Politics
London police arrest 212 people at protest over Palestine Action ban
Police said on Saturday they had arrested 212 people at a protest in London’s Trafalgar Square opposing Britain’s banning of the Palestine Action group.
The gathering was the first since London’s High Court ruled in February that a ban designating the pro-Palestinian group as a terrorist organisation was unlawful. UK Interior Minister Shabana Mahmood has been granted approval to appeal the ruling.
Lawmakers banned Palestine Action — which accuses Britain’s government of complicity in what it says are Israeli war crimes in Gaza — under anti-terrorism legislation last July after some members broke into a Royal Air Force base.
During Saturday’s demonstration, placard-holding protesters, some wearing black and white Palestinian scarves and waving Palestinian flags, sat on the ground or on camping chairs.
London’s Metropolitan Police said in a post on X that they were “continuing to make arrests where people are showing support for a proscribed organisation”.
- Temporary ceasefire is due to last for 32 hours.
- Kyiv warns it will respond if Russia violates it.
- UAE helps mediate exchange of prisoners, says Russian ministry.
KYIV: A temporary truce between Russia and Ukraine entered into force on Saturday, with Kyiv warning it would respond “immediately” if Russia violated it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the ceasefire on Thursday to coincide with Orthodox Easter, more than a week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky first made the proposal.
Both sides have agreed to observe it.
The ceasefire is due to last for 32 hours, from 4:00 pm (1300 GMT) on Saturday until the end of the day on Sunday, according to the Kremlin.
“Ukraine will adhere to the ceasefire and respond strictly in kind. The absence of Russian strikes in the air, on land, and at sea will mean no response from our side,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on X.
The Ukrainian army said it was ready to “immediately” respond if Russia violated it.
Hours before the truce was due to start, Russia launched at least 160 drones at Ukraine, killing four people in the country’s east and south and wounding dozens of others, Ukrainian authorities said.
The southern Odesa region was among the hardest hit, with authorities reporting two dead and damage to civilian infrastructure.
A wave of Ukrainian drones sparked a fire at an oil depot and damaged apartment buildings in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, authorities said.
Four people died in Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Kherson regions, according to Russian-installed officials.
Ukrainians have expressed scepticism about whether the truce will hold.
The two sides held a ceasefire for Orthodox Easter last year, but both accused the other of hundreds of violations.
Despite tensions over the truce, the warring sides exchanged 175 prisoners of war each on Saturday, according to officials.
The United Arab Emirates helped mediate the exchange, the Russian defence ministry said.
Prisoner of war exchanges are one of the few areas of cooperation between the warring sides.
Stalled diplomacy
US-led talks aimed at ending the four-year conflict have stalled in recent weeks because of the war in the Middle East.
Even before the Iran war, progress towards a peace deal in Ukraine had been slow, due to differences over the issue of territory.
Ukraine has proposed freezing the conflict along the current front lines.
But Russia has rejected this, saying it wants Ukraine to give up all the territory in the Donetsk region that it currently controls — a demand Kyiv says is unacceptable.
Several rounds of US-led talks have failed to bring the warring sides closer to an agreement.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russia had discussed the ceasefire with Ukraine or the United States in advance and said it was not linked to negotiations to end the war.
The war has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions to flee their homes, making it Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
After four years, fighting on the front has come to a near standstill.
Russia has made small territorial gains at a high cost.
But Kyiv recently managed to push back in the southeast and Russian advances have been slowing since late 2025, according to the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Apart from Ukrainian counter-attacks, analysts attributed the slowdown to Russia being banned from using SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and Moscow’s own efforts to block the Telegram messaging app.
But the situation is unfavourable for Ukraine in the Donetsk region, near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, according to the ISW.
Moscow occupies just over 19 percent of Ukraine, most of which was seized during the first weeks of the conflict.
Britain’s government said on Saturday it had put on hold its deal to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands — home to the US-British Diego Garcia air base — which has been criticised by US President Donald Trump.
The planned legislation underpinning the deal to cede the islands to Mauritius, which needs the backing of Washington, would not be included in the government’s next parliamentary agenda, The Times newspaper said.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said London would try to persuade Washington to give its formal approval.
Trump said in February that the deal was a “big mistake”, having previously said it was the best that Starmer would get.
Under the deal, Britain would retain control of the strategically important military base on Diego Garcia on a 99-year lease that preserves US operations there.
A British government spokesperson said ensuring the long-term operational security of Diego Garcia would remain a priority.
“We continue to believe the agreement is the best way to protect the long-term future of the base, but we have always said we would only proceed with the deal if it has US support. We are continuing to engage with the US and Mauritius,” the spokesperson said.
Britain forcibly displaced up to 2,000 indigenous Chagossians in the late 1960s and 1970s to establish the base on the Diego Garcia atoll.
Toby Noskwith, a spokesperson for Indigenous Chagossian People, a campaign group, said there had been some hesitation about the deal from the start from senior people in the Trump administration, perhaps even the President himself.
“We are astonished to have come to this point. This has been framed mainly as a state-to-state issue but the people who have been lost throughout the process are the Chagossians, particularly elders and survivors,” Noskwith said.
He said questions needed to be asked about “the enormous sums of money which have been wasted on a collapsed negotiation, and the legality of conceiving a plan which denied the Chagossians their right to self-determination.” He also said Starmer had to facilitate the dignified resettlement of the Chagossian people.
The alliance between Washington and London has come under strain in recent weeks over Starmer’s reluctance to get involved in the US-Israeli war on Iran and his refusal at the start of the conflict to allow Trump to use British air bases to launch attacks.
US forces have since been permitted to carry out what the prime minister calls defensive strikes.
Trump has also repeatedly criticised the British leader, saying he was “not Winston Churchill” and had ruined what is often called a “special relationship” between Britain and the US.
Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has posted images on X platform showing portraits of children killed in a US missile strike on a school in Tehran, saying they were accompanying him symbolically on his flight to Pakistan for peace talks.
The images showed children’s photos placed on aeroplane seats alongside backpacks and flowers.
A preliminary US military investigation found outdated intelligence likely led to the 28 February strike on a school in Iran, which killed more than 165 children, in the opening hours of the conflict.
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