An intelligence assessment before Palestine Action was banned under anti-terrorism laws found that the vast majority of its activities were lawful, a court has heard.

Raza Husain KC, appearing for Huda Ammori, a co-founder of the group, said Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe the group on 5 July was “repugnant” and an “authoritarian and blatant abuse of power”.

In written submissions for Monday’s high court hearing, Husain and Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC said: “On ‘nature and scale’, the home secretary accepts that only three of Palestine Action’s at least 385 actions would meet the statutory definition of terrorism (… itself a dubious assessment).”

Husain said it was for the court to consider “whether that’s sufficient or whether it’s de minimis (too small to be meaningful) for a group that’s been going for five years”.

He added that the vast majority of the group’s actions were assessed by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre to be lawful.

Challenging the ban on the grounds that it contravened freedom of expression and assembly under the European convention on human rights, Ní Ghrálaigh said the proscription had already had a significant impact. “Dozens and dozens of people have been arrested for protesting, seated and mostly silent protest,” she added.

Among the cases she highlighted were protesters near the BAE Systems factory in Samlesbury, Lancashire, who were stopped by police who asked them to remove shirts reading “Free Palestine” because they might have breached the proscription order.

She said a man in Leeds was arrested for carrying a placard reproducing a graphic from Private Eye magazine, which said: “Unacceptable Palestine Action: spraying military planes. Acceptable Palestine Action: shooting Palestinians queueing for food.”

Ní Ghrálaigh said Merseyside police had bailed someone on condition they did not “mention” Palestine. Merseyside police said later that no such bail condition had been imposed, only one to refrain from activity related to Palestine Action.

Ní Ghrálaigh also highlighted the case of Laura Murton, first reported by the Guardian, who was threatened with arrest by armed police for supporting a proscribed organisation because she was holding a Palestinian flag and had signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”.

Mr Justice Chamberlain said in response: “This is obviously an officer that doesn’t understand the law at all.”

Ní Ghrálaigh pointed out that Kent police had not apologised.

Ammori’s lawyers said the timing of the ban indicated that “national security risk was not a material factor” and was secondary to “political considerations”.

Although a review body recommended banning Palestine Action on 13 March, Husain and Ní Ghrálaigh said Foreign Office memos had advised “against moving to implement a decision to proscribe quickly”. This was because proscription might be received poorly domestically and abroad if implemented shortly after Israel’s resumption of military action in Gaza.

Sir James Eadie KC, representing the Home Office, accepted it was true that most of Palestine Action’s activities were not terrorism but said: “The incidents are serious and they’re escalating.”

He focused almost exclusively on process, telling the court in written submissions: “Parliament has prescribed the alternative and appropriate remedy namely an appeal to POAC (Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission) as the appropriate mechanism for challenging proscription; POAC’s procedures are better suited to such a challenge; and there is no good reason for going behind that process in the present case.”

Chamberlain said he would give his decision on 30 July on whether to grant Ammori permission for a judicial review.

Israel has bombed warehousing and staff accommodation in Gaza belonging to the World Health Organization amid intensifying international horror at its continuing attacks on starving civilians and on humanitarian efforts in the devastated Palestinian territory.

The airstrikes, which struck the UN global health agency’s facilities in Deir al-Balah – the focus of a recent offensive by the Israeli military – came as Israel cancelled the work visa of Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) inside Gaza and the most senior UN aid official in the coastal strip.

Hours after a hard-hitting joint statement on Monday by 27 western countries including the UK, France, Australia and Canada harshly criticising Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid and calling for an immediate end to the war, the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, warned that the “last lifelines keeping people alive [in Gaza] are collapsing”, adding that humanitarian efforts were “being impeded, undermined and endangered”.

View image in fullscreen Smoke rises as displaced Palestinian walk with their belongings in the aftermath of an Israeli military operation in Deir al-Balah. Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters

He said he “deplored the growing reports of children and adults suffering from malnutrition” as health officials in Gaza reported a further 15 deaths from malnutrition in the previous 24 hours, including four children.

The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, on Tuesday amplified that message in an interview with the BBC, describing himself as “appalled [and] sickened” by what was happening in Gaza.

“These are not words that are usually used by a foreign secretary who is attempting to be diplomatic,” Lammy said. “But when you see innocent children holding out their hand for food, and you see them shot and killed in the way that we have seen in the last few days, of course Britain must call it out.”

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, also said on Tuesday that she had told the Israeli foreign minister that Israel’s military “must stop” killing civilians at aid distribution points in Gaza.

“The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible. I spoke again with Gideon Saar to recall our understanding on aid flow and made clear that IDF [Israel Defense Forces] must stop killing people at distribution points,” she wrote on X.

Graphically underlining the scale of the intensifying humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the head of the UN’s main agency for Palestinians, Unrwa, said on Tuesday that more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces in recent weeks as they sought food aid, describing Gaza as a “hell on earth”.

Philippe Lazzarini said Unrwa’s own staff, as well as doctors and humanitarian workers, were fainting on duty due to hunger and exhaustion as Israel limited access to life-saving humanitarian aid, and that many were surviving on a single small meal a day.

“Caretakers, including Unrwa colleagues in Gaza, are also in need of care now, doctors, nurses, journalists, humanitarians, among them Unrwa staff, are hungry. Many are now fainting due to hunger and exhaustion while performing their duties,” he said in a statement at a media briefing in Geneva.

The UN World Food Programme on Monday said its assessments showed a quarter of the population of Gaza was facing “famine-like” conditions and almost 100,000 women and children were suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

View image in fullscreen Displaced Palestinians inspect shelters damaged during the Israeli military operation. Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters

Separately, the Roman Catholic church’s most senior cleric in the Holy Land said the humanitarian situation in Gaza was “morally unacceptable”, after visiting the wartorn Palestinian territory.

“We have seen men holding out in the sun for hours in the hope of a simple meal,” Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, told a news conference: “It’s morally unacceptable and unjustified.”

Despite the high-profile criticism in recent days, aid agencies have criticised the lack of meaningful action by the governments who signed the joint statement, including the UK, against Israel.

Kristyan Benedict, of Amnesty International UK, said the British government’s “failure to take robust measures to prevent genocide is no accident”, adding that “as a state party to the genocide convention, the UK has a legal duty to prevent and punish genocide – a duty it is failing miserably to uphold”.

The growing international furore came as Israeli troops pushed into the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where a number of international aid organisations are based, in what appeared to be the latest effort to carve up the Palestinian territory with military corridors.

Deir al-Balah is the only Gaza city that has not experienced major ground operations or suffered widespread devastation in 21 months of war, leading to speculation that the Hamas militant group holds large numbers of hostages there.

Israel says the seizure of territory in Gaza is aimed at pressuring Hamas to release hostages, but it is a major point of contention in ongoing ceasefire talks. However, the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza comes amid fears that its ultimate aim is to expel large parts of its population of more than 2 million by making the territory uninhabitable.

Israel justified its cancellation of Whittall’s visa on the alleged grounds of anti-Israel bias. In a statement, Ocha defended its local head’s strong remarks when describing what he was seeing in Gaza.

“Speaking about conditions we see on the ground is a core element of Ocha’s mandate,” the agency said. “Attempts to silence us are not new, but threats of reduced access to the civilians we’re trying to serve are intensifying.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has condemned what it described as a “blatant attack” on its facilities and staff in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah on Monday.

The international organisation said Israeli forces attacked its staff residence and main warehouse, causing extensive damage, endangering the lives of civilians and severely hampering its humanitarian response in the Strip.

The staff residence and the families living there were subject to three separate attacks, one of which caused a fire and extensive damage, according to the WHO.

Israeli forces also stormed the building during the shelling, forcing women and children to leave on foot towards al-Mawasi, a coastal area that Israel has declared a safe zone.

The statement added that Israeli soldiers tied up male crew members and their families, stripped them naked, and interrogated them at gunpoint.

“Two WHO staff and two of family members were detained. They were later released, while one staff remains in detention,” it said.

UN teams evacuated 32 WHO staff members and their families to the WHO office in Deir al-Balah once access was possible, the statement said.

Key warehouse bombed and looted

The WHO confirmed that its main warehouse in Deir al-Balah, located in an area subject to an Israeli evacuation order, was attacked, resulting in explosions and a fire.

The facility was then looted by desperate locals.

The loss of this vital stockpile, coupled with severe shortages of medicines, equipment and fuel, threatens a near total collapse of Gaza’s health sector.

The WHO demanded the immediate release of its detained staff member and the safety of its staff deployed at more than 50 sites in Deir al-Balah, the coordinates of which had previously been shared with the Israeli military.

It described the attacks as “compromising our ability to operate in Gaza and pushing the health system further towards collapse.”

The WHO pointed out that it is “the lead agency for health” and attacks on its facilities are “crippling the entire health response in Gaza.”

The statement closed with: “A ceasefire is not just necessary, it is overdue.”

Illumination flares launched by the Israeli army are seen over Deir al-Balah, 21 July, 2025 (Illumination flares launched by the Israeli army are seen over Deir al-Balah, 21 July, 2025)

IDF operations escalate

Meanwhile, Israeli forces continue to carry out the first large-scale ground operation in Deir al-Balah since the start of the war with Hamas more than 21 months ago, causing the displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians amid warnings of a severe hunger crisis in the Gaza Strip.

On Sunday, the IDF ordered the immediate evacuation of six blocks in southern Deir al-Balah, warning that it would act “with great force to destroy the enemy’s capabilities and terrorist infrastructure,” directing an estimated 50,000-80,000 residents to head towards the al-Mawasi safe zone in southern Gaza.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) confirmed that the organisation’s staff will remain in Deir al-Balah despite the evacuation orders and are deployed in dozens of locations whose coordinates have already been provided to Israel.

In Gaza, being a helpful, loving child can be a death sentence. Heba al-Ghussain’s nine-year-old son, Karam, was killed by an Israeli airstrike because he went to fetch water for the family, and her 10-year-old daughter, Lulu, was killed because she went to give Karam a hand.

The siblings were waiting beside a water distribution station, holding jerry cans and buckets, when it was bombed last Sunday, killing six children and four adults and injuring 19 others, mostly children.

Both Lulu and Karam died instantly, torn apart by the force of the blast and so disfigured that their father prevented Heba from seeing their bodies.

“They didn’t allow me to say goodbye or even look at them one last time,” she said. “One of my brothers hugged me, trying to block the scene from me as he cried and tried to comfort me. After that, I don’t remember anything. I lost touch with reality.”

0:22 Father grieves over bodies of children killed in airstrike – video

Lulu’s real name was Lana but her parents rarely used it because her nickname, which means pearl, captured the gentle shine she brought to family life. “She had such a joyful personality, and a heart full of kindness,” Heba said.

Karam was smart, always top of his class until Israeli attacks shut down Gaza’s schools, generous and mature beyond his years. His dad, Ashraf al-Ghussain, called him “abu sharik” or “my partner”, because he seemed “like a man in spirit”.

But he was also enough of a child to be obsessed by a remote-controlled car that he begged his mother to buy. She regrets telling him they needed to save money for food. “I wish I had spent everything I had to buy it for him so he could have played with it before he died.”

View image in fullscreen Lulu al-Ghussain (left) with her elder sister. Photograph: Supplied

Both children also dreamed of the day Israel would lift its blockade of Gaza, so they could taste chocolate, instant noodles and their mum’s best dishes. For Lulu that was the Palestinian chicken dish musakhan, for Karam, shawarma. “They had all kinds of food plans for me to prepare,” Heba said.

Israel imposed a total siege for 11 weeks starting in March that brought Gaza to the brink of famine, and the very limited food, fuel and medical supplies allowed in since May have not relieved extreme hunger.

Unprecedented malnutrition is killing children, and preventing injured people recovering, a British doctor working there said this week.

Trying to get food has been a deadly gamble for months, with more than 800 people killed since late May in near daily attacks by Israeli soldiers using weapons including tank shells and navy cannon to target desperate crowds near food distribution points.

Trying to get clean water is also a struggle. Nearly two years of Israeli attacks have destroyed water treatment plants and pipe networks. In June Unicef warned that Gaza faces a human-made drought and that without fuel to operate remaining stations children could start dying of thirst.

But until Sunday, there had not been any mass killings of people trying to collect water. The al-Ghussains sent their children to collect supplies for the family because they thought it was less dangerous than searching for food.

View image in fullscreen Children wait to fill water bottles at a distribution point in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Aid groups brought water in trucks to fill tanks at a water distribution station just a few streets away from the school where the family sought shelter after their own home was bombed. Karam would wait there in the sweltering heat for his turn at taps that often ran dry.

“I had no choice but to send them,” Heba said. “Many times, my son would go and wait for his turn, sometimes for an hour, only to end up with nothing because the water would run out before it reached everyone.”

When he did get water, it was only 20 litres, very little for a family of seven but a heavy weight for a young boy. “Karam was only nine years old and braver than dozens of men. He carried it without tiring or complaining.”

View image in fullscreen Karam al-Ghussain. Photograph: Supplied

The long queues meant that Heba was not too worried when she heard the water station was hit. Her son left home not long before the bombing, so she assumed he would still have been at the back of a waiting crowd, some distance from the blast.

As it turned out the queue was relatively small when he arrived, a stroke of fatally bad luck that probably delighted Karam in his last few minutes. It meant that when the bomb hit, he and his sister were right beside water station.

“When Lulu woke up, I told her to go help her brother carry the water containers. It was as if the missile was waiting for her to arrive to strike that place,” Heba said.

Ali Abu Zaid, 36, was one of the first on the scene, rushing to help survivors. As the dust and smoke cleared they revealed a horrific tableau.

“Each child was holding a water bucket, lying dead in place, covered in their own blood. The shrapnel had torn through their small bodies and disfigured their faces. The smell of gunpowder filled the area,” he said.

People started loading the dead and injured on to donkey carts, as medical teams were slow to arrive, but there was nothing doctors could do for most of the victims.

“Even if the ambulances had got there sooner, it wouldn’t have made a difference. There was no saving anyone, these were lifeless bodies, completely shattered.”

View image in fullscreen The aftermath of the airstrike on the water distribution point in Nuseirat. Photograph: Reuters

Ashraf raced to look for his children as soon as he heard the blast, but arrived after their bodies had been taken away to find only blood-stained water containers scattered on the street, and a terrifying silence.

So he headed to hospital to continue the search, where he found their battered bodies laid out on the floor, and collapsed over them in grief. He married in his 30s, late for Gaza, and when his children arrived they became his world. Karam and Lulu’s brutal deaths have shattered him.

“When I saw them like that, I felt as if my heart was being stabbed with knives,” he said. “I’m still in shock. I’ve become constantly afraid of losing the rest of my family and being left alone. I feel as if I’m going to lose my mind.”

View image in fullscreen Lulu (left) and Karam (right) with their father, Ashraf al-Ghussain, and their two other siblings. Photograph: Supplied

Heba also went to look for Lulu and Karam at the water station but then headed back to the shelter, hoping to find them waiting with their dad. Perhaps she had learned a kind of grim optimism from previous brushes with death.

The siblings had been rescued from the rubble of their home when an airstrike brought it down on top of them earlier in the war, and survived injuries after another bomb hit nearby. That streak would not last. “They survived twice, but not the third time,” Heba said.

Word of the children’s fate had reached the school, but even in Gaza, where no family has escaped tragedy, the scale of Heba’s loss was shocking.

“The news of their martyrdom was already spreading, but no one told me,” she said. “No one dared to deliver such terrible news.” Instead they encouraged her to go look for them among the injured in al-Awda hospital.

There she found her husband, and the shattered bodies of their beloved son and daughter, so full of life just a couple of hours earlier.

Israel’s military blamed the strike on a “malfunction” that caused a bomb targeting a militant to fall short and hit the children, and said it was examining the incident.

View image in fullscreen Abandoned water bottles where Karam and Lulu were killed. Photograph: Reuters

Ashraf questioned this. “They have the most advanced technology and know exactly where the missile will fall and who the target is. How could this be a mistake? A ‘mistake’ that killed both of my children!”

The family couldn’t afford a burial plot for the children, so they interred them beside Heba’s father. They worry they may have to reopen the grave again for the youngest of their three surviving children if aid to civilians does not increase. At 18 months, Ghina is malnourished and has skin rashes because the family cannot afford nappies and don’t have enough water to wash her.

“We sleep hungry and wake up hungry, and thirsty, too, with the desalination stations barely operating,” Heba said. “The entire world sees everything, yet they close their eyes as if they don’t.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has received multiple death threats and her head office was vandalized by anti-Israel supporters over the weekend.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Bronx office was smeared in red paint Sunday and activists placed a placard on the building that read: “AOC FUNDS GENOCIDE IN GAZA,” her campaign office said.

“Last night, our campaign office in the Bronx was vandalized and we are in the process of cleaning it up,” said campaign manager Oliver Hidalgo-Wohlleben in a post on X. “In the past few days, we also have received multiple threats on the Congresswoman’s life and we are treating this seriously with our security partners to make sure she, our staff, and volunteers are safe.”

The New York Police Department said the incident was under investigation and no arrests have been made.

The vandalism came days after Ocasio-Cortez voted against an amendment put forward by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Friday that would have stripped $500 million in funding for Israel’s missile defense systems.

Ocasio-Cortez has been a consistent voice against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and criticized Greene’s amendment for doing “nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of U.S. munitions” in the war-torn region.

“What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

The Democratic Socialists of America condemned the congresswoman’s vote in a statement released Friday.

Ocasio-Cortez voted against an amendment put forward by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that would have stripped $500 million funding for Israel’s missile defense systems. (Getty Images)

“The fact that Representative Ocasio-Cortez acknowledges that Israel is carrying out this genocide makes her support for military aid all the more disappointing and incongruous,” the group said. “We urge the representative to continue voting against the Iron Dome, whether it is part of a larger defense spending bill or as a stand-alone bill.”

Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid was among those who came to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense. “She has one of the strongest pro-Palestinian voting records in Congress. It’s fair to debate strategy and disagreement over specific choices–but vandalizing her office and saying @AOC “funds genocide” isn’t just wrong,” Shahid wrote in a post on X.

“It’s reckless, dishonest, misleading, and deeply unserious.”