Three Palestine Action members received custodial sentences of between four years eight months and five years at Woolwich Crown Court following their conviction for criminal damage at a UK facility of Elbit Systems, the Israel-based defence contractor that has been the group's primary target across Britain.

Charlotte Head (30) and Leona Kamio (30) were each sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Fatema Rajwani (21) received four years and eight months. A fourth defendant, Samuel Corner (23), was convicted alongside them, per BBC News. The sentences are among the stiffest handed down in connection with direct-action protest in recent British legal memory — a product, in part, of Palestine Action's proscription as a terrorist organisation, which reframes criminal damage at a prescribed group's behest as something qualitatively different from ordinary protest-related offending.

The Proscription Architecture

The proscription of Palestine Action by the Secretary of State for the Home Department sits at the centre of the legal machinery now bearing down on the group and its supporters. A hearing on the proscription decision was scheduled for 25 November 2025, and the judicial record shows the matter formally contested in proceedings captioned R (Ammori) v SSHD, assigned neutral citation [2026] EWHC 292 (Admin) — with the open judgment published in February 2026.

Proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000 is not merely symbolic. It makes membership, support, and financial contributions to the listed organisation criminal offences carrying significant penalties. Crucially, it shapes sentencing: offences committed in furtherance of a proscribed group's activities attract a different statutory calculus than equivalent conduct by an unaffiliated defendant. The sentences at Woolwich reflect that elevated exposure.

The Crown Prosecution Service had already signalled the scale of the enforcement effort. In September 2025, the CPS announced further prosecutions of 24 people for showing support for Palestine Action — a number that indicates the proscription is being enforced across a wide network of participants, not only those who conducted physical raids.

Elbit Systems as the Focal Point

Elbit Systems is an Israeli defence electronics company with several UK subsidiaries and manufacturing sites. It produces drone systems, surveillance technology, and weapons components, some of which have been subject to export-licence scrutiny in the context of the Gaza conflict. Palestine Action has directed sustained direct-action campaigning at Elbit's UK operations — occupations, property destruction, and disruption of manufacturing — explicitly seeking to shut down what the group characterises as complicity in the conflict.

The legal proceedings arising from those campaigns are now running across multiple venues and timelines. A trial in Elbit-related proceedings was expected to begin on 15 June 2026, with further trials scheduled into 2027, per a May 2026 judiciary document. That pipeline suggests the Woolwich sentencing is an early data point in a longer judicial reckoning, not a conclusion.

An earlier phase of enforcement reached the courts in August 2024, when seven people appeared in a London court charged with violent disorder, burglary, and related offences connected to an attack on an Elbit Systems site — charges that pre-dated the proscription and were brought under conventional criminal law, Reuters reported.

What the Sentencing Range Signals

The gap between five years for Head and Kamio and four years eight months for Rajwani — a relatively modest differential — suggests the court found broadly comparable culpability across the group, with Rajwani's lower sentence likely reflecting her age and the sentencing discount associated with youth rather than a fundamentally different role in the raid.

For practitioners tracking the proscription regime's operational impact, the sentencing range matters as a benchmark. Future defendants in the trials running through 2026 and into 2027 will be sentenced against this reference point. The CPS's 24-person tranche of prosecutions spans a wider range of conduct — "showing support" encompasses activity well short of physical raids — so sentences in those matters should fall well below the Woolwich figures. But the trajectory is clear: the state is treating Palestine Action's campaign against Elbit not as aggravated protest but as terrorism-adjacent conduct, and the courts are sentencing accordingly.

The proscription itself remains subject to legal challenge. The Ammori proceedings produced a publicly available open judgment, but the judicial record also references material heard in closed session — a standard feature of proscription litigation where intelligence underpins the designation. How the higher courts ultimately assess the proportionality of proscribing a group whose activities have consisted primarily of property destruction, rather than violence against persons, will bear directly on the legitimacy of every sentence imposed in its wake.