ULM — Five pro-Palestinian activists known as the "Ulm 5" are due to go on trial on Monday in Stuttgart over an alleged break-in and sabotage at an Elbit Systems facility in the German city of Ulm. The defendants, who hold British, Irish, German and Spanish citizenship, have been held in pre-trial detention in separate prisons since 8 September.

The activists are alleged to have broken into the Elbit Systems site in Baden-Württemberg in the early hours of 8 September, causing hundreds of thousands of euros of damage before calling police to arrest them. According to prosecutors, the group destroyed office and technical equipment with axes, detonated smoke bombs and defaced the exterior of the building with graffiti. The damage was estimated at between €200,000 and €1 million.

The five posted a video of the break-in online and waited in the grounds of the factory for officers to detain them. They have been charged with trespass, destruction of property and participation in a criminal organisation under section 129 of the German criminal code, a charge that allows authorities to deny bail on the grounds that the accused are considered a threat to society. If found guilty, they face up to five years in prison. None of the five has a previous conviction.

The defendants have been locked up for up to 23 hours a day with restricted access to visits, books, phone calls and mail, and have continued to be denied bail even after the six-month limit of pre-trial detention passed. Zo Hailu was strip-searched on arrival at a prison and forced to wear an adult nappy.

Benjamin Düsberg, a lawyer for 32-year-old Daniel Tatlow-Devally from Dublin, said the defense would invoke section 32 of the German criminal code, which allows an otherwise unlawful act to be justified if there is no other way to avert imminent harm. "The attack on the weapons factory was an action in 'defence of others' in trying to obstruct the movement of arms to Israel," he said. "We intend to use the proceedings to essentially turn the tables. We want to show that it's not our clients who should be on the hook, but rather the Elbit bosses, who continued delivering weapons even during the genocide."

The defence team will argue that as soon as the International Court of Justice ruled in 2024 that the claim of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza was "plausible", Berlin should have stopped all deliveries. Israel described the ICJ accusation of genocide in Gaza as "outrageous and false." Germany is the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, after the United States, and Elbit Systems is the most important land-based weapons supplier to the Israel Defense Forces.

In a special detention review last month, Stuttgart's higher regional court ordered the continuation of pre-trial detention for all defendants, citing a risk of flight that would not be sufficiently mitigated by bail. "The code of criminal procedure allows, under certain conditions, for the extension of pre-trial detention," a spokesperson for the Stuttgart-Stammheim court said. The spokesperson added: "Due to its size, its state-of-the-art security and media technology, the new courtroom building is particularly well suited to the requirements of state security trials (such as that of the Ulm 5), especially given the anticipated high level of public interest." The trial is expected to run until the end of July.