UK's Shabana Mahmood approves police request to ban pro-Palestine Al-Quds Day march

The British home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has approved a request by the Metropolitan Police to ban this year's Al-Quds Day protest in London.

Mahmood cited the threat to public disorder in a post she made on social media platform X on Wednesday.

The Al-Quds Day event was first held in Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and is billed as a global day of solidarity in support of Palestine.

This year's event comes amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, which has prompted pro-war and anti-war protests in western capitals.

Justifying her reasons for banning the march, Mahmood wrote: "I am satisfied doing so is necessary to prevent serious public disorder, due to the scale of the protest and multiple counter-protests, in the context of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

"Should a stationary demonstration proceed, the police will be able to apply strict conditions. 

"I expect to see the full force of the law applied to anyone spreading hatred and division instead of exercising their right to peaceful protest."

Responding to the decision to ban the march, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which organises Al Quds Day protests in the UK, said it "strongly condemns the decision by the Metropolitan Police to ban the Al Quds Day March". 

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It added: "If it was not clear already, the police have brazenly abandoned their sworn principle of policing without fear or favour, and have capitulated to the pressure of the Zionist lobby."

The group said that it was taking legal advice and that a static protest, which has not been proscribed, will proceed on 15 March.

This year's protest is set to take place just a fortnight after the start of the war on Iran, which began with the assassination of the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and the bombing of a school in the southern Iranian city of Minab, which killed at least 180 people, the vast majority of them schoolchildren.

Mahmood's cabinet colleague, the Courts Minister Sarah Sackman, refused to describe the latter attack as a war crime, calling it the "realities of war".

"I'm not going to speculate on whether this is a war crime, but what it is is a war, and in that context devastating things can happen," Sackman told Sky News.