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Sharon Osbourne has urged US authorities to revoke work visas for Kneecap after the Irish language rap group used a performance at Coachella to denounce Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The TV presenter accused the band of hate speech and supporting terrorist organisations and said it should not be allowed to perform in the US. “I urge you to join me in advocating for the revocation of Kneecap’s work visa,” she exhorted followers on X on Tuesday.

Fox News commentators also condemned the band and accused it of bringing “Nazi Germany” sentiments to America.

Kneecap scorned the Fox News comments and posted supportive messages from fans, saying it had received thousands of such endorsements as well as “hundreds of violent Zionist threats”. Almost all the concerts of a US tour scheduled for October have sold out, it added.

The trio, Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara from Belfast and DJ Próvaí from Derry, have built a following in the US with a mix of Irish republican totems, punk spirit and a film that stormed last year’s Utah film festival.

During their set last weekend at Coachella, the California desert music festival, Mo Chara said Britain had persecuted Irish people but not bombed them from the skies. “The Palestinians have nowhere to go.”

The performers led the audience in chants of “free, free Palestine” and screened pro-Palestinian messages on to screens. “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” said one. “It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes,” said another. The last used an expletive against Israel.

Osbourne, a judge on the TV show America’s Got Talent, said the festival had “compromised its moral and spiritual integrity” by allowing Kneecap and Green Day to denounce Israel over the 18-month war.

“Music’s primary purpose is to unite people. It should not be a venue for promoting terrorist organisations or spreading hate”, she said, singling out Kneecap’s “aggressive” political statements.

“This band openly support terrorist organisations. This behaviour raises concerns about the appropriateness of their participation in such a festival and further shows they are booked to play in the USA.”

Fox News commentators compared the band’s comments to Nazi Germany, with one saying the band should be removed from “authority positions” and that the “values of education” should be re-instilled.

Kneecap posted a clip of the segment and said the commentator’s admission that she had not previously heard of the band was the “only part of this shite that made any sense”.

The group said they had planned to denounce “US-backed genocide in Gaza” at an earlier performance in Coachella, on 11 April, but that the comments did not appear on the screen. The band also complained that the festival’s livestream did not carry a chant celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher.

As the bells rang out across the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the priests began to sing a deep, low prayer. Heads bowed over candles, and escorted by people bearing aloft large gold crosses, they made their way to a platform at the heart of the ancient square.

The ceremony on Holy Thursday, in which the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem washes the feet of 12 monastic priests to commemorate the Last Supper, is one of many Easter rituals that have taken place in the Old City of Jerusalem for hundreds of years. For Christians, there is no holier place to commemorate Easter than here, the site where they believe Jesus Christ was crucified, buried and resurrected.

Yet the crowd that assembled outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Thursday morning was small and muted. International pilgrims jostled with dark-robed Greek Orthodox monks, but one group of native worshippers was noticeably absent.

For generations, the tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians living in Israeli-occupied West Bank villages and cities such as Ramallah, Bethlehem and Taybeh would travel to Jerusalem’s Old City at Easter to take part in the prayers, processions and rituals such as the Holy Fire ceremony. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself is in East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel from Jordan in the six-day war of 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1980.

A Greek Orthodox cleric during the Washing of the Feet ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Thursday. Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

Yet centuries of tradition have been ruptured by Israel’s increasingly draconian control over Palestinian movement – which means any Palestinian in the West Bank living outside Jerusalem, must obtain a military permit if they want to enter the city. For years, Christians in Palestinian territories were regularly granted permits to visit Jerusalem around Easter but since the war with Hamas broke out on 7 October 2023, they have become almost impossible to obtain.

This Easter, the government announced it had issued 6,000 permits, though there are 50,000 Christians – mostly Catholic or Greek Orthodox – living in the West Bank beyond East Jerusalem. However, in reality, just 4,000 were given, according to Christian leaders, and often only to a few members of each family who applied.

These permits are valid for just one week and do not allow the Palestinian pilgrims to stay in Jerusalem overnight, meaning they have to make the gruelling journey back to the West Bank by bus or taxi – crossing a multitude of army checkpoints – every evening, limiting the festivities they can take part in. A group from the village of Taybeh said the Israeli military still did not allow them to cross over to Jerusalem for Palm Sunday even though they had valid permits.

The few who do make it to the Old City have been met with increased police brutality in recent years. In April 2023, Palestinian Christian worshipers and international pilgrims were beaten by Israeli police and armed forces as they attempted to reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

“People are very afraid and many will not risk attending the Easter processions any more,” said Omar Haramy, who runs Sabeel, a Christian organisation based in Jerusalem. He said several staff were beaten last year as they tried to attend Easter festivities in the Old City, and Christians in the Old City regularly faced hostility outside churches or as they went about their daily lives.

One of the greatest sources of distress among the Christian community is the introduction of blockades and aggressive policing that prevented thousands of Christians being able to take part in the Holy Fire festivities that mark the resurrection on Easter Saturday afternoon, as they have done for hundreds of years in the Old City.

The sun shines through the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where tradition has it that Christ was crucified, buried and resurrected. Photograph: Debbie Hill/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

While the restrictions have been justified in the name of safety, many Christians view them as another way for the Israeli state to exert dominance over the community.

“I will go to the celebrations on Holy Saturday because my family has been part of this tradition for thousands of years, but I’m not going to bring my kids, it’s too dangerous now, with the police violence,” Haramy said.

The spectre of Gaza also hangs over this year’s Easter festivities. Palestinian Christians are among the 51,000 people killed in Gaza since the war with Israel began and on Palm Sunday, an Israeli missile hit the only Christian-run hospital in the strip. There are about 500 Christians are sheltering in Holy Family church, one of only two left standing. Those contacted by the Guardian said they were too afraid to talk, fearful of anything that might make them a target of Israeli airstrikes.

For all its biblical significance and abundance of churches, convents and monasteries, Jerusalem’s Old City has become increasingly dangerous for all Christians, not just those from Arab backgrounds. Since the rise of Jewish ultranationalism in Israel, and the election of the most far-right government in the country’s history, extremist and settler Jewish movements – who want to claim all of Israel and Palestinian-controlled territories as a state only for Jews – have been emboldened in their actions against both Christians and Muslims.

Historically, the relationship between Christians and Jews has been fraught, because of the Christian church’s historic role in antisemitism and the persecution of Jews. The ongoing presence of proselytising evangelical Christians, many from the US, who travel to Israel with the sole purpose of converting Jews, has also been inflammatory, particularly among the Jewish Orthodox community.

But religious intolerance and antichristian sentiment has been made mainstream by Israeli political leadership – the ultra-hardline national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, described Israelis spitting on Christians as “an old Jewish tradition” – and old suspicions have escalated into brazen, all-out violence. There have also been growing incidences of settler groups attempting to seize Christian land in Jerusalem. In 2023, the Holy Land Roman Catholic patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa accused the government of establishing a “cultural and political atmosphere that can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians”.

A recent report by the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue documented the steep rise in the scale and severity of attacks on Christians in Jerusalem and across Israel in 2024, ranging from spitting at priests and public hate speech to the desecration of graves, arson attacks and vandalising of churches.

“It’s usually young Israeli Jewish men who are conducting these attacks with impunity. They face very little punishment, if the police get involved at all,” said John Munayer, the director of international engagement at the Rossing Center.

“It’s a clear attempt by hardcore settler Zionists to Judaise the Old City of Jersualem and trying to make it unbearable for Christians who have been there for centuries.”

As he attended the Easter prayer ceremony on Thursday, Father Nikon Golovko, the deputy head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, said he had “really seen things change for the worse for Christians in the past nine years”.

Catholic clerics during the Washing of the Feet procession at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Thursday. Photograph: Léo Corrêa/AP

He said: “We receive a lot more hostility and even aggression from the Jewish community. They spit on priests, even when we are walking through the Christian quarter. It sends a message that the city belongs not to all communities but only to the Jews. It was not like this before.”

After an incident in which Orthodox Jews were caught on video spitting at Christians, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that Israel was “totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths”.

Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian Christian political analyst and the author of Rooted in Palestine: Palestinian Christians and the Struggle for National Liberation 1917-2004, said that despite the mounting harassment they faced, the diminishing numbers of Christians left in the West Bank and the unrelenting horrors of the war in Gaza, he still viewed Easter as a time of hope and “the timely message that life defeats death”.

“As Palestinian Christians, we know that this generation will either make it or break it,” said Abu Eid.

“So making clear to the Israeli occupation that we are going to stay, that we will celebrate the same religious events that we’ve been celebrating for centuries is both a national mandate and a religious mission that we have. Keeping our Christian traditions alive, praying – they have become an act of resistance.”

Shabana Mahmood’s intervention to halt new guidelines on sentencing is “dangerous” and a “deliberate step backwards”, according to senior legal figures and prison campaigners.

The Society of Black Lawyers said guidelines from the Sentencing Council, which were suspended after an intervention by the justice secretary, were an attempt to achieve “equal treatment” after “racist two-tier policing for 500 years”.

Pavan Dhaliwal, the head of the charity Revolving Doors, said the lord chancellor’s decision to block recommendations for pre-sentencing reports for minorities “is to ignore lived experience, evidence, and the reality of disparity in our courts”.

The Sentencing Council on Monday suspended plans for the guidelines in England and Wales, which highlighted the need for pre-sentencing reports depending on age, sex and ethnicity, as ministers prepared to force through a law to overturn proposals.

Mahmood told MPs that the council would have its role reviewed in light of the row over the guidelines.

The climbdown, which took place hours before the guidance was due to come into force, followed a standoff with the Ministry of Justice, which planned to use emergency legislation to override the guidelines.

The guidelines, first drawn up under the Conservative government, were viewed as evidence of a “two-tier” justice system by the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick.

Peter Herbert, the chair of the Society of Black Lawyers, said: “We have experienced racist two-tier policing for over 500 years. If we achieve equal treatment that is not two-tier as it is long overdue. We have never asked for special treatment only equal treatment.”

Dhaliwal said: “The lord chancellor’s decision to block the Sentencing Council’s guidance is a deliberate step backwards and the claim that recognising race and inequality in sentencing undermines fairness is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.

“To suggest that acknowledging these facts undermines equality is to ignore lived experience, evidence, and the reality of disparity in our courts. Pre-sentence reports are one of the few tools we have to challenge those disparities by giving courts the full context: poverty, trauma, racial discrimination.”

Black and minority ethnic communities are overrepresented at almost all stages of the criminal justice process in England and Wales and are more likely to be imprisoned and receive longer sentences than white people.

The council, composed of some of the most senior legal figures in England and Wales, said the guidelines would have helped address disparities between how different ethnicities are treated in the justice system.

The new rules, which would have been binding on judges, were set to take effect on Tuesday but were delayed on Monday because of the inevitability they would be overturned by parliament.

The new rules stated: “When considering a community or custodial sentence, the court must request and consider a pre-sentence report (PSR) before forming an opinion of the sentence, unless it considers that it is unnecessary.”

“A pre-sentence report will normally be considered necessary if the offender belongs to one (or more) of the following cohorts:

At risk of first custodial sentence and/or at risk of a custodial sentence of 2 years or less (after taking into account any reduction for guilty plea).

A young adult (typically 18-25 years.

Female.

From an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community.

Pregnant or postnatal.

Sole or primary carer for dependent relatives.”

The leading black KC Keir Monteith said there had been a deliberate misreading of the rules to generate a row.

“This is an absurd situation where we have politicians on both sides of the house creating an argument out of absolutely nothing. It is not ‘two-tier’ justice because the starting point of the dropped guidelines was everyone should get a pre-sentencing report.

“This story that has been created by Robert Jenrick and then taken up by Mahmood and seems to coincide with all the noise we are getting from America about two-tier justice,” he said.

In an article for the Guardian, Janey Starling, the co-director of gender justice campaign group Level Up, accused Mahmood of participating in “a populist pantomime” with Jenrick.

“What is truly appalling is that Mahmood decided to play along in an attempt to win over Conservative and Reform UK voters,” she said.

In a statement to the Commons, Mahmood said: “The proper role of the Sentencing Council and the process for making guidelines of this type must be considered further.

“I will do so in the coming months. It is right that this question is considered in greater depth and should further legislation be required, I shall propose it as part of the upcoming sentencing bill.”

The Labour MP Diane Abbott has said some MPs are “astonished” at Mahmood’s response to the council’s dropped guidelines. “I realise this is not a popular view in the house but the justice secretary will be aware that some of us are astonished that she thinks our judges are so weak-minded as to be affected by what are guidelines in relation to how they sentence black and brown defendants,” she said.

People-smugglers should be treated like terrorists, Keir Starmer will say on Monday, as he hosts an international summit on organised migration crime in London.

Starmer will urge representatives from more than 40 countries to cooperate across national borders to stop smugglers just as they did to stop terrorists when he was director of public prosecutions more than a decade ago.

The summit is the latest initiative in the government’s attempts to cut irregular migration by targeting organised crime. So far, however, the strategy has not paid off, with more people having crossed the Channel in small boats this year than had done so by this point in the previous three.

Starmer will say: “When I was the director of public prosecutions, we worked across borders throughout Europe and beyond to foil numerous plots, saving thousands of lives in the process. We prevented planes from being blown up over the Atlantic and brought the perpetrators to justice.

“I believe we should treat organised immigration crime in the same way.”

He will add: “I simply do not believe organised immigration crime cannot be tackled. We’ve got to combine our resources, share intelligence and tactics, and tackle the problem upstream at every step of the people smuggling routes.”

Ministers will mark the opening of the summit with a range of new policy measures, including £30m to tackle global trafficking routes and the flows of illicit money which fund them. A further £3m will go to the Crown Prosecution Service to help it expand its international work.

Officials from a number of countries will attend, including the US, Vietnam, Iraq and France. Meta and TikTok will also be there to talk about how to stop the online promotion of people smuggling.

Yvette Cooper said on Sunday the government would also change employment laws so companies can be punished for employing someone without the necessary visa even if they do so as a contractor rather than as staff.

The home secretary is targeting businesses such as restaurants, takeaways, barbers and beauty parlours, which often use irregular workers without checking their immigration status.

She added that the government is also considering the application of article eight of the Human Rights Act, which protects the right to a family life and is often used by migrants to argue they should be allowed to stay in the UK.

Cooper told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday: “We are reviewing this area to make sure that the immigration and asylum system works effectively in the way that parliament intended it to and make sure that there is a proper sense of control in the system.”

Starmer and Cooper scrapped the previous government’s Rwanda plan soon after coming to power last year and focused instead on cross-border action to tackle people smugglers.

Officials say the approach is working, highlighting a series of recent arrests of people they describe as “smuggling kingpins”. Three men were recently convicted in Belgium for being involved in people smuggling, for example, after being arrested in the UK.

The number of small boat crossings continues to rise, however. More than 5,000 people have made the crossing so far this year – a threshold which was met faster than in any year on record.

Cooper in part blamed the weather for the high number of crossings, saying on Sunday: “We cannot carry on with border security being so dependent on the number of calm days that happen in the Channel.

“But the reason that is happening is because the criminal gangs still have a deep hold.”