Activists fly Palestine flag over UK city hall building

A group of British activists have unfurled a Palestinian flag on top of the town hall in Bishop’s Castle on the English side of the border with Wales. Activist Sarah Wilkinson climbed the building on Monday — the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Fitr — and called out the double standards of the town for raising the Ukraine flag following Russia’s invasion but not doing the same for Palestine despite it suffering under 74 years of Israeli occupation.

In a video address, she said that she had climbed the tower of the town hall “for all the Palestinians standing on the Dome of the Rock, in Al-Aqsa, flying the flag of Palestine.”

Wilkinson added on Twitter: “Palestine has been going on for 74 years and you guys are pretending that you care about Ukraine, but you have done nothing for Palestine that has been occupied for 74 years; whose people are subjected to killing, oppression and torture by the Israeli occupation.”

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She pointed out that, “2,500 Palestinian children have been killed since 1985, and 22,500 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the occupation, and no one has done anything, but the Ukrainian flag was raised only a week after the Ukrainian crisis [began]. Today, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, who are subjected to injustice, murder and torture by the Israeli apartheid regime.”

The local police were filmed arriving and remaining at the scene.

“Is it possible to imagine the displacement of six and a half million Palestinians?” one activist asked bystanders rhetorically. “What is happening in Ukraine is like a drop in an ocean compared to what is happening in Palestine. Look at history, not at the pro-Israel media. Stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.”

Activist Wilkinson insisted that she and her colleagues were not calling for a lack of solidarity with the Ukrainians. “But if you support a people under occupation, you should also support the Palestinian people.”