Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said the hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in support of Palestine were taking part in “hate marches”.
She urged officers to take a “zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism” after attending an emergency Cobra meeting chaired by Rishi Sunak on Monday.
The Prime Minister told police and the security agencies to conduct tabletop exercises simulating responses to counter-terror or public order scenarios, a Downing Street source said.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley warned on Sunday that terrorism is being “accelerated” by events in the Middle East, as he raised concerns about “state threats from Iran”.
Speaking after the Cobra meeting in Whitehall, Ms Braverman agreed with the view of the UK’s most senior officer but indicated the terror threat level was not being hiked yet.
She told broadcasters that the Joint Threat Assessment Centre that determines the level “has maintained its assessment to date”.
But she struck out at the marches that have been taking place across the UK in support of the Palestinian people as Gaza is besieged by Israel and coming under aerial bombardment.
“We’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets following the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map,” she said.
“To my mind there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches.”
