The Crown actor Khalid Abdalla says he has been told to attend a police interview for taking part in a protest for Palestine in London in January.
Abdalla said on social media that he received a letter from the Metropolitan Police last Thursday, summoning him for a “formal interview”.
While he does not yet know whether the police will press charges, he criticised the decision to call him in. “The right to protest is under attack in this country and it requires us all to defend it,” he wrote.
The British-Egyptian actor, who played Dodi Fayed in the Netflix series, is a prominent supporter of the Palestinian cause, regularly speaking at pro-Palestine marches in London and calling for a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war.
Last week, he was among hundreds of media industry professionals who signed an open letter condemning a BBC decision to pull a disputed documentary on Gaza from streaming services.
“While there is an alarming rise in attempts to censor voices that stand up for Palestine, even as it faces open calls for ethnic cleansing, it will not work,” Mr Abdalla said in his statement on Monday.
“The days of silencing after intimidation are gone. The stakes are too high, and as we can see today with No Other Land winning at the Oscars, momentum is on the side of justice and shared humanity,” said the actor, whose screen credits also include the 2024 thriller The Day of the Jackal.
Abdalla's summons is part of a wider stand-off between the police and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign over protesters’ movements during the January 18 rally.
Letters were also issued last week to 87-year-old Jewish activist Stephen Kapos, three prominent members of the Stop the War Coalition, and others.
The Met Police had prevented a proposed march from the BBC headquarters in Portland Place to Whitehall, eventually allowing a static rally in Whitehall.
Dozens of arrests were then made after a group of demonstrators at the Whitehall rally crossed the police line to lay flowers at Trafalgar Square.
The Met Police claimed the group – which included Mr Abdalla and former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn – had “forced their way through”, but members of the group say the police had allowed them to cut across to the square.
Mr Corbyn and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell were also questioned by officers about the January rally. Palestine Solidarity Campaign leader Ben Jamal was charged with a public order offence and is awaiting a court case.
A representative for the Metropolitan Police said it would not disclose the identities of the people under investigation for "alleged breaches of Public Order Act conditions on Saturday, January 18" and that a further eight people had been summoned for interview.
The police have been under growing pressure to curb the pro-Palestine marches since October 2023, with critics accusing participants of anti-Semitism and showing support for Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has likened the summons to “harassment” and accused groups supporting Israel’s war in Gaza of putting “political pressure” on the police.
“This apparently co-ordinated attack against the Palestine solidarity movement is endeavouring to halt public protest on the issue,” they said in a statement. “That a Holocaust survivor is called in by the police for the alleged offence of carrying a bunch of flowers into Trafalgar Square, underlines the unjustifiable extremes to which the Metropolitan Police are prepared to go, to restrict the right to public protest and silence the Palestine solidarity movement,” they wrote.
“We demand that the Metropolitan Police halt any prosecutions or proceedings against those involved in this entirely peaceful protest,” they said.
Mr Abdalla had previously said that the crackdown on Palestinian supporters reminded him of how Egyptian authorities had handled the Arab uprising in 2011.
In a tearful speech a week after the January rally, marking 14 years since the Egyptian revolution, he said: “I saw … the ghost of how we are policed in Egypt. The last Saturday was the first time I had tasted the shadow of what may be an authoritarianism to come.”
