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# National Gallery refuses to show how a Gaza protest that harmed no painting cost it £7,196
- URL: https://www.urgentmatter.press/national-gallery-refuses-to-show-how-a-gaza-protest-that-harmed-no-painting-cost-it-7-196/
- Published: 2026-08-31T15:25:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T15:25:29.000Z
- Description: The refusal came in a partial answer to a Freedom of Information request from Urgent Matter.
- Author: Adam Schrader
- Tags: Law and Crime, #public-access

A pro-Palestine protest in which water-based paint was poured on the wooden floor of Britain’s National Gallery reportedly cost it £7,196\. Only £271.59 of that was cleaning. No painting was damaged. And the gallery is now refusing to show how it calculated the cost.

The refusal came in a partial answer to a Freedom of Information request from Urgent Matter, sent on August 28 by Nicholas Smith, an archivist in the gallery’s research department.

The request concerned an October 9, 2024 incident in which two Youth Demand activists — 25-year-old NHS worker Jai Halai and 23-year-old politics student Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld — entered Room 43 and taped a photograph of a Gazan mother and her wounded child over the glass of Pablo Picasso’s *Motherhood (La Maternité)* and poured water-based red paint on the floor.

Halai and Rosenfeld shouted “Free Palestine” as guards dragged them out and demanded Britain impose a two-way arms embargo on Israel. The photograph, taken by Palestinian photojournalist Ali Jadallah at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, showed a mother holding a son wounded in an Israeli airstrike.

***Paid subscribers can*** [***read the documents***](https://www.urgentmatter.press/foia-documents-the-national-gallerys-partial-refusal-on-the-picasso-protest-costs/)***.***

[FOIA Documents: National Gallery partial FOIA refusalDocuments released from U.K.’s National Gallery after an Urgent Matter FOIA request.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3c/26/3c26cf7a-2384-4a8d-82e1-f44702177698/content/images/icon/urgent-matter-icon-f0cbec61-ad98-485b-beb5-d24f972922e8.jpg)Urgent MatterAdam Schrader![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3c/26/3c26cf7a-2384-4a8d-82e1-f44702177698/content/images/thumbnail/urgent-matter-icon-2-ea512b4a-aa60-41e2-bc3c-f427515d1a8d.jpg)](https://www.urgentmatter.press/foia-documents-the-national-gallerys-partial-refusal-on-the-picasso-protest-costs/)

A jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted the pair of criminal damage on July 28 after more than nine hours of deliberation. They are scheduled to be sentenced on September 8.

“To the two members of the jury who held out on their not guilty stance right until the end you have my gratitude. To stand against 10 of your peers after deliberating for 9 hours and stay true to your beliefs is no small feat. It is an act of resistance in itself and you have my thanks,” Halai [said in a statement](https://youthdemand.org/2026/07/28/two-youth-demand-supporters-found-guilty-of-criminal-damage-at-national-gallery-after-covering-up-picasso-masterpiece-with-photo-of-bloodied-gazan-mother-and-child/?ref=urgentmatter.press) after the verdict.

“To the other 10 jurors, I can not blame you for convicting us. It is a heavy responsibility being a juror, not helped by our archaic system of justice. You heard that we did not deny anything about what happened on the day. Your role was to judge our intentions and whether we were reckless about risking damage.”

The gallery itself wrote to Arts Council England on the afternoon of the protest that “no damage was done to any painting.” But the museum claimed that the water-based paint damaged the museum’s wooden floor.

Michael Willie, the 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.”

Asked during the trial whether there was an obvious case of permanent damage, Willie said, “No, not at that point,” according to the populist [British broadcaster GB News](https://www.gbnews.com/news/pro-palestine-protesters-guilty-national-gallery?ref=urgentmatter.press).

The gallery said a marble joint had to be replaced and that four workers were charged £120 an hour overnight to refinish the floor so the gallery was “presentable to members of the public the next morning,” the court heard.

“This included mopping up the water-based paint, cutting out and replacing a section of floor that had warped and rebuffing and lacquering the entire room,” Youth Demand said after the verdict. 

“The defence questioned why the National Gallery had found it necessary to include the cost of treating the whole floor when only a small section had been damaged.”

Katie McFadden, defending Halai, called that an “aesthetic decision” to keep the gallery “looking fancy,” GB News reported.

The National Gallery is now refusing to release the paperwork behind those calculations. It told Urgent Matter it holds “a document recording the total financial cost attributed to the incident, including an itemised breakdown of that total and schedule of damage" but withheld it as a court record. 

That exemption is absolute, the gallery said, and carries “no duty to consider the public interest in disclosure.”

It also withheld the invoices, a repair quotation and a purchase order too, arguing that releasing them could harm law enforcement. Some of the work never generated an invoice at all.

“Invoices were not raised for every component of the works,” the gallery said, because it calculated those costs “from the hourly rate on contract.”

The gallery confirmed, in its own words, that the painting came through untouched. It holds no conservation report because “the painting sustained no loss or damage,” the response said. And it made no insurance claim: “Given that the painting was undamaged no claim was made under the GIS,” it said, referring to the Government Indemnity Scheme that covers loans to public collections.

To justify withholding the cost records, the gallery cited the sentencing hearing. Releasing the figures now, it wrote, “might lead to comment or speculation about, or otherwise interfere in, matters relevant to sentencing before it has been imposed,” and would “likely interfere with the administration of justice.”

It also said the gallery sits “at high risk from those fringe elements intent on committing criminal activities or breaches of public order,” and that disclosing security information would undermine its safeguards.

The gallery acknowledged that “there is a public interest in knowing what costs have been incurred by the Gallery, and by extension the U.K. taxpayer, owing to criminal damage” before concluding that “the public interest strongly favors maintaining the exemption.”

The Picasso is a current long loan to the National Gallery from a private collection, documents show. Within hours of the protest, the gallery moved to reassure the lender. It emailed the lender’s representative and asked it to “share this with the owners.”

The representative wrote back that the owner had been “reassured … that their pictures are undamaged.”

The gallery withheld the lender’s identity to protect personal information but it did not redact the representative’s letterhead: the released chain carries the printed heading of art dealer Nevill Keating Pictures.

Extracts from the loan agreement show the work is covered “Nail to Nail” under the indemnity scheme, that the gallery’s liability is capped at an agreed value, and that it may remove the work “from display for safety reasons,” including a fire “or in the event of a hazard.”

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