Transparency & Accountability
Al-Masri demands Britain apologise for Balfour after Israeli sniper paralysed his grandson
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Munib al-Masri told the story of one bullet this week. In a post on his Facebook page, the Nablus industrialist recounted how an Israeli sniper's round paralysed his grandson fifteen years ago — and asked readers to stand behind Britain Owes Palestine, the campaign he leads to make London answer for the promise he says lies beneath that wound.
His grandson, who carries his name, was twenty-two when he was shot on the Lebanese border. "A single bullet was enough to paralyse him," al-Masri wrote. The suffering, he added, "is not an isolated event": its roots reach back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, leaving Britain "a historical, moral and legal responsibility" for what has followed from it to this day.
The post pointed readers to an interview his grandson gave the Scottish daily The National, published as the campaign approaches the deadline it has set for Keir Starmer's government: answer a 400-page legal petition by September, or face an application for judicial review.
One bullet at Maroun al-Ras#
On 15 May 2011, Munib Rabih al-Masri, then a geology student at the American University of Beirut, joined tens of thousands of people at Maroun al-Ras, on Lebanon's southern border, marking the sixty-third anniversary of the Nakba — the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the war of 1948. Israeli soldiers fired live rounds across the frontier fence into the crowd.
One round tore through him, destroying his left kidney and his spleen and breaking apart against his spine, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported at the time. He survived a chain of operations. He has used a wheelchair ever since.
He was not alone that day. Israeli fire killed around ten demonstrators and wounded more than a hundred along the border, The Electronic Intifada recorded in a retrospective of the day that counted 112 people hit beside the ten dead.
Two bullets, sixty-eight years apart, frame the family's case against the declaration between them. Graphic: Times of Palestine.
The grandfather's older wound#
The grandfather carries an older bullet in the same story — a British one. In 1943, as a schoolboy in Nablus under the British Mandate, he was shot in the leg by British troops during a protest march, he told Middle East Eye, five years before the Nakba emptied hundreds of towns and villages.
The boy went on to study in Texas and build much of the Palestinian economy's civilian scaffolding: the PADICO holding group behind the Palestine Exchange and the telecommunications company Paltel. Wealth earned him the nickname "the Duke of Nablus". It never closed the question he says he first met at a school desk.
I learnt about the Balfour Declaration at school, and it's taken me 83 years to get to the door of Downing Street to hold Britain to account.
Munib al-Masri, September 2025
A petition at the black door#
Last September, al-Masri finally reached that door. With his grandson beside him in his wheelchair, the historian Avi Shlaim and the international lawyer Victor Kattan, he delivered the petition to 10 Downing Street, The National reported from London.
The document, drafted by the barristers Ben Emmerson KC and Danny Friedman KC, argues that Britain unlawfully failed to recognise Palestinian self-determination and lacked proper legal authority for the Balfour Declaration and for the Mandate that enforced it between 1917 and 1948.
Its requests are specific: search the government's archives and release withheld material, respond fully and in public, acknowledge the wrongful acts of the Mandate years, have the prime minister deliver an apology in the House of Commons, and examine appropriate forms of reparation.
Westminster begins to answer#
The campaign has started to register in Parliament. In March, dozens of MPs and peers signed a letter backing the call for an apology over the declaration, Middle East Eye reported — the first parliamentary echo of the petition, six months after its delivery.
The organisers have given the government until September to respond, and say they will move for judicial review in the British courts if it does not. The campaign carries its case to the public in the meantime through its Instagram and Facebook channels under the name Britain Owes Palestine.
The grandfather framed the stakes in family terms. His grandson, he wrote, "is one of thousands of Palestinians who have suffered, and still suffer, the effects of this continuing reality." One bullet ended a young man's ability to walk; the campaign contends an older promise made that bullet possible. September will show whether Britain is prepared to answer for either.
