National Gallery staff walk past Claude Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillere (left) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Grenouillere during an exclusive preview of the forthcoming exhibition Renoir and Love in London, United Kingdom, on July 28, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Two anti-Israel activists who pasted an image of a wounded Gazan mother and child over a Pablo Picasso painting at London’s National Gallery and poured red paint across the floor have been convicted of criminal damage.
Jai Halai, 25, a worker for Britain’s National Health Service from Barnet, and Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld, 23, a politics student from London, were found guilty by a jury at Southwark Crown Court. Both had denied the charge and were released on bail ahead of sentencing in September.
Halai and Rosenfeld, members of the activist group Youth Demand, staged the protest on Oct. 9, 2024. They affixed a photograph of a bloodied Gazan mother holding her injured child to the protective glass covering Picasso’s 1901 painting “Motherhood (La Maternité)” before pouring water-based red paint beneath the artwork and across the gallery floor.
The pair then chanted “Free, free Palestine” and demanded that Britain impose a two-way arms embargo on Israel. Youth Demand released footage of the demonstration shortly afterward and identified Halai and Rosenfeld as the participants. Security guards removed the activists from the gallery before police arrested them.
The Picasso painting itself was not damaged, but the protest caused damage elsewhere in the gallery, Michael Willie, the National Gallery’s head of security and facilities, told jurors.
“Paint was on the marble skirting, stanchion, rope barriers, and it was seeping into the sockets,” Willie testified. “Just staining in the grains of the marble, the mastic joint, we had to replace it in its entirety.”
The jury deliberated for more than nine hours before finding both defendants guilty of criminal damage. Judge David Tomlinson allowed them to remain free on bail until sentencing.
