PRO-PALESTINE activists have claimed to have vandalised every Barclays Bank cash machine in Glasgow.
Several people from campaign group Palestine Action took part in the protest overnight on October 7 in an attempt to put the cash machines out of order.
Activists claimed the bank now holds more than £2 billion in shares of companies whose weapons, components, and military technology are used by Israel in Gaza.
ATMs on Argyle Street, one at the Barclays HQ in the Glasgow Financial Services District, and the machine at Springfield Quay are all out of service, activists reported. Some were glued up while others were filled with expanding foam, and messages pasted on to them stating: “Barclays funds genocide”.
Others scaled the stone arches at the University of Strathclyde to fly a Palestine flag and a Lebanon flag.
Organisers claimed Strathclyde partners with BAE Systems, one of the companies making the F-35 fighter jet targeting Palestine and Lebanon.
The campaign group said: “The Israeli bombardment has displaced nearly the entire population of the densely inhabited area of Gaza, forcing hundreds of thousands of people into camps which lack all basic provisions, and which are also frequently attacked.
“The current genocide is a continuation of Israel's destruction of Palestinian life since the state's foundation in 1948, and further back, to Britain's colonial occupation of Palestine in the 1920s.
"We will not rest until Glasgow ends all complicity with the settler colonial Zionist state."
Barclays has been targeted by pro-Palestine campaigners in recent months, with protesters smashing windows and chucking paint over dozens of the bank’s branches across the UK.
The bank said it has become the target of a disinformation campaign over its ties to defence companies which has put colleagues at risk.
In a statement previously posted online, the bank said: “We trade in shares of listed companies in response to client instruction or demand and that may result in us holding shares.
“Whilst we provide financial services to these companies, we are not making investments for Barclays and Barclays is not a ‘shareholder’ or ‘investor’ in that sense in relation to these companies.”
