said
Yeah, that’ll stop it happening again and no money spent to do it. Win-win.
Good they need to all be brought to justice and the RAF needs to get it act together on base security.
It’s being reported Starmer actually defended one of these lunatics back in 2003 with defendant walking free as no verdict was reached. Apparently Starmer had claimed the defendant was justified in his actions in 2003 because if successful would have prevented a war crime. Apparently he had to take the case something called the cab rank rule. Quite amusing really because cabbies quite often refuse rides to some. I guess some professions have different moral standards to others.
It’s a basic principal of common law going back to Magna Carta that everyone is entitled to a free and fair trial and that includes legal representation. Is that something your against?
English law is the best in the world… if you can afford it.
Halt, who goes there!
Remember those days.
What worries me more. Is the language from government, calling this ‘vandalism’, why is this being pulled down to a bus shelter level, it’s not vandalism. If the aircraft could be affected in its operability then it’s sabotage. The paint is sprayed directly into the engine with the canister, a modified fire extinguisher, thrown into the engine also. They could have sprayed the wing with a slogan for example, but no, the intent was to knock out the plane. Their web site announce the intention to knock out the aircraft. So it’s all there, sabotage in plain sight, so why are doors not getting kicked in and people being arrested.
Absolutely-laying the ground work down for altering the context , the perceived ‘impact’, and therefore the sentence.
Treason.
It seems to me that there are far too many people in this country that prefer to bite the hand that feeds them! As far as security at a premier RAF base is concerned, I’m appalled!
Poor England.
Nobody is surprised at this. And they didn’t even catch them?
Britain is an overly permissive society where anything goes and there are no real consequences for individuals who break the law. What a mess.
So many groups like this are either linked to or are themselves ideologically far-left. Intelligence briefings always announce islamic terrorism and the far right as their main targets. Yet the ever changing definition of what is far right seems to indicate a political agenda rather than a serious threat to the nation. The far-left on the other hand openly cause mass disruption and acts of violence and sabotage. I want to see this discussed out in the open. The far-left are a one of the greatest internal threats to the safety of this nation.
I’d ask who is going to police this group; who is going to monitor the council estates in the back-streets of Bradford et al? There’s no point in a law if we haven’t the will or services to enforce it. Think Jo McCarthy – ‘we have a country of fifth-columnists’.
Thanks to the Tories and loss of control at the border. Net migration of +4 million people in 3 years. Hundreds of thousands of illegal boot people, all from the third world. Vast majority fighting aged men. We have allowed an enemy within. This country is now in deep deep trouble and seemingly we can’t even defend one of our few high priority military bases.
Base commander needs sacking
Head of security dismissing
RAF regiment hauled in and dressed down
Military police ditto.
Government needs to get a grip PDQ. National embarrassment, but could have been worse. If that infiltration had been Russian or Chinese operatives we would have just lost the vast majority of our transport and tanker fleets.
You may agree or disagree with their objectives, but this is a civil protest and civil protest is allowed in the UK and other democracies. It makes us rather different to repressive states around the globe.
The activists will be found and charged with trespass and damage. Fine, that’s how the law works here. When you start proscribing organisations that oppose the Government’s line, you start down a very slippery slope e.g. National Guard being empowered to arrest civil demonstrators in USA. Many people do not agree with the USA’s overly pro-Israeli stance and the UK’s tacit support for it. Many view Israel’s actons in the West Bank, Gaza and around the ME as.incompatible with and contradictory to international law. They are entitled to make their views known.
Proscibing this little outfit would look like furious pique from the establishment, because the poor level of security at UK bases has just been publicly displayed. It is actually a good thing, in that it will drive the MOD to rapidly review and improve base security. Probably long overdue, another underfunded element of defence held up to the light.
Sabotaging military equipment is not “protest”. That’s one hell of an attempt to gaslight.
Sabotaging military equipment, especially when on the brink of war, should see these likely foreign agents introduced to a rope and a tree. Civil rights my arse
Fortunatrly, we have the rule of law here and thus don’t do civil lynchings.
There is no claim or proof as yet that the perpetrators are ‘likely foreign agents’. If they are, they will be charged accordingly. If they’re not, we’ll, it will just be one more made-up.web story.
I think your assertion that we have rule of law here is looking increasingly dubious by the day
I disagree with you about this being a civil protest. If a group is targeting UK military and defence businesses that strikes me as something more serious. Part of the problem is that there is a increasingly common perception that there is not a consistent approach to these kinds of issues and that identitarian left wing politics has become a kind of establishment default that goes soft on people tacitly supporting Hamas while, for example, sending out the police to harass innocent journalists expressing legitimate free speech concerns for alleged ‘non-crime incidents’, which as a ‘non-crime’ should not require police action.
Damaging vital military equipment and rendering it inoperable, even if only temporarily, is NOT a civil protest.
It’s a threat to our national security.
Civil Protest? What absolute tosh! This is not a group of guys blocking The Mall and being moved on by the police this is criminal damage of military assets at.a time.of high tensions and to equate the two is simply subversive. I’m heartily sick to death of those that perpetrare these sorts of crimes nearly as much as I am of those that surreptitiously support them.
They are not auditors to test base defences, this was not criminal damage, they are not criminals therefore it is not criminal damage as you state, this is ideology, and ideology can get dangerous. No one says they don’t have the right to protest, but as with the Rotherham rioters who were also protesting, you can’t attack assets that are designed to protect, you can’t set fire to a building and you can’t sabotage military jet engines either. There is no ‘pique’ to react when a serious boundary is crossed. As with the rioters, you have to act otherwise others become emboldened. Every bad actor who dislikes this nation will have seen how easy that was, there needs to be consequences, I was there at Kings Cross in the 7/7 bombings, it wasn’t pretty, hatred for this country and its government and establishment is very real whether it’s ’for Palestine’, for ‘Ireland’ for being infidels or far right hatred or whatever, the lid needs to be kept firmly shut and the job of that is the state, of which we pay our taxes for.
To be honest I assume the RAF regiment must have had something else to do that day as isn’t airfield defence there thing
Not in the UK it isn’t.
The RAF Regiment Sqns do indeed do force protection, and Squadrons are aligned to certain assets, but when deployed, not home base.
Stations also often have an RAF Reg Flight advising on security but on RAF Stations security is the job of the MPGS and the RAF Police.
MoD Guard service also might be on the gate.
I don’t believe the part timers of the RAux AF Regiment get involved in peacetime either, beyond on exercise.
They will just change their name.
OTT in my view. Two blokes on a scooter with some paint. If we are doing this then what about Just stop oil or BLM et al. The British government has become autocratic and a large correction is required in my opinion.
With some paint *and crowbars*, causing damage to aircraft engines on a Defence base. This wasn’t daubing slogans on some Whitehall wall. It was a deliberate attempt to degrade the defences of the country, grounding planes and costing the taxpayer Lord knows how much money.
The reason for the existence of Palestinian Action is to teach people how to break the law by undertaking “direct action”. If they can’t tell the difference between inconvenient property damage that could just as easily be handled in the civil courts and degrading the defences of the country, shutting them down is far from OTT.
Your right a large correction is required👍anybody now entering a clearly signed restricted area should be subject to whatever means of force that these protected areas require,up to and including lethal force for defending strategic assets from “ blokes with paint” ( could easily have been explosives) !
Large enough for you?