A judge has jailed four Palestine Action activists over a 2024 break-in and damage at Elbit Systems UK’s Gloucestershire factory, after finding their offending had a terrorist connection. Charlotte Head and Leona Kamio were each sentenced to five years, Fatema Rajwani to four years and eight months, and Samuel Corner to seven years and eight months.

The ruling, handed down on Friday, means each will also spend an additional year on licence and face 15 years of terrorist notification requirements. It is a severe outcome for a case that began with property damage, but ended with a judge treating the raid as more than criminal mischief.

A prosecution report said the raid caused £1.2m of damage, including 41 military assets and £395,056 tied to six units in an unnamed drone system. The site was described in court as the UK factory of an Israeli arms manufacturer, and prosecutors said the scale of the attack justified a sentence that reflected far more than the value of the wreckage.

Mr Justice Johnson said the defendants had taken part in a “carefully planned and highly sophisticated attack” designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public, including Elbit employees and people linked to the company. He said the fact that they were trying to shut down a company they believed was acting unlawfully did not reduce the seriousness of what they had done.

That finding put the case squarely at the point where the defence and the court parted ways. The prosecution had asked for the activists to be sentenced as terrorists for a non-violent offence, while lawyers for the defendants argued the court should not use terrorism laws to drive up punishment where no jury had convicted them of terrorism-related conduct.

Samuel Corner’s sentence was the longest of the four, and his case carried an added dimension. He had already been convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent after striking Sgt Kate Evans with a sledgehammer during the same episode, a fact that sharpened the gravity of the attack and set him apart from the others in the dock.

The judge’s order now leaves all four with years in prison and a long tail of monitoring after release. The unanswered question is whether the defendants will challenge the terrorist connection finding, the lengths of the sentences, or both — but for now, Friday’s ruling has turned a break-in at an Elbit Systems site into a case with consequences that will run for years.