


British police will be given powers to restrict repeat protests in the same place, the government said on Sunday, after the latest pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstration went ahead Saturday despite requests to cancel it in the wake of a deadly attack at a synagogue.
The new powers will allow senior police officers to consider the cumulative impact of previous protests on a local community, the interior ministry said.
“The right to protest is a fundamental freedom in our country,” UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said. “However, this freedom must be balanced with the freedom of their neighbors to live their lives without fear.”
Mahmood is also due to review the police’s existing powers to ensure they are sufficient and consistently applied, including powers to ban protests outright, the ministry said.
“Large, repeated protests can leave sections of our country, particularly religious communities, feeling unsafe, intimidated and scared to leave their homes,” Mahmood said.
“This has been particularly evident in relation to the considerable fear within the Jewish community, which has been expressed to me on many occasions in these recent difficult days.”
Questioned by a BBC television interviewer about the Jewish community’s repeated warnings about the dangers they face, Mahmood admitted she was “very worried about the state of community relations in our country.”
The home secretary added, speaking to Times Radio, that there was a broad “problem of a rise not only in antisemitism but in other forms of hatred as well.”
“There are clearly malign and dark forces running amok across our country,” she said.
Two people were murdered in Manchester on Thursday on Yom Kippur, the holiest day for Jews, and police shot dead the terrorist, a British man of Syrian descent who officials said may have been inspired by extremist Islamist ideology.
On Saturday, police arrested almost 500 people in central London in the latest protest in support of Palestine Action, a group that was banned in July after members broke into an airbase and damaged military planes.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer had urged the protest’s organizers to call it off out of respect for the grief of British Jews.
Three people who were seriously injured in Manchester remain hospitalized, including one who is also believed to have been accidentally hit by police fire.
Counter-terrorism police have been granted more time to detain four people arrested on suspicion of terrorism-linked offenses over the incident.
The UK has seen repeated pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel demonstrations since the deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.