Dozens of Palestine campaigners have staged a protest in Churchill Square shopping centre.

The group were in the centre of the shopping complex in Brighton this afternoon.

Stood on the balconies above the ground floor, they hung Palestine flags and banners and chanted “ceasefire now”.

A spokesman for Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign said: “While you are shopping, bombs are dropping.

“Evading security, 150 people are holding a mass action inside Brighton’s Churchill Square shopping centre.”

The group were dropping leaflets from the balconies.

Artist Action Brighton were drawing attention to the genocide case against Israel being heard in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

Artist Action Brighton organiser Tanushka Marah says: “As artists and above all, as fellow human beings, we cannot stand by and do nothing while hundreds of innocent people are slaughtered daily. We are here today to bring home to shoppers and passers-by the crimes against humanity taking place on an unimaginable scale in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. We support the case being brought before the ICJ and call on all our political representatives to urge the Israeli government to stop the killing now.”

Several members of Artist Action Brighton dressed as International Court judges and broadcast statements from the ICJ legal teams, who say we are witnessing:

“A crisis of humanity, a living hell, a bloodbath, a situation of utter deepening and unmatched horror.”

“An entire population is besieged and under attack.”

“Gaza has become a place of death and despair.”

Palestine supporters have held regular protests in Brighton and London since Israel launched its war against Hamas.

Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in Israel, and saw about 250 others taken hostage from the country’s south.

Health authorities in Hamas-ruled Gaza say Israel’s offensive has killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

The offensive, one of the most destructive military campaigns in recent history, has pulverized much of territory and displaced more than 80 per cent of its population of 2.3 million people.

An Israeli blockade that allows only a trickle of aid into Gaza has led to widespread hunger and outbreaks of disease, United Nations officials have said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that the only way to secure the hostages’ return is by crushing Hamas through military means.

Churchill Square has been contacted for comment.