Again, malicious intent and causing distress according to whom?

According to a court, the classic test they would use is "the reasonable man" - "would a reasonable person consider the actions likely to cause distress?" is the kind of question they would ask. Proving intent is quite a high bar, most likely it would rely on the perpetrator slipping up and basically admitting it was their intent, either with what they say or in how they do it. For example, destroying a symbol in private doesn't have any specific target, but doing it in public could only reasonably be done to incite people offended by it.

The religion would not have a say in this. They would not be able to just change their symbols and immediately have them covered. It would have to be genuine, such that your average Joe would know about it, as without a reasonable person knowing about it then you cannot prove intent (unless they admit it).

Do you think for example we should ban this as it was done deliberate intent to upset the protestors?

No, because there's more than enough plausible deniability there. They may have been doing it to offend people - and that seems quite likely to us - but they could also just really want to kiss. People like kissing, it's not prohibited in public and this isn't the only time they've done it. Thus you cannot prove the intent.

To take another example, Hinduism says the cow is sacred. The cow is a religious symbol. If I eat beef in front of a Hindu person, it is very likely to cause offense to them. However, I regularly eat beef, and I'm probably not doing it to offend them but just because I like it. Even if I was trying to offend them, you'd struggle to disprove it if I made that claim. On the other hand, if I made a social media post saying I was going to eat beef in front of Hindu people and make them cry and then went and did it, then I would have admitted intent to cause harm and would clearly be doing something wrong.