On Hunger Strike
E.S. Wight
Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, T Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed are on hunger strike. All are on remand in British jails awaiting trial for alleged actions either at Elbit Systems UK’s Filton research hub in August 2024, or, in June 2025, at RAF Brize Norton, from where flights depart regularly to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, which is used for British surveillance flights over Gaza and military operations across the Middle East.
The hunger strikers are demanding an end to censorship of their communications, immediate bail, the release of all documents relating to their cases to enable a fair trial, the deproscription of Palestine Action and an end to the UK operations of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. Zuhrah and Gib began the strike on 2 November, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Ahmed and Hoxha were hospitalised last week.
They are among 33 people currently incarcerated in the UK for alleged actions taken in solidarity with Palestine, where the genocide being committed by Israel, with material and diplomatic backing from Britain and the US, continues. Since the supposed cessation of hostilities on 10 October, hundreds of Israeli ceasefire violations have been recorded and more than 350 Palestinians have been killed; 9100 Palestinians remain locked inside Israeli prisons. Despite the partial suspension of some export licences in September 2024, UK arms exports to Israel reached a record high value this year, and the Ministry of Defence continues to buy equipment and services from Elbit Systems UK.
As British ties to the Israeli war machine persist, so does protest against them. Since July, more than two thousand people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act while resisting the proscription of Palestine Action. The High Court is currently considering a legal challenge to the ban, although the last-minute replacement of the presiding judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, has raised concerns over the impartiality and transparency of the judicial review.
None of the six hunger strikers is charged with terrorism offences: all, however, have been subject to arbitrary and demeaning treatment since the ban, including non-association orders, exclusion from employment and education programmes, and the removal of their keffiyehs. T Hoxha, who was also on hunger strike in the summer over conditions in HMP Peterborough, characterised the prison’s response to the ban as a form of ‘retrospective punishment’.
The strike is another means of applying urgent pressure on the government, using the only tools available to the prisoners: their rapidly deteriorating bodies. This is the largest co-ordinated hunger strike in British prisons since 1981, when Bobby Sands and nine other Irish republican prisoners died of starvation before Thatcher’s government quietly implemented many of their demands. Like Sands, these six hunger strikers are young: none is over thirty; Zuhrah turned twenty in prison. They aren’t setting out to become heroes or martyrs: as Muraisi wrote on beginning her strike, ‘this is not about dying, because unlike the enemy I love life.’
It is a terrible and astonishing thing, to love life so much you will shrink it down to its barest nub in an effort to extract more life for people you have never met. I keep thinking about how small a starving body is. And how small are the things it requires of us: that we speak about its struggle, that we act to prevent it from slipping out of the world.
The British government – along with much of the media – remains silent about the hunger strike. But prisoners in Italy, the US and Greece have undertaken solidarity strikes. Georges Abdallah, a prisoner of the French state for 41 years before he returned to Lebanon in July, and Bernadette McAliskey, a veteran of the Irish liberation struggle and spokesperson for the Smash H-Block Campaign in 1981, have issued statements in support of the strikers. Palestinian prisoners liberated from Israeli jails, no strangers to the ‘battle of empty stomachs’, have hailed them as comrades. And Zuhrah has said: ‘It is from our Palestinian prisoners, whose captivity and unspeakable torture could not extinguish their desire for the liberation of their homeland, that we learn.’