Met Police set a 12:30 start and a 14:00 end for the 7 October student march

The Metropolitan Police have imposed conditions under the Public Order Act on a student march planned for Wednesday, the third anniversary of the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. The march was expected to run from King's College London, on the Strand, to University College London, at Russell Square. It will not choose its own timetable.

The conditions, published by the Met on Tuesday, require the group to form up at Lincoln's Inn Fields by 12:30 and to start the procession at that hour. The route is prescribed. Jewish News, citing the force, put it along Remnant Street, Kingsway and Southampton Row to Russell Square. The post-march assembly must stay inside Russell Square and must end by 14:00, when participants have to disperse. No one taking part in the form-up, the procession or the rally may wear a face covering that conceals identity. A breach can lead to arrest.

The legal hook is section 14(3) of the Public Order Act 1986. That section lets a senior officer impose conditions on a public assembly if he or she reasonably believes the assembly may result in serious disorder, serious damage, serious disruption, or intimidation. The Met's notice said the conditions were imposed to prevent serious disruption to communities. The notice did not publish a fresh intelligence assessment. It published the map, the clock, and the face-covering rule.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner James Harman, who leads Met Operations including public order policing, said the conditions were meant to manage the event and limit serious disruption. He said anyone who breached them, or who committed offences, should expect arrest. He said the force had zero tolerance for hate crime, and that those who chanted or displayed placards calling for intifada, or who encouraged unlawful extremism, would be arrested. The intifada line is the operational sentence. It tells officers, and anyone planning a chant, what the force will treat as an arrestable slogan on this route.

The date is the point of the conditions. Wednesday is three years after the attacks that killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 hostages. London has policed large marches related to Gaza since October 2023. The Met's choice this week is not a ban. Paris, on a separate decision by police prefect Patrice Faure, banned an Urgence Palestine march planned for the same evening. London has set a start time, an end time, a route, and a rule on faces. The two cities are using different tools on the same anniversary.

A fixed two-hour window changes what a march can do. A procession that must form by 12:30 and disperse by 14:00 cannot occupy a junction into the evening commute. It also cannot grow by late arrivals after the form-up area closes. Lincoln's Inn Fields is the holding pen. Russell Square is the end pen. Both are defined on a map the Met said it would publish. Anyone outside the shaded area, after the start, is outside the condition and can be arrested for that fact alone, before any chant is considered.

The face-covering rule is separate from the Public Order Act's older disguise provisions. The Met has stated it as a condition of participation. A mask that hides identity is a breach whether or not the wearer commits another offence. Officers do not have to prove a further intent. That is why the condition is written as a participation rule rather than as guidance.

Harman's warning on intifada chants sits next to arguments that have run in British courts and in Parliament since 2023 about which slogans are offences and which are political speech. The Met is not waiting on a new statute for Wednesday. It has told participants that this chant, on this march, will be treated as a hate-crime matter. Arrests, if they come, will be made under existing public-order and hate-crime law. The condition does not create a new offence. It tells the march what the senior officer will authorise his officers to act on.

King's College and UCL are the named ends of a route the organisers wanted and the police have redrawn. The Strand to Russell Square is a short central-London walk. Under the conditions it is a timed walk between two parks, with a ban on covered faces and a stated arrest line on a specific chant. By 14:00 the assembly is required to be over. What happens after that, on pavements outside the shaded map, falls back under ordinary law rather than under section 14(3).