Pictures and speech from our latest Nottingham vigil

Notts Friends of Standing Together holds regular vigils in the city centre. These are pictures and the introductory speech from the vigil held on 22 February.

**This address at the vigil was given by Farheen Khan:
**
This week Alon-Lee Green, co-director of Standing Together, has been in the UK.

Some of you may have seen him speaking in person, and others may have caught him on the BBC News pushing back against the Israeli government message, pushing back against Trump’s Board of Peace, and making it very clear that security for Israel is dependent on the security and safety of the all Palestinian people living in Israel-Palestine.

Also this week, Yvette Cooper, our Foreign Secretary, spoke at the UN Security Council. She talked about the demilitarisation of Hamas, the withdrawal of the IDF from the Gaza Strip. The need to support Palestinian governance and the imminent extinction of any hope of a viable Palestine.

She said “We must prevent the destabilisation of the West Bank and preserve the viability of a Palestinian state. We have seen the Palestinian economy face strangulation, including the Israeli government withholding some of the Palestinian authority’s own tax revenues.

“We are witnessing an all-time high of Israeli settlement expansion and settler violence, in flagrant breach of international law. With Palestinian families and communities driven from their homes, beaten while farming in their own land. Attacks that sow terror among civilians. This is deeply deeply wrong, and a clear contravention of the resolutions of this Council, and counter-productive. It only makes the Israeli and Palestinian people less secure.”

These are Yvette Cooper’s words.

Having acknowledged all of this, the question now is what pressure will the government exert to shift the Israeli government?

The situation in the West Bank is now dire, with new Israeli regulations and constant settler-military violence and harassment causing deaths and injuries, forcing displacement of whole communities and more de facto annexation.

Last Sunday, the Israeli security cabinet passed major changes to the established division of powers in the West Bank, set up three decades ago under the US-backed Oslo Accords, signed by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

They include expanding Israeli control beyond its military occupation into Palestinian-run areas, as well as broad powers to take over so-called “heritage sites” across the West Bank. Israel also says it will take over planning authority at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which sits inside the city’s Ibrahimi Mosque.

Back in July 2025, the UK Foreign Affairs Committee issued a report on conflict in the Middle East. They said that the Israeli government has not listened to the UK, nor its friends and allies – with the exception of the US. The report concluded that the UK Government must take a different approach; that it must act “more boldly and bravely”.

The Committee called for the UK’s sanctions against illegal outposts and violent Israeli settlers to be sustained and extended to all businesses operating in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It said the Government must take immediate steps to implement a comprehensive ban on the import of goods from the illegal settlements in the West Bank, using the UN database of businesses substantially and materially involved in settlement-related business activity.

It welcomed the sanctions that the Government has imposed on illegal outposts and violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. It recommended that the Government sanction companies and organisations that have facilitated the building of any Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

It is time for UK Government words to be given weight by UK Government actions.

The UK Government has had since July 2025 to action the recommendations of its own Foreign Affairs Committee, but it has failed to do so. And the reality for Palestinians is becoming increasingly grave.

This week, in the run-up to Ramadan, the Jerusalem police and the internal security force Shin Bet have made a series of arrests without charges at Al Aqsa Mosque of Muslim caretaker staff and an imam; another six imams have been denied entry to the mosque. At the same time, they have been enabling large groups of radical Jews who have been calling for the destruction of the mosque to come onto the site to offer prayers. The Jordanian-appointed foundation that manages this holy site in Jerusalem has had five of its staff taken into administrative detention.

On the West Bank, the IDF launched an operation to arrest Palestinians that it claims are inciting terror on social media. An IDF spokeswoman said that the operation will continue throughout the month of Ramadan. As we have seen from arrests made in Israel, their definition of inciting terror is very broad and includes expressing sympathy for the children of Gaza.

Please take some time to reflect on these realities and to think about the action that we can take to change this.

Posted 23 February 2026