London (Quds News Network)- UK lawmakers have voted in favour of legislation to designate Palestine Action as a 'terrorist' organisation, in response to the group’s opposition to the UK's complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The order, which amends the Terrorism Act 2000 and passed by 385 votes to 26, is now expected to be signed by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and come into effect later this week. This came after the group’s activists broke into a military base last month and sprayed red paint on two planes in protest at the UK’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The group Palestine Action said two members entered the RAF Brize Norton military base in Oxfordshire, spraying paint into the engines of the Voyager aircraft and attacking them with crowbars. “Despite publicly condemning the Israeli government, Britain continues to send military cargo, fly spy planes over Gaza and refuel U.S./Israeli fighter jets,” the group said in a statement, posting a video of the incident on X. “Britain isn’t just complicit, it’s an active participant in the Gaza genocide and war crimes across the Middle East.” The ban puts Palestine Action on a par with armed groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) in the UK, making it a criminal offence to support or be part of the protest group. “Let us be clear: to equate a spray can of paint with a suicide bomb isn’t just absurd, it is grotesque. It is a deliberate distortion of the law to chill dissent, criminalise solidarity, and suppress the truth,” said lawmaker Zarah Sultana, a member of the ruling Labour party. Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive of Amnesty International UK, slammed the move as “unprecedented legal overreach”, pointing out that it gave the authorities “massive powers to arrest and detain people, suppress speech and reporting, conduct surveillance and take other measures”. “Using them against a direct-action protest group is an egregious abuse of what they were created for,” he said. Protesters gathered outside Westminster on Wednesday to show support for Palestine Action. The proscription order will reach parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, on Thursday. If approved there, the ban on Palestine Action would become effective in the following days. The group, which has called its proscription unjustified and an “abuse of power,” has challenged the decision in court and an urgent hearing is expected on Friday. Launched in July 2020, Palestine Action says it uses “disruptive tactics” to target “corporate enablers” and companies involved in weapons manufacture for Israel, such as Israel-based Elbit Systems and French multinational Thales. The British government has accused the group of causing millions of pounds of damage through its actions. The head of Human Rights Watch in the UK, Yasmine Ahmed, said proscribing Palestine Action was "a grave abuse of state power and a terrifying escalation in this government's crusade to curtail protest rights". "We expect this of authoritarian regimes like Russia or China, not a country like the UK that professes to believe in democratic freedoms," she added.