How Israeli Atrocities Fueled Palestine Action

By Dania Akkad and Phil Miller  –  Jul 16, 2026 

“A stray dog with a toddler’s arm,” was one of the Israeli atrocities that women in the Palestine Action case told the Old Bailey jury, report Dania Akkad and Phil Miller.

Two women have told a court how they felt compelled to join the Palestine Action protest group after watching “a live-streamed genocide” of Israeli attacks in Gaza.

“I would see mothers scrape up tiny pieces of their children,” 53-year-old Hannah Davidson told jurors at the Old Bailey this week. “I saw a stray dog with a toddler’s arm in its mouth.”

Co-defendant Teuta ‘T’ Hoxha, a 30-year-old care worker, said she watched a video of a Palestinian father carrying two bags.

“He was wailing. It was the type of wail that comes from the soul. What he was saying was, ‘I have my son in these plastic bags’, and that devastated me.

It was the realisation that if a state wants to exterminate people and it’s in the interests … of another state to collude, they will.”

Both women were motivated to join Palestine Action after watching graphic videos from Gaza, but deny organising a raid on an Israeli-owned arms factory in Filton, Bristol, in August 2024.

Hoxha and Davidson are among eight defendants accused of helping plan the raid. Both women are charged with violent disorder and criminal damage, which they deny.

“The majority of the British public were calling for a ceasefire,” Hoxha said. “An end to genocide was paramount.”

Asked by her lawyer Raj Chada whether that would involve using “any means necessary,” she replied,

“No. By ‘any means necessary’- I’d take that to mean Elbit, whose sniper drones target doctors going to treat families.”

She said Palestine Action “had done hundreds of actions and my understanding was there had never been any violence.”

The group’s aim was to “destruct the arms trade flowing from here in the U.K. to Gaza.” Hoxha knew there was a “risk of ending up in prison and people were willing to sacrifice their freedoms to make sure children ended up staying alive.”

Davidson, an artist, said prior to the incident she had handed in her notice at her job and struggled to sell her art while “in tears for hours and hours a day.”

“It felt very disingenuous to be advertising my art on Instagram and have 10 percent off my art and then the next thing you scroll to is bits of children.”

She had been a “deeply committed volunteer” with Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee, a Scottish organisation which lobbied local councils to divest from Israeli weapons firms, according to a character reference given to the court.

By January 2024, feeling “completely helpless” and done with letter writing, she became aware of Palestine Action on social media. Davidson said: 

“They were a bit cheeky, and they’d already managed to shut down two Israeli arms factories sending weapons from this country to be used in war crimes.”

Who Is Hannah Davidson?
On July 9, questioned by her lawyer Hamish McCallum, Davidson talked about growing up with her four siblings on a council estate in west London.

“I struggled a lot,” she said. “I struggled with the school environment. I struggled with socialising with other children.”

At 12, Davidson, who has since been diagnosed with autism, dropped out of school. 

She babysat and washed cars until she was 15 when a neighbour who owned a horse offered Davidson a chance to learn to ride. 

A job at a stable yard turned into a career with horses, working for the Metropolitan Police and two charities helping disabled and under-privileged children. She also worked as an artist. 

But during lockdown, when her work with horses stopped, she headed to Edinburgh to live with a friend. She got a part time job and worked on building her art business back up until she was left distraught by the scenes in Gaza from October 2023, which led her to join Palestine Action.

‘Behind the Scenes’
After a training day in April 2024 and a follow up phone call from someone in the organisation who wanted to know her motivation for getting involved, she started taking part in actions.

In June, she received another call from someone in the organisation asking if Davidson would “like to help out in some way behind the scenes,” she said.

She started to explore what would be involved, joining calls and reading documents she was sent about how the group worked.

On July 29, 2024, a little over a week before the raid on Filton, she attended a gathering in Manchester of around 10 people involved with Palestine Action.

“It was a general meeting and it was also a bit of a social event because people were chatting online and, like myself, wanted to meet people in person,” she said. 

“So if I was going to do more behind the scenes, people would want to meet me, check me out.”

Filton, she said, was discussed among other topics, but at that point, she thought it was “being prepared for something in the future” and her intention was “to be involved behind the scenes and not be involved in actual actions.”

Driver
But in the following days, Davidson said her mental health “was deteriorating again.” 

“I was feeling quite desperate about the situation,” she said. 

And when someone said they were short of a driver for the action in Bristol, Davidson agreed to step in, driving a rental car to take her and Madeleine Norman, another defendant, to go help out.

“I thought I’d be running errands for the weekend, helping people with whatever they needed help with,” she said.

In Bristol, Davidson drove people around to pick up last-minute items and delivered food to a local campsite where those involved were staying.

In the early morning hours of Aug. 6, she drove the personal belongings of activists – alleged to have caused a diversion outside the factory – to a country road where they grabbed them quickly before they were driven away by three other cars.

She then returned to the Air BnB where the activists had been staying to pick up three people – Sean Middlebrough, Yulia Brigadirova, and Norman – and drop them at their homes on the way back to Edinburgh. 

Around 4:30 pm the next day, Davidson was returning from having lunch with a friend and found two detectives waiting at her flat who arrested her. She was transported from Scotland to counter-terrorism police cells in Newbury.

It would take 31-and-a-half hours before she was allowed to speak to a lawyer. “We were going out of our minds, we didn’t know what was going to happen to us,” she said, crying. “We were asking and asking and didn’t get a lawyer.”

“I was in absolute shock and autistic meltdown. I could barely breathe in and out while I was in the counter-terror unit.

“They gave me a piece of paper and pencil and I sat and drew…We weren’t given T-shirts, only jumpers, and it was as hot as this,” she said, referring to the summer heatwave.

After police custody, Davidson said she

“spent 46 days in [a prison] without any contact. I wasn’t allowed to phone anybody…. I think we all just have really chronic PTSD about that period. We just disappeared. We didn’t know what had happened. We couldn’t have known that would be the response . . . it was just horrifying.” 

Both her lawyer and the prosecutor Deanna Herr, who cross examined Davidson, asked repeatedly about her knowledge of the raid given planning documents she had access to. 

Davidson maintained that she skimmed through much of the detail because she didn’t think it was relevant to her role.

She also said she thought that much of what was in evidence was unfamiliar to her and may have had details added about which she was unaware.

This included a document which listed items including axes, kebab skewers and whips. The items were to be used by the “black team” who were meant to distract security outside the factory as the “red team” gained access to the inside and destroyed weapons.

‘Shocked’
Davidson said she didn’t think any items had been listed when she looked at it and that she had only seen the completed document once it was in police evidence. 

“If they’d been completed I’d certainly have flagged that up and wouldn’t have been involved in that action. Whips, BBQ skewers, absolutely not.”

Davidson further denied planning the break-in, saying: “I did not coordinate this action. I did not instruct anyone…I simply did not have an organisational role.”

Heer put it to Davidson that she was “intimately involved in this action. You knew full well it would involve the black team taking steps to stop the security guards intervening.”

Davidson replied: “I did not. I wish things had been different.”

Heer alleged she knew the action involved the threat of violence. Davidson responded: “Absolutely not what I agreed to at any time.”

Her testimony echoed that of Norman’s from earlier this week who also said not to have seen the axes and whips listed in the document, and believed Davidson had not seen it either because they were certain they would have discussed it. 

Norman had also suggested that others involved in the raid were “pretty pissed off” that the attack “didn’t go down” the way they had believed it would.

Palestine Action Activists Sentenced as Terrorists

Of the list referring to whips and axes, Davidson said on Thursday:

“There is a lot I’ve seen in evidence that is the first time I’ve seen it. That is one of the things I was quite shocked about.

“If I had seen it, I wouldn’t have gone. I wish I had seen it. I wish I had seen some of the other documents as well because then maybe things would be different today.”

‘Important Responsibility’
Giving evidence on Friday, Hoxha also denied knowing that the raid would result in violent clashes with security guards and police.

Hoxha had previously taken part in a Palestine Action blockade of a different Elbit factory in Bristol, where she had “locked on” to a van. She had been arrested but released with no further action taken against her.

Despite being based in London, this prior experience in the Bristol area meant she volunteered to undertake a “reccie” of the main Elbit site in Filton but did not know at that stage what was being planned.

A meeting she attended on Formby beach near Liverpool, which prosecution allege was to plan the raid, was to celebrate a birthday of co-defendant Sean Middlebrough, she said.

CCTV footage from Liverpool Lime Street station shows Middlebrough carrying what looked like a cake box through the station.

Hoxha said she was involved in discussions about using Go Pro cameras in the raid. “The purpose of the Go Pro is to document the war crimes going on inside Elbit Systems,” she said, adding that thousands of Palestinians are “without arms and legs” due to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“Documenting war crimes is an important responsibility,” she told the jury. Hoxha said she provided Go Pros to two members of the red team, Fatema Zainab Rajwani and Samuel Corner, as well as a member of the black team.

The lengthy process of configuring the Go Pros for live streaming via pre-paid phones left Hoxha “extremely stressed out” the night before the raid and meant she was not privy to final discussions about other details of the operation, she told the court.

Once the Go Pro stream was working, Hoxha told members of the red team that: “You guys are amazing we are here with you online.”

Asked by her lawyer what she meant by this, Hoxha said they were, “Brave spectacular young people with the moral clarity to damage weapons that have left children without parents. I would rather live in that kind of society than one run by the Epstein class…They are amazing and they are brave.”

Hoxha denied watching the live feed but sent messages saying: “Start smashing guys!!! Smash!!!”

She told the court that “Elbit advertised that their weapons are battle tested on Palestinians,” but said there was “cloudy language” around what they make inside their U.K. factories. 

Hoxha wanted the red team to record evidence of “Quadcopter drones, the Magni X drones, the servers and the other technology that means those drones in Gaza swarm…and drop bombs on people.”

During the raid, another user in a Signal group who was watching the live feed, said “Those are Israeli drones…The quadcopter that they are not supposed to have here.”

Hoxha told the court: “I think 40 drones were disarmed in 20 minutes.”

‘Sentenced as terrorists’
Chada described there being a “flurry” of Signal calls in the days after the action, which Hoxha said was because the red team was “being held longer than 48 hours.” Hoxha said,

“Everyone was worried…One of the red team’s mother was dragged all the way from Wales to London by counter-terrorism. I was arrested by counter-terrorism. We were all arrested by counter-terrorism.

We were all terrified. We didn’t know how an action could turn into a terrorism case.”

She said they were held as “terrorist prisoners” and told the jury: “The red team have been sentenced as terrorists and I would never wish that on anyone else.”

When asked by her lawyer, she said she “didn’t assist or encourage” criminal damage or violence, but said that the red team was composed of “brave individuals and I think it’s disgraceful what has happened to them.”

Asked why she did not think the raid would involve violence, Hoxha said, “Given that behind the scenes lobbying groups [were] lobbying the government, it wouldn’t be in the interests of Palestine Action to be violent.”

During cross examination, prosecutor Emma Gargitter asked whether Hoxha’s use of aliases in Signal groups was to guard against infiltrators.

Hoxha confirmed this was the reason, adding that “We knew that officials from the Israeli embassy were having meetings with the government regarding members of Palestine Action.”

Another prosecution barrister, Heer, then got to her feet and told the judge: “I think there is a matter of law that needs to be addressed.”

The jury was then sent out.

Who is Teuta ‘T’ Hoxha?
Hoxha’s family came to the U.K. when she was four-years-old and settled in Croydon, with her father working as a cleaner and caretaker at a school. 

Her mother passed away in 2016, leaving her to help care for her younger siblings. 

She graduated in English Literature at King’s College, London and aspired to be an investigative journalist.

Despite being short-listed for an award by the BBC for a piece on the Grenfell Tower disaster, she told the court she lacked the financial background to get into journalism.

Instead she became a carer for disabled people in hospitals and worked in residential schools for children with autism. 

She had long been aware of the situation in Palestine due to her Muslim faith and went on marches, wrote to politicians and held fundraising stalls, but felt she was just “raising money for people that were going to be killed anyway.”

After seeing the video of the man in Gaza carrying his son’s remains in plastic bags, she googled “action for Palestine, and Palestine Action came up,” before attending an online training day.

She researched the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori “to understand what her principles were,” and noted that Ammori was half-Palestinian and had “turned to direct action” after “every avenue,” including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, “wasn’t working.”

Hoxha was inspired by a quote from David Graeber, who said: “Protest is asking the powers that be to dig the well. Direct action is digging the well yourself and daring the powers that be to stop you.”

The trial continues.

Dania Akkad is an investigative journalist. She has won awards for her reporting on women’s rights in the Middle East, Saudi Arabian dissidents and California’s lettuce industry. She started her career covering crime and agribusiness at daily newspapers in California, and then reported from Syria as a freelance journalist before the war, including investigating the 2005 suicide bombing in Amman that killed members of her family. She served most recently as senior investigations editor at Middle East Eye.

Phil Miller is the editor of Declassified UK. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes.

 

(Consortium News)