Nine people have been arrested after a banner with a pro-Palestinian slogan was displayed on a building in central London.
The banner, which read “globalise the intifada”, was hung outside a building in Park Square, near Regent’s Park, on Tuesday.
The Metropolitan police said the building, a large Georgian terrace in one of the most expensive parts of London, was being used by squatters but had now been secured.
The Arabic word “intifada” means shaking off or struggle and is often used to describe periods of uprising, some of them involving the use of terrorism, by Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Police said the arrests had been carried out under section 18 of the Public Order Act, which prohibits the display of “any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting” if the intention or likely consequence is to stir up racial hatred.
They said the banner had been removed and they would maintain a presence in the area to respond to “any further incidents”. Officers had left the scene by 4.30pm, the PA news agency reported.
When asked on 30 October about language used at some pro-Palestinian protests, an official spokesperson for the prime minister said calling for intifada was “obviously … not acceptable”.
Referring to the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, the spokesperson added: “People need to think extremely carefully about the impact of their actions following a traumatic terror event which saw more than 1,000 people killed.”
The pro-Palestinian protests of recent weeks have brought renewed debate about freedom of speech and whether certain slogans constitute calls for violence or even genocide.
Among the most controversial has been a chant, frequently heard at the demonstrations, that states: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Activists have argued that the phrase is only a call for freedom and human rights for Palestinians, but in a letter to senior police officers in October Suella Braverman, then the home secretary, said it could be understood as an “expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world”.
She said that in certain contexts using the slogan could amount to a racially aggravated public order offence.
