Hamas Continues Its Battle Against UK Terror Designation
On Tuesday, Hamas formally accused the British Home Secretary of improperly subordinating her authority to “Zionism and the Apartheid State of Israel.”
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As Israel continues its intense campaign of terror bombings across the Gaza Strip, and promises to carry out the largest ethnic cleansing operation of the 22-month genocide, Hamas is fighting a second battle around 3,500 kilometers (roughly 2,200 miles) away in London. On Tuesday, Mousa Abu Marzouk—one of the earliest members of Hamas and a senior leader of the movement—submitted an appeal to a British government commission that challenged the Home Secretary’s decision to maintain Hamas’s designation as a “proscribed terrorist organization.”
In a six-page legal filing, lawyers for Hamas argued that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper “acted with an improper motive,” when she rejected Hamas’s April 9, 2025, appeal of the terror designation, saying she failed to give it proper review or engage its legal arguments because of “her support for, and belief in, Zionism and the Apartheid State of Israel, and/or her related and racist hostility towards non-Jewish Palestinians.” The lawyers charged that Cooper had “fettered her discretion by subordinating her decision to a prior, longstanding, and inflexible government policy of support for Zionism—a racist and fascist ideology.”
In its April 9 filing, Hamas argued that the British government should remove its designation as a proscribed terror group and recognize its legitimate role as a Palestinian resistance movement engaged in a struggle for self-determination and liberation. Hamas’s terror designation went into effect in 2021. The British government had labeled the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, as a proscribed group in 2001, but not the political movement as a whole. When it formally added Hamas to the list of designated terror groups in 2021, the Home Office asserted: “The government now assess[es] that the approach of distinguishing between the various parts of Hamas is artificial. Hamas is a complex but single terrorist organization.”
Less than 24 hours after Hamas filed its 106-page appeal, the British Home Secretary appeared on LBC Radio, and when asked about the case, Cooper said, “Hamas is a terrorist organisation. It was a barbaric terrorist attack on October the seventh in Israel, and Hamas has long been a terrorist organization and banned in the UK. We maintain our view about the barbaric nature of this organization.”
Hamas submitted its filing to the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission on Tuesday and its lawyers wrote therein that “it would have been impossible” for the Home Office to have considered the legal merits of the case in less than 24 hours and, instead, issued a political rejection—not a legal one. As part of the original filing, the lawyers submitted reports from 26 subject experts totaling 748 pages. They charged that Cooper’s “decision on the application [was] both procedurally and substantively unfair.”
“We're alleging that she's biased. We're alleging that she had closed her mind to the decision before she'd even had a chance to properly read the application that she was required to decide,” said Franck Magennis, one of the two barristers representing Hamas, in an interview with Drop Site. “She has a discretion about how to decide this application. And that discretion has been completely subsumed within a very deeply embedded prior policy of support for an apartheid state.”
On July 5, the British government also designated the direct action activist collective Palestine Action as a terror organization. Throughout the course of the Gaza genocide, the nonviolent movement has engaged in a series of protests directly targeting British support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, primarily through property damage at companies, including Elbit Systems, that provide military technology to Israel. Since the designation went into effect, more than 700 people have been arrested in the UK for expressing support for the group—speech that is now illegal in Britain.
“It's an affront to civil liberties. It's an overreach, it doesn't cohere with ordinary people's understanding of terrorism. But that's very different to what's happening in the case of Hamas. Hamas won the only election in Gaza these last two decades, and the British government doesn't like that,” said Magennis. “They've punished the Palestinian people for voting for what the British government says is the wrong party. And that logic—the logic that the people of Palestine are somehow guilty for having voted for the wrong people—is the foundational logic of this genocide. So this is the central point: the British government's decision to proscribe Hamas forms part of the deep logic of this genocide.”
On July 8, the Home Office officially rejected Hamas’s April challenge to the terror designation. “The proscription of Hamas supports law enforcement in tackling harmful activity in the UK; it underlines the UK’s endorsement of non-violence in Palestine and the region; and it reinforces the UK’s commitment to combatting terrorism overseas,” the Home Office asserted in its one-and-a-half page decision. “Maintaining Hamas’ proscription is necessary and proportionate to protect UK national security and support the global fight against terrorism.”
Hamas’s lawyers rejected that characterization and said that the group “does not pose any threat to the UK’s national security. In fact, it has never conducted any operations outside of historic Palestine, let alone in any of the territory of the UK.” They said the Home Office’s claims that the UK supports non-violence in Palestine and the region “are perverse, which renders the decision itself perverse. The UK has persistently and consistently used, and defended, the use of violence in Palestine and the region.”
Magennis said that the UK government’s position is that Palestinians do not have a fundamental right to resist occupation and genocide, as evinced by Hamas’s terror designation. “Who cares what the British government thinks about how to resist colonialism? Who cares what the British government thinks about who the Palestinian people should vote for? It's none of their business,” he said. “Palestinian people vote for whoever they want. And the British government doesn't get to lecture anyone on, ‘Oh, you voted for Hamas? They are too violent.’ It's like some sick joke.”
“This is the British government that waged an illegal war in Iraq and smashed an entire country,” Magennis added. “And they're going around lecturing organizations, like Hamas, that are resisting a genocide in which the British government is actively participating as part of a Zionist project that only came into existence because of the policy of the British government. The British government thinks they're in a position to lecture the Palestinian people, and the Islamic resistance movement, on these questions of violence and legitimacy and democracy? It's sickening. It's grotesque.”
In their April filing, the lawyers argued, “Hamas is the only effective military force resisting—and seeking to end and prevent—the ongoing acts of genocide and crimes against humanity being committed by the Zionist State against the Palestinians in Gaza. Its continued proscription is purposefully—and in any event practically—inhibiting the efforts of the Palestinian people to use military force to end and prevent those ongoing acts of genocide.”
Magennis said that, if Hamas did not exist, a different Palestinian group would have formed in Gaza that would have led the armed struggle against Israel’s mutli-decade siege and war of annihilation. “It's the sort of national liberation movement that you would expect to see emerge in any context where people are being explicitly told that they're human animals—that they're of the wrong race—who have faced a project of explicit ethnic cleansing for more than a century.”
The lawyers for Hamas asserted in Tuesday’s filing that “The ideology animating [Israel’s] Apartheid regime … is not worthy of respect in a democratic society,” The lawyers also contended that the UK terror designation laws are so broad that they amount to criminalization of protected speech and, moreover, provide grounds to categorize multiple national armies, including the British, as terrorist groups. “Hamas does not deny that its actions fall within the wide definition of ‘terrorism’ under the Terrorism Act 2000,” they wrote. “Instead, it notes that the definition also covers all groups and organizations around the world that use violence to achieve political objectives, including the Israeli armed forces, the Ukrainian Army, and indeed the British armed forces.”
The filing for Hamas’s appeal to be removed from the list of proscribed organizations in the UK.
Hamas’s appeal, Magennis said, will now move to a hearing before the Proscribed Organization Appeals Commission. “Hamas will have their day in court. They will have a chance to argue that the decision that Yvette Cooper has taken refusing their application is unlawful,” he said. If the commission rejects Hamas’s appeal, the case could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court and then the European Court of Human Rights.
“I think that the British government is in a legitimacy crisis, because it's actively participating in yet another genocide,” said Magennis. “Support for that apartheid state was always dubious as a matter of law and morality. But [now] 22 months into a genocide, in which the British government is actively participating, the British government's continued support for that policy of Zionism is completely unsustainable.”
The governments of the U K, the U S, Germany, et. al, are the ones who need to be "designated terrorists."
I keep hearing the trope, "Israel has a right to defend itself." But Palestine doesn't? Who made those rules?
What I'm hearing from the colonial powers is that Israel ( a fascist, racist fiction of a state) has the "right" to kill, by starvation, bombing, and any other means it chooses, 7 million Palestinians, in order to facilitate the theft of their land. Do I actually have to say, "Bullshit?" I guess it actually needs to be said.
People get so disgusted with the zionist induced moral blindness and corruption of the US, UK and the west.