MPs banned Palestine Action while doctors told parliament of Gaza horrors
Vote to proscribe direct action group came as medics a few corridors away spoke of the Gaza healthcare system’s collapse under Israeli bombing
As MPs voted to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation on Wednesday night, their colleagues at a parliamentary briefing a few corridors away heard harrowing first-hand testimony from doctors about how Israel’s bombardment has driven Gaza’s healthcare system to collapse.
The draft order to amend the Terrorism Act 2000 and outlaw the activist group, alongside two unrelated far-right organisations, passed the Commons by 385 votes to 26. The House of Lords is due to vote on the order on Thursday and, if passed, it could become law within days — making it a criminal offence to be a member or to “invite or recklessly express support” for Palestine Action, which uses direct action to target those it calls the “corporate enablers of the Israeli military-industrial complex”.
The briefing, organised by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians and the Labour Muslim Network (LMN), saw three doctors give evidence to a committee room containing at least two MPs as well as councillors, activists and members of the public. Between them, the doctors have made six recent trips to Gaza to volunteer at the strip’s crumbling hospitals.
Dr Goher Rahbour is an NHS consultant and general surgeon who completed a volunteer medical mission to Gaza’s Nasser hospital from May to June 2025 with Medical Aid for Palestine.
Of his time there, he told the briefing: “Mass casualty events just kept happening. Mass casualty. It is raw. There is anger. There is copious blood on the floor. Children dead on arrival. Children with limbs gone, bullets, shrapnel, suffering. There is no availability of painkillers.”
He added: “In one of the cases, the surgeon I operated with, his cousin had died in a mass casualty event that day. He had buried him the same day and then came back to operate. That is resilience.
“A woman in her early 30s, 24 weeks pregnant, she had been shot while lying in a tent … she needed a hysterectomy, removal of the uterus, so not only has she lost a 24 weeks foetus which had been killed, she would never be able to have any more children.”
Dr Victoria Rose is an NHS surgeon who completed three volunteer medical missions in Gaza in March and August 2024 and May 2025. “This time,” she said, “in May, I have operated on more children than I’ve ever operated on in the NHS in one month [than] in 30 years [working for the NHS].”
Ali Milani, LMN’s national chair, said it was “particularly ironic” the doctors were relaying these tragedies while MPs were in the process of banning Palestine Action — a move that came after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire last month and vandalised two planes.
“The only conversation happening around Palestine right now in this house is proscribing protest groups as terrorist organisations,” he said. “I think that irony is something that we can all reflect on.”
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Dr James Smith, an emergency physician and lecturer in humanitarian policy and practice at UCL, who completed medical missions in Gaza in January and June of 2024, added: “If MPs don’t have the power, and if we’re proscribing the actionists on the streets, then what’s left? I really don’t know what’s left at this point.”
Asked what she made of MPs focusing on proscribing Palestine Action, Labour MP Abtisam Mohamed — who hosted the event — said: “It’s not the right time to be having these discussions.
“I agree with our speakers that what we should be focusing on is pushing for an end to the violence there. This is what Palestinians need to see. That’s what they want to see us working on as parliamentarians.”
Security minister Dan Jarvis told MPs on Wednesday: “The attack at Brize Norton on 20 June has understandably provoked shock and anger in this House and across the country, but it was just the latest episode in Palestine Action’s long history of harmful activity. It has orchestrated a nationwide campaign of attacks that have resulted in serious damage to property and crossed the threshold between direct criminal action and terrorism.”
