Palestine Solidarity Activists Are Holding Historic Hunger Strike in UK Prisons

Seven people, all being held on remand pending trial for allegedly taking action in solidarity with Palestine, are on hunger strike in British prisons. Their names are Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, T Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed, and Muhammad Umer Khalid. An eighth prisoner, Lewie Chiaramello, who is diabetic, is also on a partial hunger strike, refusing food every other day at serious risk to his health. Today marks Day 40 without food for Qesser and Amu, who began the strike on November 2, the 108th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Their bodies are weakening — five strikers have already been hospitalized — but their resolve is not: the strikers state that they will continue to refuse food until the British government fulfills their five demands.

Several of these demands pertain to the strikers’ own cases: an end to censorship of their communications, immediate bail, and the release of documents relating to Israeli state and corporate influence in their cases to ensure a fair trial. They also embrace the wider Palestine solidarity movement: the strikers call for the de-proscription of Palestine Action, a direct action group that was categorized as a terrorist organization in July; since then, more than 2,350 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act for holding signs indicating their ‘support’ for the group. The final demand extends beyond Britain’s borders: the strikers call for an end to the UK operations of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, which produces 85% of the drone fleet being used to perpetrate genocide in Palestine.

This is the largest coordinated prison hunger strike in UK history since the 1981 H-Block strike by Irish republican prisoners, protesting the British state’s refusal to recognize them as prisoners of war. Over the seven months of that strike, Thatcher’s government watched ten young men die before quietly granting almost all of their demands. The hollowing bodies of Bobby Sands and his comrades were witnessed and grieved around the world. Far beyond the North of Ireland, the H-Block strike was recognized as an act through which, to quote words smuggled out of Israel’s Nafha prison by Palestinian prisoners after Bobby Sands’s death, the strikers “sacrificed the most valuable possession of any human being. They gave their lives for freedom.”

Now, images of the ’81 struggle are resonating across the decades. Again, a collective prisoners’ hunger strike is being met with deathly silence by the British state (“that’s very unfortunate,” says David Lammy, Justice Secretary, upon being approached by Kamran Ahmed’s sister Shahmina Alam on day 25 of his strike, “[is this] in the UK?”). Again, that silence is being matched by an international chorus of voices raised in solidarity. In cities across the Czech Republic, the home country of striker Jon Cink, banners hanging on bridges call out his name: “Where is Jon Cink?” Outside British embassies from Boston to Tel Aviv, protesters are screaming the names of UK lock-ups — Bronzefield, Peterborough, Pentonville — located thousands of miles away. And in the U.S., Italy, and Greece, prisoners Jakhi McCray, Stecco, and Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis have undertaken solidarity strikes, matching their hunger pangs to the rhythm set by the eight UK prisoners for Palestine. Stecco’s statement articulates the breadth of terrain that the strike opens up: “The struggle against prison and the military techno-industrial system is essential for a struggle of broader scope, of revolutionary and internationalist resistance.”

It’s astonishing to watch this hunger strike cross borders. Astonishing because, on one level, the hunger-striking prisoner’s confinement is absolute. They are locked behind cell walls, prison walls, border walls; often, they are cordoned off even from the rest of the prison population, for fear that their resistance, like a nasty flu, might prove ‘catching’. And the body locks down in starvation, shrinking and stilling, eating itself in order to prolong life. It seems bizarre, in light of this extremity of confinement, to speak of a hunger strike as something that can travel.

But travel it does, over and over again. The ’81 strike in Ireland offers us one example; Palestine countless others. The ‘battle of empty stomachs’ has been waged across decades by Palestinians held hostage in Israeli prisons. At points, hundreds or thousands of detainees have gone on strike to demand basic rights — visits, mattresses, pillows, pens, the right not to call guards “sir” — or to protest the carceral institutions that structure and constrain Palestinian life — like administrative detention, itself a border-crossing device first imported into Palestine by British Mandate-era colonial administrators.

In Palestine, a land transformed by the occupation into an “entire geography [of] carceralised locations,” the prison hunger strike cannot be contained by the prison’s walls. Organized resistance inside cries out for, and is answered by, organized resistance outside: as the recently liberated Palestinian prisoner and veteran activist Khalida Jarrar writes, “the ongoing quest to liberate prisoners [and] the slogan “emptying the prisons” [are] derived from and […] core component[s] in the Palestinian struggle.” Thus, like a call-and-response, the hunger strike behind bars finds echoes out on the streets in sit-ins, encampments, and mass demonstrations, both within and beyond Palestine’s borders. These acts of solidarity are not just add-ons to the prison protest: to quote Ashjan Ajour, “popular support and solidarity are the lungs from which the [hunger] strikers breathe.”

And hunger strikes speak to each other, across distance and across time. Over a few months in 2013, thousands of prisoners across Pelican Bay State Prison (California), Guantanamo Bay, and Palestine went on hunger strike. All were protesting their own particular conditions of incarceration — the brute cruelty of solitary confinement, the bureaucratized cruelty of administrative detention. But Khader Adnan, who was detained a total of 12 times by the Israeli occupation before dying, at age 45, in a 2023 hunger strike that lasted 87 days, threaded the strikes together. Writing in solidarity with the California prisoners, he said: “Hunger strikes are a courageous step and a real tool for all those who are deprived of their rights to lift the existing oppression […] Today, the hunger strikes of the Palestinian prisoners inspire those who are detained to engage in hunger strikes.”

This remains true today as it was in 2013. The current UK hunger strikers proudly locate themselves in what Qesser Zuhrah calls the “honored legacy” of prison hunger strikes from Ireland to Guantanamo to Palestine. Britain is not Ireland or Palestine: there is no equivalent tradition of hunger striking lodged in the national memory; no list of martyrs’ names carved in minds and on monuments. So, the strikers must turn outward, looking beyond the cell walls to find precedents for their own bodies’ breakdown. As always, their eyes are trained on Palestine, where their willed refusal of food confronts the ongoing enforced starvation of the people of Gaza — aided and abetted by the same government that turns the keys of their cell doors.

And Palestinian prisoners are looking back at them. Several veterans of the ‘honoured legacy’ of prison resistance have issued statements in solidarity with the strikers. Lifelong Irish activist Bernadette McAliskey, who campaigned during the H-Block strike, declared that she “stand[s] unequivocally” with the UK prisoners’ struggle. Two former Irish republican prisoners, Frankie Quinn and Tommy McKearney, the latter also a former H-Block hunger striker, have likewise voiced support: “you’re suffering a grave injustice […] well known to us,” says McKearney. Lebanese revolutionary Georges Abdallah, who was freed from prison in France after 41 years of incarceration this July, expressed his “full solidarity” with the strikers. And then there are the greetings of recently liberated Palestinian prisoners, claiming the strikers as “brothers and comrades,” extending to them their hope, their steadfastness, and their “pride.”

The strikers need this international solidarity. They need threads netting them to liberation struggles around the globe. Such statements rumble the prison walls that seek to block people from view of their communities and movements. They function as reminders that prison struggle is constantly being iterated and reiterated, suppressed and sparked again, mobilized against a shifting constellation of forces with a growing mass of allies at its back. Crucially, they are living proof that these eight hunger strikers are not alone: the world outside won’t let them be.