Last week saw an art exhibition row and two different direct action protests as the firm denies links to Israeli military
Protesters from a group called Disarm Bristol blockade the front of Elbit Systems defence firm in Filton on Thursday, March 26(Image: Disarm Bristol)
Bosses at a defence company on the edge of Bristol that has been the subject of years of protests and direct action over their links to Israel have hit back, and said the campaign against them is ‘deplorable’.
Elbit Systems told Bristol Live it is ‘proud’ that the firm employs hundreds of people locally, and denied that any arms or military equipment worked on at the firm’s locations in North Bristol supplies Israel.
Elbit Systems broke its usual silence over the protests after campaigners again blockaded the entrance to the firm’s facility in Filton last week, and controversy raged over an art exhibition at the M-Shed which linked the firm and its bosses to Israel’s military action in Gaza and the West Bank.
The week began with Bristol Live reporting that Bristol City Council shut down an art exhibition that criticised the city’s defence firms, BAE Systems and Elbit Systems, and in various pieces of pop-art, named bosses at the firms and linked them to the Israeli military action in Gaza.
On Wednesday, activists from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) said they had shut down Elbit’s premises in Filton, with images showing a large number of campaigners linking arms to across the road and the gates to the site, and activists had also targeted other defence companies, including other Elbit Systems sites, around the country in a day of co-ordinated action.
READ MORE: Council shuts down art exhibition criticising Bristol’s arms industry
Video footage on social media later showed police physically attempting to remove campaigners and break the wall of people.
There were similar scenes again on Thursday, with a different group called Disarm Bristol blocking the entrance, and this time, many protesters wore cut-out masks showing the face of an Elbit Systems boss, which had been removed from the art exhibition at the M-Shed after the intervention of lawyers from Bristol City Council.
But Elbit Systems hit back, slamming the protesters for their regular direct action protests at their sites in Bristol, and saying workers at the businesses were ‘abused and subject to misinformation’.
The firm said the sites in Bristol supplied the UK’s armed forces, not Israel’s. “We are proud that hundreds of locally employed and highly skilled colleagues working at our Horizon site in Bristol provide critical support and advanced technology to the British armed forces,” a spokesperson told Bristol Live.
File image of protesters at Elbit Systems in Bristol(Image: Submitted)
“Any claims that this facility supplies the Israeli military or the Israeli Ministry of Defence are completely false.
“We will continue to robustly protect our people and property. It is deplorable that our members of staff are abused and subjected to misinformation about the true nature of their work,” they added.
Protesters in Bristol who have been targeting Elbit Systems for years disagree with the firm’s denials, saying the firm is Israeli-owned and supplies the Israeli military.
The Israeli military operation in Gaza was described as a genocide by a UN Commission of Inquiry report in September 2025, and by the world’s leading association of genocide scholars in the same month.
“Britain is an active participant in Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians by continuing to facilitate the export of weapons and military technology to Israel,” said Lewis Backon, the PSC’s campaigns officer.
“Many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s genocide, yet still the government refuses to impose a full arms embargo. Our nationwide protests today show that there is a clear demand to end Britain’s complicity in these monumental crimes against humanity.”
Dr Eldin Fahmy, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, was one of the protesters with Bristol PSC on Wednesday. He said: “We are ashamed to have Elbit Systems in our city. We must end all complicity in the genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.”