Actor Khalid Abdalla has received a letter from the police summoning him to attend a “formal interview” after he attended a Palestine rally in January. 

On an Instagram post published yesterday, Abdallah noted that several others, including Stephen Kapos, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, received a letter about the same protest, which was organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and took place on January 8.

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed to the BBC that eight people have been “invited to be interviewed under caution at a police station” in relation to an “ongoing investigation into alleged breaches of Public Order Act conditions on Saturday 18 January”. It’s unclear whether the interview will lead to a charge.

“The right to protest is under attack in this country and it requires all of us to defend it,” Abdalla wrote on Instagram. “While there is an alarming rise in attempts to censor voices that stand up for Palestine, even as it faces open calls for ethnic cleansing, it will not work. The days of silencing after intimidation are gone.”  He pointed to the victory of Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land at the Oscars on Sunday as an example of momentum being on the side of justice. 

Abdalla, who is best known for his roles in The Crown, The Day of the Jackal, The Kite Runner and United 93, is not the first public figure to face a police interview in relation to the protest in January. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell were both questioned under caution, after they allegedly breached conditions imposed on the protest by the police, which had curtailed plans to march past the BBC because there was a synagogue nearby.

The police later claimed that a group of protesters “forced its way through” a police line, but this characterisation of events was disputed by Corbyn. “I was part of a delegation of speakers, who wished to peacefully carry and lay flowers in memory of children in Gaza who had been killed,” he wrote on Twitter. “This was facilitated by the police. We did not force our way through. When we reached Trafalgar Square, we informed police that we would go no further, lay down flowers and disperse.”

Abdalla is an outspoken supporter of Palestine. He has attended several demos against Israel’s war on Gaza,  which many experts believe meets the legal definition of genocide, and he recently signed an open letter protesting the BBC’s decision to remove a documentary about children in Gaza after it discovered the 13-year-old narrator is the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.