Three Years of Genocide
The 37th National March for Palestine took place on Saturday 10 October 2026 from Victoria Embankment to 10 Downing Street, marking three years since the beginning of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza and the onset of the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The march was organised by the Palestine Coalition, which includes the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Muslim Association of Britain and the Palestinian Forum in Britain. The march was part of an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People and was followed by a public rally with many speakers.
Aimee Shalan, newly appointed director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, addressed the crowd: Tens of thousands of us are marching today to mark three years of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, British complicity and Palestinian resistance. We are horrified by the genocide in Gaza and by the attacks by settlers in the West Bank and marvel at how the Palestinians are resisting erasure. We join them in uncompromising solidarity. The Palestinian people have placed liberation at the heart of global politics. No army can break Palestinian resistance. The limited British sanctions against Israel announced by our government have been won by you, but these do not go far enough. We won’t rest until the UK has severed every link with Israel’s genocide. Thousands of us face the threat of terrorism charges. Others are in prison. There is no settlement economy, just the Israeli economy. Israel depends on trade with Britain. Britain still supplies Israel with F-35 bomber parts. We must fight for a total arms embargo and comprehensive sanctions against Israel. We’ll continue to build the widest possible movement.
There was a two-minutes silence for the 1000s killed in the genocide and those killed since 1948.
Fares Amer spoke on behalf of the Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB). Amer called on the UK government to immediately stop supporting Israeli military actions in Gaza. He emphasized global solidarity, stating that people of conscience are mobilizing across the world to stand up for justice, and reaffirmed the crowd's commitment to continue demonstrating until Palestine is free.
John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington, spoke next: Three years ago, when we had our first march, some of you may remember that the then leader of the Labour Party threatened any Labour MP that came on any of these marches. Well, a number of Labour MPs, including me, did, and we've spoken on every occasion. And then now we have Ed Miliband telling us we were right. Too bloody right - we were right! We were right all the way through. But words must be followed by actions. Yes, we welcome the sanctions on the West Bank Israeli settlers, but we want to see Israel totally isolated economically and politically. And when they threaten consulates in Jerusalem, we don't expect just a few token diplomats to be expelled. I want the Israeli ambassador kicked out of this country.
They ask us each time why we keep coming. I keep coming for three names. One is Dr. Husam Abu Safia, the consultant who refused to leave his patients in Gaza, and then the IDF imprisoned him. He's done over 500 days in prison. We're worried that he will not survive. I come for Dr. Mazen Al Rantisi, the doctor of the poor on the West Bank. He's been in prison since June, and we know his health is at serious risk. I come to secure their freedom, but I also come for a friend of mine, Fatema Rajwani. She's been in prison now over two years. Why? Because she sought to destroy the drones at Elbit Systems that were killing children. So, we'll be campaigning to secure their release, for the de-prescription of Palestine Action, and to ensure that we have a government that now recognizes that we were right.
Alex Kenny of the Stop the War Coalition announced that we had filled the whole route of the march.
Lindsey German, convener of Stop the War Coalition, told the crowd that we were part of a huge movement. This weekend there are 250 demonstrations taking place in 60 countries. Three years ago, we said Israel would make Gaza hell on earth and today Gazans are living in tents, starving and many are amputees. This is why we keep coming back. Ed Miliband now says we were right to demonstrate but it has taken the government three years to admit we’re right. If we’re right, why not stop arming Israel? Why not sanction products from the whole of Israel? All terrorist charges against pro-Palestinian activists should be dropped.
Zara Sultana, MP for Coventry South, accused the government of complicity in what she described as genocide, occupation and apartheid against Palestinians. She criticised the continued arms trade with Israel and the maintenance of diplomatic relations with its government. She said that the genocide continues despite a ceasefire. British pensioners are still being arrested for holding up placards. A genocide is being live streamed and yet when we speak out, they try to smear us. But we are on the right side of history. Demanding equal rights for Palestinians and opposing genocide and apartheid is not antisemitism.
Dr Ismail Patel of Friends of Al-Aqsa described 1096 days of horror but said Gaza would not be erased. Israel has tried to turn names into numbers, but we remember the names of Hind Rajab, killed by 335 bullets in a car alongside her family; the poet and professor of literature Refaat Alareer who wrote the poem If I must die…; 19-year-old Shaban al-Dalou, who was connected to an IV drip and was burned alive in a tent along with his mother outside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah. In Gaza homes have become graves and hospitals killing grounds. In the West Bank settlers burn down olive groves while the IDF looks on and does nothing. Worshipers at the Al-Aqsa mosque are beaten. But Keir Starmer, who said that Israel had the right to cut off the water supply in Gaza, is no longer in power. Israel and its cheerleaders are counting on our exhaustion, but our solidarity cannot be extinguished.
Yasmine Adam of the Moslem Association of Britain described the mass funeral in Gaza last week of the remains of 105 people who have been denied the dignity of a funeral for three years. The ceasefire meant the killing had to stop and yet Palestinians have been killed queuing for food and buried alive. We march for those under the rubble whose families have dug them out with their bare hands. They have been killed because of decisions made in capitals like this one. Today across the globe people are marching - in South Africa, Spain, Canada and elsewhere. This is the largest anti-genocide movement in history. We refuse to stay silent. It’s the moral line of our generation. Palestinian lives are not expendable.
Hala Hanina, a Palestinian activist from Gaza, tells the crowd that the dress she is wearing is the dress she wore on her wedding day. The embroidery on her dress tells the history of her family, the story of their village. She has heard that the photographer Mohammed, who took her wedding photo and captured the happiest day of her life, was killed when queuing for flour. He had gone out to search for food to keep his family alive. This is the first time she has worn her dress since she heard the news. She is wearing it for all the doctors, teachers and children that Israel has killed to show that Palestinian existence and culture can’t be erased. Look at the embroidery, my wedding, our history, hear our songs. We existed before 1948 and we won’t be erased. The occupation existed before Netanyahu. We need to find the root cause of our suffering. It is Zionism. My grandparents were expelled from their village in 1948. Using the word racism may hurt people’s feelings but it’s the least way to describe what we’ve been through. People say ‘now is not the right time, wait till when…’ We’ve waited 100 years. If we wait any longer, we’ll be erased. How many more Mohammeds have to be killed? Zionism is terrorism. No one can be free until Palestine is free.
Jeremy Corbyn MP thanked us for never giving up and thanked the organisations that have got behind this movement. Netanyahu got up to speak at the UN General Assembly and half of the delegates walked out. This shows how out of step are the US and UK with this global movement. Israel is at war with all of its neighbours. In the past three years Israel has bombed 100,000 targets in neighbouring countries, 73,000 in Gaza. Israel is a rogue state of the first order. Ed Miliband’s statement was small, but he only made it because of our marches. He said that the UK government insists that all countries abide by international law. The ICJ states that any country that provides weapons to a country committing a genocide is complicit in that genocide. It’s time for the UK government to accept that a genocide is taking place and yet the UK is still cooperating with Israel on security and intelligence. Israel is enforcing the ultra-Zionist project of expelling all Palestinians. The media tries to divert attention away from Gaza. True adherence to international law requires a complete halt to UK arms sales, military cooperation, and complicity with Israel. We’re all here as long as it takes for Palestinians to live in freedom and justice.
The next speaker was Sukaina Rajwani, mother of Fatema Zainab Rajwani, a 21-year-old Palestine Action activist who was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison under British anti-terror legislation following a protest at an Elbit Systems weapons factory. She said that the Filton 25 were arrested for trying to stop the genocide that the government has failed to do. My daughter Fatema has been sentenced as a terrorist with no terror offences committed. A case of property damage has been upgraded to terrorism. The sniper drones made by Elbit Systems are used after a bombing raid to annihilate survivors. The quadcopters imitate the sounds of babies crying to draw people out to help. Then they are shot by the drones. The new film NAZA shows how the Israeli military operates these killer drones like playing a video game. The Filton 25 found drone controllers in the factory they were indistinguishable from Xbox controllers.
Britain is locking up activists and re-writing history to de-justify pro-Palestine protests as criminal acts and to turn direct action and saving lives into terrorism. We have submitted an appeal to challenge the unprecedented sentencing of members of the Filton 25. We are awaiting our hearing at the court of appeal. Today I invite all of you to join us outside the court to stand in solidarity against government oppression. Details will be shared on the Free the Filton 5 social media networks.
Anas Altikriti, secretary-general of the Global Alliance, is organiser of this global Day of Action spanning six continents. He told us that just after midnight the first protest had begun in New Zealand and so it went on with people all over the world hitting the streets in solidarity with Gaza.
Dora Fidler, representative of the Jewish bloc, the UK’s movement of Jews committed to fighting for the liberation of and justice for Palestine, told the crowd: Most recently members of our movement embarked on a campaign to end the sale of stolen Palestinian land in the UK. On the 14th of June this year activists from Jewish Anti-Zionist Action infiltrated the great Israeli real estate event at Edgware United Synagogue where they found evidence that illegally occupied land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was being marketed and sold. This evidence reinforced what we already knew: that the Nakba never ended and is now being hidden under the guise of bureaucracy and normality facilitated by shiny-eyed real estate agents. The original keys to the houses they can never return to burn hot and heavy in the pockets of Palestinians in refugee camps in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon and throughout the diaspora.
Meanwhile, new sets of keys to the latest Anglo neighbourhood in the north of Jerusalem or sea view apartments with large windows are offered to British citizens in places like Edgware United Synagogue, a desecration of a holy site and a stain on the history of our religion rooted in the tradition of love and care for all, particularly the oppressed. And therefore, it is imperative that all such events are cancelled, all people complicit are prosecuted and that the charity statuses of groups such as the Jewish National Fund is revoked.
We must also remind ourselves that all the properties being sold at the real estate fair, beyond the Green Line or not, illegal or not, settlements or not, is stolen Palestinian land stolen from 1948, 1967 or 2026.
Three years into the genocide it’s far beyond the point where general acts of solidarity are enough and that’s why we’re developing targeted and strategic actions and campaigns such as this one. We already see outcomes, both legal and fiscal from these campaigns, most notably in Ed Miliband’s announcement of sanctions on settlement goods imported from the West Bank into the UK. This is something we received with relief but in the full knowledge that it is not enough.
Khalid Abdalla, actor, spoke of three years of genocide. It’s hard to stand here and not to return to where we were three years ago. Three years ago today on October 10, 2023, the official death toll of Palestinians killed in Gaza was 900. A week later it was 3,000. A month later it was 11,078. By the time the ICJ gave its judgement of plausible genocide on January 26 it was 26,083. When Keir Stamer came to power in July 2024 it was 38,069. And by the time Ed Miliband stood on stage at the Labour Party conference and told us we were right the official death toll had almost doubled to over 74,000 that we all know is probably much higher.
But I want to take us back to that first week. Some of the very first calls of genocide came from Palestinian human rights defenders in Gaza on October 9. By October 13, Raz Segal had written and published in Jewish Currents his now famous article, A Textbook Case of Genocide. Two days later, 800 scholars issued a joint warning alongside him, but here we are.
The question for us all today is not just what world were we in then, but what does it tell us about how to look at the world we’re in now? Genocides don’t come out of nowhere. They are the result of decades of systematic dehumanisation and how that manifests in government institutions and structures of power. Being told we are right is only important in so far as it signals the beginning of a change in the political sphere and that is significant and welcome. A dam has burst because of the courage of our movement but the reason we are here is to stop the killing and work for a world in which a free Palestine means something tangible to the lives of Palestinians living under the brutality of Israeli occupation and apartheid. As Rasha Abu Jalal, a Gazan journalist and mother, recently said, the hardest thing is to be expected to continue as if nothing has happened. The international community might accept the idea of a ceasefire, but what does that word mean when a mother cannot answer a simple question? Can I guarantee my children will be alive in the morning?
The status quo is not just the 1,460 people have been killed in the last year. It is not just that two-thirds of people in Gaza are living in tents or that medical supplies are still not being let in. It is that the culture around us is enabling the genocide and apartheid to continue, treating it as taboo to name the root cause an ideology, which is Zionism, not Netanyahu, but the racism of an idea which at its simplest is about creating a state for Jewish people only on a land that requires the dispossession and murder of Palestinians for generations. Is there any other situation in which the supremacy of one religious group over another people would not be called out for what it is? So many great Jewish traditions and figures saw the colonial and racial injustice at the heart of Zionism right from the beginning in the 19th century. Their inheritors are with us here today, at the heart of this movement, as we just heard. There would have been no Nakba just as there would have been no genocide without the idea that it is somehow legitimate to push people out of their homeland because of a distant ancestral claim or a proclaimed right to self-determination on a land in which, when the Balfour declaration was signed in 1917, over 90% of the people were Palestinian Arabs – Muslim and Christian.
If reckoning with a motion by the Green Party is more important to you than reckoning with the history of the Nakba all the way through to this genocide, then there is a hierarchy in your concern for the human life. This hierarchy is putting the feelings of those who still believe in the legitimacy of Israel’s origin story, and the ideology that underpins it, over the brutal reality of what it has meant for Palestinians generation after generation, day by day. To honour the Holocaust is not to use it to justify the dispossession and murder of another people who matter less to you but to build a world of equal rights in which ‘never again’ means never again for anyone and the Nakba is acknowledged as an ongoing crime. Don’t let anyone ever tell you what you do doesn’t matter! Continue to stand on the right side of history even when it’s hardest. The movement for a free Palestine is changing the world.
The next speaker was Zainab Kamal, a speaker for the Red Ribbons Campaign, a global human rights initiative focused on raising public awareness and showing solidarity with Palestinian prisoners and hostages detained by Israel. We stand here united by a simple demand: free the Palestinian hostages, bring them home, let them live in freedom and dignity. The Red Ribbon Campaign refuses to let the world forget the 1000s of Palestinians held behind Israeli prison walls, separated from their families and their homeland. Today around 9,400 hostages remain in Israeli prisons. Thousands are held without charge or trial, hundreds are children, dozens are women. Among the detained are doctors, journalists, people whose voices the world needs to hear. Behind every number is a human being; a mother waiting for her child, a child waiting for their father, a family living with fear and uncertainty. And from behind those prison walls come reports of beatings and degrading treatment in inhumane conditions that demand urgent investigation and accountability. No human being should be stripped of their dignity. No child should have to endure the terror of detention. No hostage should be beyond the protection of international law. We are alarmed by Israel’s new death penalty, a law that is discriminatory. We demand an end to policies that place Palestinian lives and rights under a different standard of justice. And where is the International Committee of the Red Cross? Its access to Palestinian hostages has been blocked since October 2023. We demand immediate access, independent monitoring and answers about the fate and whereabouts of those detainees. And to the British government we say we are tired of your inaction. Palestinians want diplomatic power. We want the UK to apply meaningful and political pressure. We want the UK to end its complicity in violations of international law. We demand access to every hostage, accountability for abuse and the release of those arbitrarily detained. Do not let words of concern become an excuse for inaction.
Other speakers were: Sophie Bolt (General Secretary of CND) Ben Jamal (Palestine Solidarity Campaign), Chris Nineham (Stop the War Coalition), Juliet Stevenson, and Yanis Varoufakis.