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LONDON: Pensioner Marji Mansfield never imagined she would end up suspected of terrorism for protesting against the banning of a pro-Palestinian group.
But the British grandmother was arrested on July 5 for joining a demonstration in support of Palestine Action just days after it was added to the UK government’s list of proscribed organizations.
“It’s a terrible shock to be accused of potentially being a terrorist,” said Mansfield, 68, who described herself as a “proud grandmother” of seven.
She “was never politically interested,” the former banking consultant from the southern town of Chichester told AFP. “I just worked hard, raised my family, lived an ordinary life.”
In early July, the UK government banned Palestine Action under the UK’s Terrorism Act, after activists broke into an air force base in England and damaged two aircraft.
Since then, the campaign group Defend Our Juries has organized protests around the country to challenge the ban, described as “disproportionate” by the United Nations rights chief.
More than 200 people have been arrested, according to Tim Crosland, a member of Defend Our Juries. They risk prison sentences of up to 14 years.
A new demonstration in support of the group, which was founded in 2020, is planned on Saturday in London. Organizers expect at least 500 people to turn up, and police have warned all demonstrators could face arrest.
People “don’t know what the nature of this group is,” interior minister Yvette Cooper has said, claiming that “this is not a non-violent group.”
But Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori has launched a court bid to overturn the ban and a hearing is set for November.
Mansfield has long supported the Palestinian people, but the start of the current war, sparked by Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, galvanized her into action.
“When it started happening again ... it was the most horrible feeling, that children’s homes were being blown up, that their schools were being destroyed,” she said.
Hamas’s October 2023 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s subsequent campaign to eradicate the Palestinian militant group in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which are deemed reliable by the United Nations.
For Mansfield, the Palestine Action ban was the final straw, fueling her feelings that the government was silencing her political views.
The night before attending the July demonstration, Mansfield said she was “terrified.” But she did not change her mind.
Images on British media showed her being moved by several police officers after she refused to get up from the pavement. An 83-year-old woman was by her side.
Mansfield spent 12 hours in custody, and is now banned from parts of London, meaning she cannot visit some museums with her grandchildren as she would like to do.
“It was just ordinary people,” said Mansfield. “We came from all backgrounds ... we’re not terrorists.”
Alice Clark, a 49-year-old doctor, also does not regret attending the protest where she was arrested in London on July 19.
“Nobody wants to be arrested. I just feel that there’s a responsibility,” said Clark, who also accused the government of undermining “our civil liberties.”
Cooper said the ban on Palestine Action was “based on detailed security assessments and security advice.”
The ban says the group’s “methods have become more aggressive” by encouraging members to carry out attacks which have already caused millions of pounds in damage.
But Clark, a former volunteer for medical charity Doctors Without Borders, said she felt “growing disgust and horror” at the images of starving children in Gaza.
The 12 hours in custody after her arrest were a shock. If convicted, she risks losing her license to practice medicine.
“There were points where I was close to tears. But I think just remembering why I was doing it kind of helped me keep calm,” said Clark.
History student Zahra Ali, 18, was also arrested on July 19, before being released under supervision. None of the three women has been charged.
She is also appalled by the scenes from Gaza.
“The starvation in Gaza, it’s disgusting. And our government isn’t doing anything about that,” she told AFP.
Imagining herself in prison at 18 is “a big thing,” but “if people who are in their 80s can do it, then I can do it,” Ali said.
She also does not describe herself as an activist, but as “a normal person ... who decided that what our government is doing is wrong.”

MELBOURNE: The Great Barrier Reef has experienced its greatest annual loss of live coral across most of its expanse in four decades of record-keeping, Australian authorities say.
But due to increasing coral cover since 2017, the coral deaths — caused mainly by bleaching last year associated with climate change — have left the area of living coral across the iconic reef system close to its long-term average, the Australian Institute of Marine Science said in its annual survey on Wednesday.
The change underscores a new level of volatility on the UNESCO World Heritage Site, the report said.
Mike Emslie, who heads the tropical marine research agency’s long-term monitoring program, said the live coral cover measured in 2024 was the largest recorded in 39 years of surveys.
The losses from such a high base of coral cover had partially cushioned the serious climate impacts on the world’s largest reef ecosystem, which covers 344,000 square kilometers (133,000 square miles) off the northeast Australian coast, he said.
“These are substantial impacts and evidence that the increasing frequency of coral bleaching is really starting to have detrimental effects on the Great Barrier Reef,” Emslie said on Thursday.
“While there’s still a lot of coral cover out there, these are record declines that we have seen in any one year of monitoring,” he added.
Emslie’s agency divides the Great Barrier Reef, which extends 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) along the Queensland state coast, into three similarly-sized regions: northern, central and southern.
Living coral cover shrunk by almost a third in the south in a year, a quarter in the north and by 14 percent in the central region, the report said.
Because of record global heat in 2023 and 2024, the world is still going through its biggest — and fourth ever recorded — mass coral bleaching event on record, with heat stress hurting nearly 84 percent of the world’s coral reef area, including the Great Barrier Reef, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s coral reef watch. So far at least 83 countries have been impacted.
This bleaching event started in January 2023 and was declared a global crisis in April 2024. It easily eclipsed the previous biggest global coral bleaching event, from 2014 to 2017, when 68.2 percent had bleaching from heat stress.
Large areas around Australia — but not the Great Barrier Reef — hit the maximum or near maximum of bleaching alert status during this latest event. Australia in March this year started aerial surveys of 281 reefs across the Torres Strait and the entire northern Great Barrier Reef and found widespread coral bleaching. Of the 281 reefs, 78 were more than 30 percent bleached.
Coral has a hard time thriving and at times even surviving in prolonged hot water. They can survive short bursts, but once certain thresholds of weeks and high temperatures are passed, the coral is bleached, which means it turns white because it expels the algae that live in the tissue and give them their colors. Bleached corals are not dead, but they are weaker and more vulnerable to disease.
Coral reefs often bounce back from these mass global bleaching events, but often they are not as strong as they were before.
Coral reefs are considered a “unique and threatened system” due to climate change and are especially vulnerable to global warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proclaimed in 2018. The world has now warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. That report said “tropical corals may be even more vulnerable to climate change than indicated in assessments made in 2014.”
The report said back-to-back big bleaching events at the Great Barrier Reef in the mid 2010s “suggest that the research community may have underestimated climate risks for coral reefs.”
“Warm water (tropical) coral reefs are projected to reach a very high risk of impact at 1.2°C, with most available evidence suggesting that coral-dominated ecosystems will be non-existent at this temperature or higher. At this point, coral abundance will be near zero at many locations,” the report said.