Sue Parfitt is an 83-year-old retired priest who was arrested for protesting in solidarity with Palestine Action, a group designated as a terrorist organisation by the UK government.
Retired priest arrested for supporting Palestine Action
The Berlin police lied and the lie is now used to justify repression
On May 15, a pro-Palestinian demonstration was held in Berlin to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. What unfolded that day was not only a case of police violence, but a coordinated effort by German authorities, the media, and politicians to turn fiction into fact in order to further criminalise Palestinian protest.
According to a public statement issued by the Berlin police , a demonstrator had violently assaulted one of their officers, resulting in serious injury and hospitalisation. The police claimed the officer was dragged into the crowd, deliberately attacked, knocked to the ground, and then trampled or kicked by protesters. The message was clear: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators are violent, irrational, and dangerous.
But this entire story is a lie.
Video evidence, meticulously analysed by Forensis, an independent research agency founded and led by members of Forensic Architecture, has unequivocally disproven every single one of the Berlin police’s claims. The footage shows an officer with the number BE24111 written on the back of his uniform jacket advancing into the crowd with colleagues to arrest a protester. As they push people around, BE24111 starts punching protesters in the head and kicking them. He appears to injure himself during this violent fit and retreats with his colleagues.
There is no violent mob. No one is dragging him into the crowd. No one knocks him to the ground. No one kicks him. On the contrary, the footage shows demonstrators actively distancing themselves and shielding one another from BE24111’s assault. It was the officer, not the crowd, who carried out violence.
Despite the truth being uncovered, the damage has already been done.
The Berlin Police’s false narrative was quickly amplified by media outlets and government officials, unleashing a wave of fearmongering and political opportunism. A police union representative appeared on Welt TV channel and described the demonstrators as a “gang of murderers” who “would have killed the officer if they could have”.
The tabloid BILD ran a headline reading: “Jew haters kick police officers” and quoted Stephan Weh of the German Police Union as saying, “when a colleague is dragged into a crowd and trampled, losing consciousness multiple times, we have to say it’s pure luck that he survived the night […] This madness must end before one of our colleagues loses his life at such a gathering.”
The Public Prosecutor’s Office stated it was “an attack on the organs of the rule of law” and launched a formal investigation into the incident under charges of “dangerous bodily harm” and a “serious breach of the peace”. The very people assaulted by police may now face criminal prosecution based on events that never happened.
Germany’s Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt also seized the moment, declaring in the Bundestag: “An officer at an anti-Israel demo in Berlin was dragged into a crowd by aggressive demonstrators and seriously injured… The police need the best possible equipment and appropriate powers. We will make this clear in the law.”
The state is not just spinning falsehoods; it is also bent on using them to legislate repression. This is part of its overall strategy to criminalise pro-Palestinian activism, protest and speech under the guise of fighting extremism.
On June 10, less than a month after the incident, the State Office of the Protection of the Constitution, a state security agency, released its 2024 report, in which it categorised multiple pro-Palestinian organisations as “extremist” groups, including Jewish Voice for a Just Peace, BDS, and Palestine Speaks. This categorisation will likely result in more intense surveillance, potential police raids on group members, and even bans on organisational activities.
Other groups have already been proscribed. In May 2024, Palestine Solidarity Duisburg association was banned and its website shut down by the Interior Ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia state. Previous to that, in November 2023, the federal government banned the pro-Palestinian group, Samidoun.
The state has come after not just groups but also individuals. In April, three European Union nationals and one US citizen were threatened with deportation for their pro-Palestinian activism. A year earlier, Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a UK-based Palestinian surgeon, was barred from entering the country to speak at an event.
My husband and I were placed on a black list after we were supposed to speak at the same event. For a year now, we have been subject to interrogation, harassment, and invasive searches every time we travel outside the country.
Various “symbols” of pro-Palestinian solidarity have also been suppressed. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was officially banned by a Berlin judge in August 2024, for allegedly expressing support for terrorism. Then, in an even more chilling move, the city of Berlin banned all Arabic-language chants at demonstrations in April of this year, effectively criminalising an entire language and silencing entire communities, particularly the Palestinian one, which is the largest in Europe.
Meanwhile, police brutality at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany has become disturbingly routine. Protesters are regularly kettled, beaten, and arrested without cause or explanation. What once might have seemed exceptional is now standard operating procedure.
The fight to end German complicity in genocide is being violently suppressed, both in the streets and in the courts. State-sponsored censorship, racialised policing, and violent erosion of civil liberties are carried out under the false banner of public safety.
While the German state continues to claim that it is “atoning for its past” by cracking down on anti-genocide protests, in Gaza, the genocide is raging at full force. Bombings continue, little children are starving to death, and aid seekers are massacred at aid distribution zones. The Israeli military is pushing forward with plans to create a large concentration camp for Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip in preparation for their ethnic cleansing.
Acting to stop this horror has never been more urgent.
In these dark times, those who stay silent about the German state’s lies and repression must consider carefully what they are acquiescing to. Today, it may be the pro-Palestinian activists and people of conscience who are criminalised, but tomorrow it will be others. German democracy is collapsing, and state repression will not stop at a racialised community of protesters.
Ukraine war creates a generation at risk of being lost
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Varvara Tupkalenko’s two sons played with miniature cars like typical boys. Now, plastic guns dominate their living room in Kalynove, a village 15km (9 miles) from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.
Andrii, eight, and Maksym, six, once enjoyed playground games, but they now explore abandoned trenches and burned-out armoured vehicles on the village’s outskirts.
“They’re kids afflicted by war,” Tupkalenko said.
Europe’s largest land conflict since World War II is transforming devastated Ukrainian frontier communities like Kalynove, inflicting both visible and invisible wounds on their youngest residents.
These hidden traumas extend beyond anxiety and fear to more profound effects, including poverty, depression and stunted emotional development, according to a February report by the NGO Save the Children.
“This is how a lost generation becomes a reality,” the report said. “The longer the conflict continues, the more likely it is that these children will grow up without the opportunities and resources necessary to recover and normalise their lives.”
When the Reuters news agency first visited Kalynove in late March, the boys were among six children remaining in the shrapnel-scarred village, whose landscape of open fields and gentle hills bears witness to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Now they are the last children remaining after the others fled with their families, their mother said.
Although a Ukrainian counteroffensive in late 2022 pushed Russian forces back from the village perimeter, both armies continue exchanging fire just 20km (12 miles) away, leaving the Tupkalenkos struggling to preserve any semblance of normal childhood.
Military games dominate the boys’ play, including setting up pretend checkpoints to inspect fellow villagers. Their wooden fort features cloth netting – protection, they explain, from drones.
Lamine Yamal faces legal probe into dwarf entertainers at 18th birthday
Barcelona star Lamine Yamal is facing an investigation regarding the presence of a group of people with dwarfism as entertainers at his 18th birthday party last weekend, Spain’s Ministry of Social Rights told the AFP news agency.
The winger celebrated with a private event in Olivella, about 50km (30 miles) west of Barcelona, which the ministry asked the prosecutor’s office to investigate after a complaint from the Association for People with Achondroplasia and Other Skeletal Dysplasias with Dwarfism (ADEE).
Yamal turned 18 on Sunday, the day after his party on Saturday night, which many of his teammates attended along with celebrities from the music world, including Bizarrap and Bad Gyal.
“The ADEE has filed a complaint, so this ministry has asked the prosecutor’s office to investigate to see if the law has been violated and, therefore, the rights of people with disabilities,” the Social Rights Ministry told AFP on Tuesday.
ADEE “publicly denounces the hiring of people with dwarfism as part of the entertainment” and said it would take legal action because it “perpetuates stereotypes, fuels discrimination and undermines the image and rights” of people with disabilities.
Guests were not permitted to film at the event, but a video emerged of a group of people with dwarfism heading into the party.
“No one disrespected us. We were allowed to work in peace,” one of the performers told Catalan radio station RAC1 on the condition of anonymity, adding that four performers were in the group.
“We’re normal people who dedicate ourselves to what we love doing in an absolutely legal way. …
“For a couple of years, these people [the ADEE] have wanted to harm us. They want to prevent us from doing what we like, but they have not offered any work or training to those who are affected. …
“All this fuss has come about purely because it was Lamine Yamal’s party.”
The performer said they dance, deliver drinks and do magic tricks to entertain guests at the events they work at.
Yamal is a candidate to win the Ballon d’Or after helping Barcelona to a domestic treble of La Liga, the Copa del Rey and Spanish Super Cup last season.
The Spain international has scored 25 goals for the club in 106 appearances, having made his debut at just 15 years old in 2023.
Yamal’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Will Patriots promised by Trump boost Ukraine’s defence against Russia?
Kyiv, Ukraine – Heavy thuds that resemble fast hip-hop beats fill the night air when MIM-104 Patriots, air defence systems made in the United States, get to work.
Each Patriot surface-to-air launcher can shoot up to 32 missiles within seconds – and hit Russian ballistic missiles closing in on their targets.
The missiles fly at supersonic speeds, and the collision triggers a bright, split-second blast followed by a thunderous shock-wave.
“That’s the kind of explosion that makes me feel safe,” Ihor Lysenko, a 17-year-old in the capital Kyiv told Al Jazeera. He believes that the “technology is pretty reliable”.
The Patriots were developed in the 1970s to down Soviet missiles. Kyiv first received them in April 2023 from Washington and several of its Western European allies.
Within weeks, they had intercepted Russia’s Kinzhal (Dagger) intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are launched from fighter jets at more than 12km (7.5 miles) above the ground.
The Kinzhals mostly fly in the Earth’s stratosphere to maintain their speed, which, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is 10 times faster than the speed of sound, which he said makes any Western air defence system “useless”.
But in the past two years, about 10 Patriot systems in Ukraine – the exact number is a state secret – stationed in Kyiv and the southern port of Odesa have downed dozens more Kinzhals – along with other cruise and ballistic missiles, including North Korean ones; fighter jets; helicopters; and attack drones.
The latter is similar to hammering a nail with an electronic microscope – a Patriot missile is priced at several million dollars while Russian drones cost 100 times less.
The Patriots are, however, not 100 percent efficient.
During a late April attack on Kyiv, a Russian missile razed a two-storey apartment building, killing 12 people and wounding 87, gouging out windows and damaging roofs in dozens of buildings nearby.
On Sunday, US President Donald Trump announced that he would supply Kyiv with more Patriots – by selling them to Washington’s NATO allies who would pass them on to Ukraine.
“We will send them Patriots, which they desperately need,” Trump told reporters. “Putin really surprised a lot of people. He talks nice, and then he bombs everybody in the evening.”
On Monday, Trump specified the number of systems – 17 – during a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
“It’s everything. It’s Patriots. It’s all of them. It’s a full complement with the batteries,” Trump said.
He referred to an unnamed Western nation that had the “17 Patriots ready to be shipped”.
Days earlier, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Berlin was ready to acquire additional Patriot systems.
‘We need hundreds of interceptors’
The new Patriots that will be deployed to large Ukrainian cities will definitely lower the lethality of Russian air raids, but won’t cross any “red lines” for Putin, a Kyiv-based analyst said.
“Russia occasionally cried about red lines when it came to long-range weaponry for strikes on Russia,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “There are no red lines with Patriots.”
However, the new Patriots won’t solve Ukraine’s problems with Russian air raids.
“The problem is not just about the Patriots,” Fesenko said. “We don’t just need the Patriots to fight ballistic missiles. Now Russia’s main strike weapon is drones. They cause most of the damage.”
Most damage and deaths are caused by attack drones that fly in swarms of hundreds at heights of up to 5km (3 miles) and cannot be hit by Ukraine’s own air defence systems or mobile air defence teams armed with machineguns.
Ukraine needs up to 25 more Patriot systems to cover its key urban areas, according to Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the Ukrainian military’s General Staff.
While the details about the new Patriots’ arrival are unknown, some observers said the purpose of Trump’s pledge is clear.
“He does that to support his image that has been tarnished domestically and internationally,” Romanenko told Al Jazeera.
And what Ukraine needs the most is drone interceptors that can fly up to 500 kilometres per hour (310 miles per hour) as Moscow equips new generations of its unmanned vehicles with jet engines, he said.
“The quantity is what matters. If they launch more than 700 [drones per attack], if they are capable of upping it to 1,000, then we need hundreds of interceptors,” Romanenko said.
Moscow scrupulously analyses the routes of its drone swarms and frequently changes them to avoid interception, so Kyiv needs light planes with electronic jamming, helicopters and air defence systems that can down aerodynamic targets, he said.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian air force said the newly supplied, German-made Skynex air defence system shot down six Russian-made Geran drones.
The Skynex has a 35mm automatic cannon that fires up to 1,000 rounds per minute and uses programmable ammunition that detonates near its targets, releasing a cloud of projectiles.
However, there are only two Skynex systems in Ukraine, and there are no details about further supplies.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence has been slow to develop drone interceptors so far, an expert said.
“Everything is on an amateur level,” Andrey Pronin, one of the pioneers of Ukrainian drone warfare who runs a school for drone pilots in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
He said he was part of a team that developed an interceptor drone capable of catching up to Russian loitering munitions.
But even though the interceptor was battle-tested, Ukraine’s Defence Ministry didn’t show any interest, he said.
UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 quarterfinals: Qualified teams and full schedule
With close to half a million fans attending the group-stage games, the UEFA Women’s Euros has attracted attention like never before.
Now, the spotlight shifts to the knockout stages, where the stakes are high and the pressure even higher.
Eight teams remain in contention to lift the trophy, with hosts Switzerland reaching the quarterfinals for the first time. World champions Spain have lived up to their billing as the team to beat at the competition, while holders England advanced after overcoming an early scare.
Here’s how the Euro 2025 quarterfinals line up:
⚽ First quarterfinal: Norway vs Italy
When: Wednesday, July 16 at 9pm (19:00 GMT)
Where: Stade de Geneve, Geneva
With a perfect nine points, Norway finished on top of Group A as expected, but they lack cohesion. The two-time European champions conceded five goals in the opening round – the most among the table toppers of the four groups.
Nonetheless, the experienced duo of striker Ada Hegerberg and winger Caroline Graham Hansen has proven to be vital for the Norwegians, who have an excellent opportunity for a deep run with Italy their quarterfinal opponent.
The Italians, who finished second in Group B, will be playing in the knockouts for the first time since 2013. Top-four finishers at six of the first seven Euro tournaments, Le Azzure have endured a barren spell since and have made the knockout round only twice in the 21st century.
But after surviving a tricky group stage – registering a win, a draw and a defeat – the Italians believe their best football is ahead of them in the last-eight.
“We have a great desire to do well, to continue dreaming, to continue writing important pages of a story that is only at the beginning,” midfielder Annamaria Serturini said before the quarterfinals.
The winner of this match will face either Sweden or England in the semifinals.
⚽ Second quarterfinal: Sweden vs England
When: Thursday, July 17 at 9pm (19:00 GMT)
Where: Stadion Letzigrund, Zurich
After an opening match defeat which raised serious doubts about their title defence, England bounced back in style with consecutive statement wins, reaffirming their status as one of the heavyweights.
Thanks to the attacking prowess of Lauren James, Ella Toone and Georgia Stanway, the holders scored a combined 10 goals in their last two matches, finishing second in Group D.
In the quarterfinals, the Lionesses will be up against familiar foes, Sweden, whom they smashed 4-0 at the same stage during their Euro 2022-winning campaign.
“Sweden are a fantastic team, they’re relentless in the way they go about their game,” England captain Leah Williamson said.
“I think they sort of avoid the expectation of every tournament, and nobody really talks about them, [which is] slightly disrespectful, I think, because they always show up. They always seem to pose a threat to most teams, and normally come out with a medal or [be] a semifinal team, so they’re a strong team. We’re looking forward to the fixture.”
The Swedes laid down a marker with a sensational 4-1 win against a powerful Germany outfit on July 12, sealing the top spot in Group C and laying the groundwork for a revenge victory against England in Thursday’s quarterfinal in Zurich.
⚽ Third quarterfinal: Spain vs Switzerland
When: Friday, July 18 at 9pm (19:00 GMT)
Where: Stadion Wankdorf, Bern
Playing in the Euro knockout stage for the first time, hosts Switzerland face their biggest test yet against reigning world champions and title favourites Spain.
La Roja, who topped Group B with three wins in as many games, looked unstoppable in the opening round, scoring a tournament-high 14 goals while conceding just three.
Twice Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas once again grabbed the spotlight with three goals and four assists, while striker Esther Gonzalez has led the scoring charts with four goals.
Switzerland, who finished second in Group A, are the underdogs in this contest but will undoubtedly count on passionate home nation support in Bern as their youthful side strives for an unlikely upset.
“I think none of us expected things to happen in Switzerland – sold out crowds… Everything is blowing up way bigger than we ever expected,” Swiss captain Lia Walti said.
“We couldn’t even imagine having this when we were little,” added defender Viola Calligaris. “And now it’s like this for every match. We felt the people cheering – that really gives you strength.”
The winner of this match will face France or Germany in the semifinals.
⚽ Fourth quarterfinal: France vs Germany
When: Saturday, July 19 at 9pm (19:00 GMT)
Where: St Jakob-Park, Basel
France enter the quarterfinals in scintillating form, advancing as table toppers in what many had dubbed the “group of death”.
Scoring 11 times in the opening round, including a 5-2 thrashing of the highly-touted Netherlands outfit, France proved why they are the dark horses at this year’s tournament. Attacking winger Delphine Cascarino and striker Marie-Antoinette Katoto are both in stupendous form and have scored two goals a piece in the group stage.
“When it comes to Germany, it’s a very big nation,” Cascarino said. “They won several trophies and they have already knocked out others, so we know it’s going to be a great game… we’re going to try to find the cracks and win.”
For the eight-time record champions Germany, who finished second in Group C, defensive frailties remain a concern, especially after their 4-1 thrashing at the hands of Sweden in the last group match.
The last time these sides clashed was in February 2024 with France defeating Germany 2-1 to reach the first UEFA Women’s Nations League final. A victory on Saturday would also avenge France’s painful defeat to Germany in the Euro 2022 semifinals.
