Police bodycam footage that was played Monday at the trial of six Palestine Action members who broke into a UK subsidiary of Israeli arms firm Elbit last year showed one of the intruders striking an officer on the back with a sledgehammer as she knelt on the floor during the break-in, fracturing her lumbar spine.
“I had no idea what it was until I turned around and saw a male with a sledgehammer behind me,” said the officer, Sgt. Kate Evans, at the trial of the proscribed anti-Israel group’s members, according to Sky News. “I said something like ‘you have just hit me with a sledgehammer,’ and he didn’t recognize that at all. He just started telling me I’m complicit in genocide again.”
When other officers arrested the six intruders, Evans’ alleged attacker, 23-year-old Samuel Corner, complained to her that his handcuffs were too tight, she told the Woolwich Crown Court.
“We still have a duty of care to make sure no one is in pain… They seemed perfectly fine to me,” said Evans, whom Channel 4 News described as helping the other officers while “scooting around on her backside” because she was unable to stand.
The attack left Evans unable to drive, dress or shower without assistance, she said, adding that she took painkillers to handle the “intense pain.”
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She could not work for three months, and remains on restricted duty, the BBC reported.
???? Palestine Action activist ‘broke police officer’s back with sledgehammer’
The alleged attack is said to have fractured Sgt Kate Evans’ spine
Watch here ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/RlNEzccYQQ
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) November 25, 2025
Corner is accused of causing grievous bodily harm to Evans. Along with fellow defendants Charlotte Head, 29, Leona Kamio, 30, Fatema Rajwani, 21, Zoe Rogers, 22, and Jordan Devlin, 31, he is also accused of aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder at the Elbit UK site in Bristol. All of the accused deny all charges.
The six defendants were arrested last August at the Bristol site, which belongs to a subsidiary of Israeli weapons producer Elbit Systems, one of the IDF’s biggest suppliers.
In their trial, the accused spoke about their opposition to Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza, UK media reported.
This is “Palestine action” activist Samuel Corner, who swung a sledgehammer at a female police officer fracturing her spine and leaving her with permanent disabilities.
This is what leftist media is manufacturing. pic.twitter.com/krLxq3iNRs
— Andy (@PositivFuturist) November 24, 2025
Officers who responded to the break-in testified on Monday that they saw a security guard at the factory covered in foam as the intruders, clad in red jumpsuits and splattering red paint, wielded sledgehammers to smash property, Sky News reported.
One of the officers, Police Constable Aaron Buxton, said Corner also “swung the sledgehammer multiple times” at him as the officer struggled with another intruder.
“I was scared. I believe it made contact with my right calf and my work radio. I had quite considerable pain down that area of my leg following it and also I had some bruising come up,” said Buxton.
Illustrative: Activists from the Palestine Action group protest at the gates of a factory owned by Ferranti, a British subsidiary of Elbit Systems, in England on February 1, 2021. (Paul Ellis/AFP)
The officer said he then saw Corner attack Evans, who was kneeling and trying to arrest another intruder.
Evans recalled seeing another colleague, Constable Peter Adams, shocked as the sledgehammer came crashing down.
“I can remember looking up and PC Adams for some reason had a shocked face on him, and then I had a pain in my back,” she said. “It was just a massive shock vibrating through my whole back, a thud on my back through my whole body extended down to my legs.”
Adams recalled: “I remember her screaming in pain and she’s fallen to the floor on her back.”
Adams recalled Evans being struck twice, but Evans remembered only one blow of the sledgehammer, according to the BBC.
The trial is expected to last until January. Because the allegations in the case came before the UK proscribed Palestine Action in July, the terror ban on the group is irrelevant to the trial, prosecutors have said.
A protester is taken away by police officers at a ‘Lift The Ban’ demonstration in support of the proscribed anti-Israel group Palestine Action, calling for the recently imposed ban to be lifted, in Trafalgar Square, central London, on October 4, 2025. (JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP)
UK authorities declared Palestine Action a terror group after members of the organization broke into a Royal Air Force base in central England in June and vandalized planes.
The ban has resulted in hundreds of arrests at protests in support of the group, with supporters claiming that the organization is peaceful in its actions.
Some far-right UK activists seized on the newly released bodycam footage on Monday to criticize those who have accused law enforcement of heavy-handed policing against anti-Israel protesters since the devastating Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in southern Israel, which sparked the war in Gaza.
“All those politicians and ‘celebrities’ standing by them, calling them ‘non violent’? Tell that to this WPC!” wrote far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson on X, referring to Evans with the abbreviation for Woman Police Constable, a rank phased out by British police in the 1990s.
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