A man who assaulted a police officer during a pro-Palestine protest on Saturday has been jailed.
Atif Shafiq, 41, was sentenced to six months in prison following the incident.
District Judge Denis Brennan told Shafiq: “This country has an honourable tradition of peaceful protest.”
He said Shafiq’s actions could have “provoked a volatile reaction from the crowd”.
The officer received a “laceration to the head” in the attack but was pictured in hospital smiling with his thumbs up.
This comes as the Home Secretary branded the pro-Palestine demonstrations “hate marches”.
Suella Braverman warned that calls for the erasure of the Israeli state would not be tolerated.
Some protesters called for an “intifada”, meaning a civil uprising, from “London to Gaza”, while many others chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
The “river” and “sea” referenced in the chant references the Jordan River to Israel’s east and the Mediterranean Sea to the Jewish state’s west.
After attending a COBRA meeting headed up by Rishi Sunak, Ms Braverman said: “First of all let me explain what we’ve seen over the last few weekends, we’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets following the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map.
“To my mind there is only one way to describe those marches: they are hate marches.”
Asked about reports pro-Palestinian demonstrators had used the Arabic word meaning shaking off or struggle, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Obviously that’s not acceptable and people need to think extremely carefully about the impact of their actions following a traumatic terror event which saw more than 1,000 people killed.”
He said the chant “from the river to the sea” is “deeply offensive” to many. The Home Secretary also revealed that the UK’s terror threat level remains unchanged at “substantial”.
