Palestinian restaurant in London faces daily storm of phone threats since Oct. 7

By Burak Bir

LONDON (AA) — A Palestinian restaurant in the British capital has been receiving threatening calls for a month, but its owner vows to resist and “keep the Palestinian cultural alive.”

“I’ll come over and take away your life … Israel forever,” said only one of the dozens of threatening calls that the restaurant has received daily amid the ongoing onslaught of Israeli attacks on the besieged Palestinian enclave Gaza. The flood of calls has sometimes forced the London business to unplug its phone.

Located on Marylebone Road, customers walking into the restaurant are welcomed with a wall-length banner of a waving Palestinian flag, along with other cultural images and objects that line the establishment, including embroidery and the national colors of black, white, and green.

It also features portraits of celebrities who have voiced support for Palestine, including US actress Angelina Jolie, Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, and model Bella Hadid, as well as Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian journalist killed by Israeli troops last year.

“I just want people to feel they are in a Palestinian restaurant in Palestine,” Haleem Kherellah, owner of the restaurant, told Anadolu.

Kherellah said he also wanted people to feel like they were coming to “my parent's kitchen, a home.”

In an exclusive interview to Anadolu inside the restaurant, he said they still received death threats via dozens of calls which have “gone crazy,” in the last 10 days.

“They are threatening to come and kill the staff, to come and beat them up. ‘We are coming to you,’” said Kherellah, adding that even before the current surge, they were receiving threatening calls on a regular basis.

“Because it's so annoying. I told them to unplug the phone,” added Kherellah, a London resident for 20 years.

Thankfully, the calls have not materialized into any major physical attack apart from one person throwing an object at the restaurant and another putting offensive stickers on the door.

His staff “feel that this restaurant has a mission to keep the Palestinian culture alive and we are not going to let people kill it,” Kherellah asserted.

Meanwhile, police have launched an investigation into the incident and found two to three suspects in relation to the threat calls, he said, happy that action had been taken.

He also noted that when word of the abuse got out, the restaurant also received many calls from different groups expressing solidarity.

“We get 10 to 20 phone calls from Jewish people to say how sorry they are,” he said.

More support came from Mayor Sadiq Khan, who visited the restaurant, saying it was unacceptable that business owners had become victims of “abhorrent hate crimes” in London.

“We can't let hate divide us-we must stand in solidarity with affected communities & strive for unity,” he said on X last week.

As a Palestinian living in the UK for decades, Kherellah said anything representing their culture risked facing such challenges.

“All my message to everybody, ‘Don't surrender, don't let them defeat you and carry on.’ And we will always rebuild again. We have nothing to hide. We have a strong cause and we have a strong culture and we should let everybody see it and feel it,” he said.

- Situation in Gaza

Noting that he has family near Jaffa and nephews and nieces in the Negev desert in southern Israel near the border, Kherellah said many of his cousins living in Gaza faced extreme difficulty under the Israeli attacks.

“So bad. Bad is not the word. It's so sad and it's so bad,” he said.

Civilians in Gaza are dying under “collective punishment,” stressed Kherellah, lamenting the thousands of children and women getting killed in the enclave over the past weeks.

Kherellah said that while he was impressed by the vast support Western nations gave Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia, these same countries had “zero humanity” for Palestine.

“But I will never ever stop thanking everybody shed tears for us. Everybody who walked in the demonstration, everybody, supporters, I know they are ordinary people,” he said.

It was very sad to see that Western governments and media “are not really against Hamas, but more harming the children and the women,” he said.

Israel has launched incessant air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Oct. 7.

At least 10,569 Palestinians, including 4,324 children and 2,823 women, have been killed since then. The Israeli death toll, meanwhile, is nearly 1,600, according to official figures.

Besides the large number of casualties, massive displacements and thousands of buildings razed to the ground, basic supplies are running low for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents due to the Israeli siege.