British Band Denies Support for Yahya Sinwar After Showing Footage of Late Hamas Leader at UK Concert

The British trip-hop group Massive Attack released a statement on Monday in response to controversy surrounding a video montage it displayed at a recent concert in the United Kingdom that included footage of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel

“Massive Attack categorically reject any suggestion that footage or reportage used as part of an artistic digital collage in our live show seeks to glorify or celebrate any featured subject,” the Bristol-based band — who are avid critics of Israel – said in a statement shared on social media. “To isolate a single section of reportage from the artistic context within which it sits – a digital array that spans a wide variety of issues and themes … – is tantamount to a willful device to create conditions for misinterpretation, or distortion.”

Massive Attack headlined LIDO Festival on Friday night at London’s Victoria Park and during their set, they showcased a video montage reportedly titled “Open the doors to the merchants of death.” It included real-life footage of Sinwar’s family members, including the late terrorist leader himself, walking through a Hamas terror tunnel underneath the Gaza Strip on Oct. 10, 2023.

Sinwar orchestrated the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack that took place three days earlier in southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were murdered and 251 others were taken as hostages back to Gaza. Sinwar was killed during an Israeli military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah in October 2024. The footage of Sinwar and his family members walking through the Hamas tunnel that Massive Attack showcased on Friday night was released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) last year.

Alex Gandler, deputy spokesperson for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the band’s display of the footage was “just disgusting.”

“People have completely lost the plot,” he wrote in a post on X. “They are aligning themselves with the worst humans. not [sic] even hiding their hatred anymore.”

Massive Attack said in its statement on Monday that the film loop featuring footage of Sinwar “interplays with scenes from Jean Cocteau’s film ‘Orpheus,’ creating both a placement and implicit tone of horrified lament; that an individual of power can take people down into hell.”

“It would be bizarre (and perhaps revealing) that any observer of the live show films would solely home in on the Sinwar/IDF footage and completely overlook all other controversial figures featured in the reportage loops,” the group added. “Would ‘x’ observer suggest we sought to glorify Vladimir Putin, who appears in four loops? Or Donald Trump, who appears in several? Or J. Edgar Hoover? Or indeed the IDF soldiers who feature in the exact same location reportage as the Yahya Sinwar footage cited by various social media accounts? Unfortunately, the only reasonable conclusion is that this level of deliberate context removal, and such a leap of misinterpretation, has political motivations.”

Massive Attack concluded by claiming that artists who “consistently speak out against Israeli war crimes, apartheid, and human rights abuses, and in defense of the Palestinian people” face “determined and spurious attempts to discredit us, as a deterrent to us from speaking out.”

They stated: “These spurious attempts will always fail.”

Massive Attack has participated in a cultural boycott of Israel since 1999. During their show on Friday night, the group also displayed on the screen on stage a video message calling for the release of Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti. The secretary general of the Fatah movement in the West Bank was arrested by Israel in 2002 and is serving five life terms for the murder of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada.

The band showed footage of the arrested Palestinian political leader declaring that “security will be achieved by one way: by peace.” Massive Attack then displayed an alleged quote by Nelson Mandela from 2002. Barghouti’s lawyer at the time quoted Mandela as saying: “What is happening to Barghouti is exactly the same as what happened to me.” Afterwards, an image of a massive Palestinian flag adorned the screen along with the message “Free Palestine.” Several Palestinian flags were also waved by audience members throughout the performance.

Massive Attack was also joined on stage during their set at the LIDO Festival by actor and activist Khalid Abdalla and American rapper Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def. Abdalla, who was introduced as a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, rallied the crowd to make some noise “if you want your favorite artists to stand up for Palestine.” He also claimed that the Palestine solidarity movement is “the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement [and] the anti-genocide movement of our time in which ‘never again’ means never again for anyone.” Abdalla was referencing the “Never Again” slogan that is commonly used to commemorate the Holocaust and as a pledge to ensure that similar atrocities will not happen again.

“Dance for freedom and a free, free Palestine,” Abdalla shouted at the audience who gathered at the Massive Attack performance on Friday night. He also reportedly called for an immediate ceasefire to end the Israel-Hamas war and the distribution of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, according to NME.

A day before their performance at the Lido Festival, Massive Attack played in Manchester’s Co-Op Live. Before their set, they released a statement condemning the arena’s new corporate sponsorship deal with Barclays, claiming it has a “profoundly unethical corporate identity” because of its alleged “billions of dollars of investments in arms companies that supply Israel in its genocidal onslaught of Gaza, and war crimes in the West Bank.”

The band said after its insistence, owners of Co-Op Live agreed to remove from the arena all physical and digital Barclays livery and logos and on Massive Attack’s show page on the arena website. The group also added that “no show tickets will go to Barclays.”

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