The situation facing the six people currently on hunger strike in English prisons is dire and worsening by the minute. Their names are Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed and Lewie Chiaramello. Two others, Jon Cink and Umer Khalid, also spent considerable time on hunger strike before recently ending their action, while Chiaramello, a diabetic, is engaging in a periodic fast every second day.
The most serious concern is for Zuhrah. At the time of writing she has been on hunger strike for 46 days, and needs urgent medical attention. Martin Hurson, the tenth hunger striker in the H-Blocks in 1981, was allowed to die on Day 46. The prison authorities at HMP Bronzefield, where Zuhrah is detained, refused to call an ambulance for her on 16 December. Overnight a solidarity crowd outside the prison were joined by Zarah Sultanah, an MP with Your Party, and still prison authorities continued to prevent an ambulance from entering the prison for over fifteen hours. The prison said there was an on-site doctor, which if true makes things worse as Zuhrah hadn’t seen a doctor since Monday (15 December).
This one incident is a microcosm for how the wider British establishment has treated Palestine solidarity activists from the beginning of the genocide. And the cruelty with which they have dealt with the hunger strikers is itself indicative of the barbarity they’ve been willing to inflict on Palestinians through their active support of Israel.
Just as Margaret Thatcher preferred to let ten republican prisoners in Long Kesh die in 1981, so it seems Keir Starmer wants to live out his Thatcherite fantasy by sitting on his hands while these young activists risk death. If the British Government doesn’t intervene immediately, they will be entirely responsible.
Hypocrisy, Mistreatment, Inaction
All eight hunger strikers have been detained in connection with alleged direct action against key elements of Britain’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Some are members of the Filton 24, arrested in dawn counter-terror raids for allegedly causing over £1m worth of damage to Elbit System’s research centre for Israeli weapons. Others have been held in relation to alleged involvement in £7m worth of damage caused to an RAF base which serves as a launchpad for flights that aid Israel’s genocide effort.
Many have been kept on remand – in jail without trial or bail – for over a year, despite the legal limit for remand being six months. All have been denied proper means of communication while imprisoned. All have been shockingly mistreated, with some even being assaulted by prison guards.
The British government has form here, of course. Not just in the manner it has cracked down on activism since the beginning of the genocide in order to neuter the solidarity movement, but in dealing with hunger strikers in the most inhumane and unrelenting manner. Keir Starmer and the rest of the cohort in Westminster cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Their interests are tied up with Israel, their ally in the Middle East, and the imperial nexus of which both are key players.
While many MPs and media figures lined up to speak out against the political assassination of US citizen Charlie Kirk, there is a near-total silence from the same quarters about the treatment of imprisoned Palestine solidarity activists facing death in British jails. Starmer, and his lackey David Lammy, have brazenly ignored public demands, open letters, parliamentary motions and more. Bar some honourable exceptions, the media has refused to give this issue any real coverage.
Were the hunger strikers well-off British youngsters who shared the interests of the establishment, there is no imaginable scenario whereby they were allowed to languish on, malnourished and deteriorating.
Movement in Solidarity with the Hunger Strikers
The role of the international movement must be to build a pressure on Starmer which cannot be ignored. Protests are needed in every town and city across Ireland and Britain. Wherever protests have petered out or have become demobilised, they must be reignited. Local politicians, particularly MPs, must be hounded across Ireland and Britain to use their platform to raise the plight of the hunger strikers.
Media outlets great and small must hear the demand to end the under-reporting on this issue. Trade unions have an obviously important role to play here, not just those who represent journalists reporting on this issue but all trade unions who have passed resolutions to support the BDS movement.
Unison, to take one of the largest unions across these islands, passed a motion in 2024 which recommitted its members to using ‘targeted BDS to apply pressure to the Israeli government to end the occupation’. Unite passed a motion even more recently which declared that ‘BDS has been shown to be an effective, peaceful strategy in campaigning in solidarity with the Palestinian people.’
These are the motivations and objective aims of the hunger strikers who are imprisoned without trial. Trade unionists across the water have spoken out in solidarity and attended rallies, including a protest at Bronzefield prison. This kind of action can be replicated here in Ireland by trade union leaders and members mobilising their numbers on the streets, in the emails of local political parties to demand action, and ultimately, in the form of workers’ action.
There is a critical window in front of us, not just to intervene to protect the lives of incredibly brave and principled young people but also to force the British state to accede to their urgent demands.
Their Demands
A constant theme in what the hunger strikers themselves have said is that their motivation has less to do with their own situation as it is about the bigger issue of what’s being done to Palestine by Israel and the West. Their demands reflect their objective of using this prison struggle to challenge the British state and its complicity, and in this they draw heavily on the experience of republican prisoners during the war here. Their five demands are:
- End Censorship
While incarcerated, prison authorities have clamped down on the means of communications for these activists. Letters and phone calls have been frustrated and denied, all in an attempt to stifle their voice and the demands they have.
- Immediate Bail
The British Government has flouted the law, keeping over thirty people detained on remand without trial, well over the legal time limit of six months. They should be released on bail pending their hearing.
- Fair Trial
On top of the injustices mentioned above, prisoners have been denied access to documents and information that are critical to their case. This includes the communications between the British Government and Elbit Systems and Israeli officials, given the undoubtable fact that there has been coordination at government level when it comes to the crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism.
- Deproscribe Palestine Action
The proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation has drawn widespread condemnation. It represented a further, desperate escalation by Starmer and his cronies. Activists both in Britain and in the North of Ireland, including People Before Profit members in Derry, have been targeted for refusing to abide by this farcical law by openly showing support for the group. As is clear to anyone with common sense, the real terrorists in this instance are the Zionist entity and Western governments which enable it.
- Shut Down Elbit
Elbit Systems is Israel’s biggest weapons company. It has multiple sites in Britain, both plants and offices. It has been a central target of the Palestine solidarity movement across the water, especially for Palestine Action. A sustained and courageous series of direct actions have cost Elbit millions, sparking a state backlash that led to the eventual proscription of Palestine Action. It remains the case that Elbit is a key link in the genocidal chain, and in any humane world it would have been shut down long ago – like all arms factories.
Flood the damn streets
The hunger strikers’ demands are our demands. And in recognition of their steadfast commitment to breaking the genocide, we in Ireland should act with renewed vigour against local BDS targets such as InvestNI, the factories making F-35 parts in North and military equipment in the South, and the continued presence of US warplanes landing at Aldergrove and Shannon airports. As the Mid-Ulster branch of the IPSC recently stated, ‘supporting the hunger strikers means not supporting the F-35 programme.’ That programme, and the companies that make such military parts, is our local Elbit.
It is worth repeating here words from hunger striker Qesser Zuhrah:
“They won’t imprison us all, they know if they fill the prisons with activists, we will overpower them from within. So flood the damn streets in your millions. Shut down these factories in your thousands! They can never arrest the resistance in our smiles. We will use the shards of our broken hearts to spear the system of injustice.”
Dlúthpháirtíocht leis na stailceoirí ocrais. We must force this rotten British Government to do what it doesn’t want to do: intervene, enact the demands, and keep these valiant hunger strikers alive.
For updates and more information, please follow Prisoners for Palestine as well as local efforts in Ireland to build support.
