The Filton 24 have spent a year in prison without trial.

A guest blog by Catherine Fish

While men, women and children have been killed in Gaza”and a genocide unfolds, activists who tried to halt the British cog in the Israeli war machine were arrested over a year ago under the Terrorism Act, but after over a year remaining in custody, have not been tried under that Act. Serving a long sentence before being even tried cannot be fair, reasonable or even rational.

The Filton 24 were initially arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act (2000) for a week. Now they have been in custody for over a year, and most of the Filton 24 are set to be imprisoned for more than two years before trial, over the alleged causing £1 million of criminal damage to an Elbit Systems site.  This is well over the pre-trial legal custody time limit of six months.  Despite draconian conditions in which they are held, these people are all calling for the focus of rage, and despair, and our efforts for justice to be the suffering people of Gaza,  for whom they took the actions, rather than on themselves.

On Saturday, relatives and supporters of the group gathered in the park outside the Imperial War Museum in London for speeches, poems and to show support for their loved ones and for the people of Gaza in the ongoing genocide.

I was very privileged to steward at that event, where family members had space to share and reflect that each of the Filton 24 is a daughter, son, partner or loved one.(see attached pictures)  Messages of solidarity were profound and moving, as were the messages from the prisoners, read out by their loved ones saying that when their grandchildren ask what they did to stop the genocide in Gaza, they will be able to reply.

As a Filton 24 spokesperson said: “Our lives have been turned upside down by the imprisonment of our loved ones and we miss them constantly. 

“Why does this government value the property of an Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, over the rights and freedom of its own citizens?”

I came away from the event determined to do more to expose the injustice that leads our government to prop up a killing machine, through arms factories even in my home city of Sheffield, while disallowing  free speech and protest, and legislating suppression but calling it “security”.

We can all keep on speaking out for dignity and decency for all, and against the production of drones and missiles on UK soil to be sent to Israel to kill thousands of innocents. We should not rest until we see a whole arms embargo on Israel.