Solidarity with the hunger strikes

Political prisoners on hunger strike are challenging the counter-terror laws and the criminalisation of Palestinian solidarity inside Britain’s prisons. As Thomas Necchi argues their struggle calls for our unconditional solidarity.

On 2 November 2025 two political prisoners Qesser Zuhrah (from the Filton 24) and Amu Gib (from the Brize Norton 5) went on hunger strike. They were the first in a staggered, rolling series of hunger strikes waged to resist the authoritarian repression and abuse of counter-terror laws imposed on them by the British state.  Prisoners for Palestine, a group led by those incarcerated stated specifically that they were ‘launching the hunger strike to protest their continued imprisonment without trial, their mistreatment while in prison, and in support of a short list of demands.’ These demands are listed below in full:

As has been noted by Calla Mairead Walsh (formerly of Palestine Action US), not much has been made of the strike by the Labour government. This, despite the fact it is ‘the biggest collective hunger strike in the prisons of the British state since the 1981 Irish republicans’ hunger strike in the north of Ireland.’ Like the hunger strike waged by Bobby Sands and his comrades in the Provisional IRA, at the core of it this struggle comes down to the status of prisoners. In the Irish struggle, the republican prisoners sought to be granted special category status to reflect the political status conferred juryless Diplock courts and Operation Demetrius, where the unionist government of the time enacted the mass arrest, internment and imprisonment without trial of suspected IRA members from nationalist communities and backgrounds (though many of those interned were not in fact involved).

Much like how the republican prisoners sought to have the status of ‘criminal’ removed, Prisoners for Palestine seek to be unchained from the category of ‘terrorist.’ This categorisation crystallised with the proscription of Palestine Action, but it was happening even before then, with members of the Filton 24 reporting unfair treatment and harassment in prisons long before the proscription. They have been remanded before trial for far longer than the law is supposed to allow. They have been subjected to violent raids by the police. All of this has been justified by the imposition of the so-called ‘terrorist’ status, even though the Filton 24 are not being charged under counter-terror laws. As Ravachol Mutt made clear at the time

It becomes abundantly clear that the counter terror laws are not being used in order to charge the actionists with a specific political crime they have allegedly committed, but because the category of ‘terrorist’ deprives them of rights that prisoners are supposed to be afforded; because it opens them up to another realm of violence. In essence, they are being pushed outside of the law, all the better to hurt them.

This treatment has its historical precedents – one of its earliest targets was the Palestinian people. As Edward Said notes in The Question of Palestine, Palestinians are so often framed through a policing lens so much so that ‘the Palestinian problem immediately calls forth the idea of “terrorism”‘. The use of terrorist extends the logic of the carceral state, that sharply divides the prisoner from “society”, only now the divide is racialised through Islamophobia. As Frantz Fanon wrote

The colonial world is a Manichean world […] the colonialist turns the colonised into a quintessence of evil […] The “native” is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil.

Palestinians are often subjected to administrative detention, where they are imprisoned without trial, sometimes for years. The law for this was originally established during the British Mandate and kept for the past 77 years. Alongside prisons, policing as a part of Britain’s carceral system was honed and refined in Ireland. The tactics and strategies were then brought back home to violently crush dissent. For example, Tia Trafford writes that ‘Kenneth Newman was appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1982. He had previously worked for the British Palestine Police, and most recently as Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.’

But why the tactic of hunger striking? Some might think that extreme – all over a category? But this is no pedantry over abstract concepts; to be classified as a ‘terrorist’ has real consequences for the quality of life of political prisoners. As political prisoner T Hoxha lays out in her letter, she was subjected to repeated and targeted mistreatment and harassment, including losing her library job for ‘security reasons.’ And that’s not all, as Mutt recalls

Inside prison, detainees are subjected to arbitrary and repressive restrictions. According to a report by Declassified UK, these have included actionist Zoe Rogers being “interrogated for seven days without charge, often in the middle of the night in a windowless cell”. Zoe “was not immediately offered a phone call” upon arrest, “and was held in the prison induction wing for six weeks.” Fatema also experienced harsh treatment, which included being “subjected to multiple random drug tests” and having all of her mail withheld. Her mother highlights that this reflects endemic Islamophobia in the prison system, a fact which is supported by a Nejma Collective report on the experience of Muslims in prison.

This tactic has not been used as a first resort. Prisoners and their families have tried official channels and methods first and if these worked it was only to a certain extent, because when the prison system and the state holds such control over you and your body, it can simply choose to ignore you. It’s important to remember that T Hoxha is on her second hunger strike. She went on her first when methods of appealing and protesting did not secure her demands. Hunger strikers themselves also emphasise that the strike can be ‘liberating – it is a reassertion of life in itself, a reclamation of resistance when your body is your only weapon left’, as Walsh observes. The prison derives its power from control of your body, time and the proximity to decay and death. Hunger strikes disrupt this by placing control of both body and death in the hands of the hunger striker.

The implications of this struggle cannot be overstated. As T Hoxha concludes in her letter:

The strategy the state has used has made us targets inside prison. We are the punching bags of the proscription.

[…]

We might not get told much as prisoners, and we’re often the last to know anything pertaining to ourselves, but what is clear as day is that what is being criminalized is not “extremism,” but the Palestinian identity itself.

What’s been proscribed is any engagement with the Palestinian identity.

The Filton 24 are a test case and a warning to anyone who shows solidarity with Palestine. Reading this, it is hard not to think of a similar statement made by Bobby Sands in his diary:

I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-Block, or to gain the rightful recognition of a political prisoner, but primarily because what is lost in here is lost for the Republic and those wretched oppressed whom I am deeply proud to know as the ‘risen people’.

What is lost in the prisons is lost on the outside. What the political prisoners are doing is intensifying the contradictions of the British front of the struggle for Palestinian liberation and we owe them our full and unconditional solidarity in doing so. As Walsh has made painfully clear, we have failed so far in doing this, and we must figure – quickly – how to do this. Too much is at stake to let the movement suffer such a defeat. Much like in Palestine, the prison is a crucial site of struggle and our political prisoners are the vanguard.

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