The Home Office is investigating whether Iran is funding Palestine Action, while the Government moves to designate it a terrorist organisation.
Officials are understood to be probing the group’s source of donations amid concerns it is not bound by financial transparency rules.
There are fears Iran could be providing money, via proxies, given their objectives of ‘dismantling the apartheid regime in Israel‘ are aligned.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is due to update MPs next week on the proposals to make it a criminal offence to belong to or support Palestine Action.
The move comes after the group posted footage online showing two people inside the base at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.
One person was recorded riding an electric scooter up to an Airbus Voyager air-to-air refuelling tanker and appearing to spray paint into its jet engine.
Yesterday, protesters crashed with police in London in response to the Government’s plans.
Ms Cooper’s secondary legislation to add Palestine Action to the list of proscribed groups will be published next Monday.
Palestine Action protesters and police clash in Trafalgar Square yesterday afternoon
An activist clashes with a police officer amid the protest
Palestine Action posted footage online showing two people inside the base at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire
MPs will then vote on the motion the following Wednesday; if passed, the House of would have the final say the next day, with the proscription order coming into effect on July 4.
Palestine Action invites donations directly through its website but does not publish financial information, the Times reports.
The Home Office has voiced concerns around where the group is raising the significant sums it requires for its legal costs as it has instructed lawyers to pursue ‘all avenues for legal challenge’.
Palestine Action states on its website it is a grassroots movement and accepts funding is ‘sometimes inconsistent’. Donations are said to go towards supporting members who are arrested and imprisoned.
NGO Monitor a research institute that aims to promote transparency, has said the group’s lack of public financial information ‘reflects a lack of transparency and accountability’.
But one of its known public donors is James ‘Fergie’ Chambers – an American communist and philanthropist who is heir to a multi-billion conflomerate.
Mr Chambers stated in 2023 he had paid the legal fees of Palestine Action members.
Beyond concerns around transparency, the Home Office is yet to state direct evidence that links Palestine Action with Iran.
Yvette Cooper is facing a Labour backlash at plans to ban Palestine Action in the wake of RAF planes being vandalised
Ms Cooper has attempted to justify her move in banning the group by pointing to a series of attacks by Palestine Action since its inception in 2022.
She also claimed its media output promotes its attacks involving ‘serious property damage, as well as celebrating the perpetrators’.
Among the groups’ staging of demonstrations in recent months are the spraying of London offices of Allianz Insurance with red paint over its alleged links to the Israeli defence company Elbit, and vandalising President Trump’s Turnberry golf course in South Ayrshire.
Ms Cooper went on to say Palestine Action’s activity had increased since last year and claimed its methods had become ‘more aggressive’.
She said attacks at the Thales defence factory in Glasgow in 2022, as well as Instro Precision in Sandwich, Kent, and in Bristol last year, had caused damage costing millions of pounds.
Palestine Action has argued Ms Cooper made ‘a series of categorically false claims’ and called the reaction ‘unhinged’.
A spokesman said: ‘This is an unhinged reaction to an action spraying paint in protest at the UK government arming Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people.
‘We are teachers, nurses, students and parents who take part in actions disrupting the private companies who are arming Israel’s genocide, by spray-painting or entering their factory premises.
In a statement yesterday, Met Police commissioner Mark Rowley condemned the then planned protest in Westminster
A clip shows one person riding an electric scooter up to an Airbus Voyager air-to-air refuelling tanker and appearing to spray paint into its jet engine
‘It is plainly preposterous to rank us with terrorist groups like Isis, National Action and Boko Haram.’
Baroness Chakrabarti, former head of the human rights group Liberty, also said banning the group ‘may be an escalation too far’.
But Ms Cooper has said the ban would allow law enforcement to ‘effectively disrupt the escalating actions of this serious group’.
She added: ‘Proscription represents a legitimate response to the threat posed by Palestine Action.’
Palestine Action’s protest on Monday was supported by 35 other protest groups, including Just Stop Oil.
Yesterday, hundreds of protesters waving Palestinian flags and holding placards gathered at Trafalgar Square.
A Met spokesman said: ‘While the protest initially began in a peaceful manner, officers faced violence when they went into the crowd to speak to three individuals whose behaviour was arousing suspicion.
‘This sequence of events repeated itself on multiple occasions, with officers being surrounded on each occasion they tried to deal with an incident.’
Diana Neslen, 85, who said she was a ‘regular’ at marches in support of Palestine, attended the protest on crutches.
She added in response to police restrictions: ‘Look at this, we should have the right to stand in front of parliament and show our faith until the MPs see why we think what they’re doing is wrong.
‘Instead we’re herded into little tiny spaces so that hardly anyone can see us, and certainly not the politicians.’
