Hunger-striking Palestine solidarity activists hospitalised
Two political prisoners in the United Kingdom, Amu Gib and Kamran Ahmed—activists with the protest group Palestine Action—have been hospitalised after weeks on hunger strike. According to Prisoners for Palestine, a prisoner collective, at least eight hunger strikers have now been hospitalised since the protest began in early November.
All eight are being held on remand (not in the same prison) for alleged protests at Elbit Systems’ Filton research hub in August 2024 or at the Brize Norton airbase in Oxfordshire in June this year, during which military aircraft were allegedly sprayed with paint. The airbase protest led to Palestine Action being designated as a terrorist group.
The prisoners report that guards have confiscated their keffiyehs, moved them around arbitrarily and given them non-association orders so that they can’t contact each other. Teuta Hoxha, 29, who has been awaiting trial for thirteen months, says that a scarf she had knitted in red, white, green and black was taken from her, according to a report in the Guardian.
At the time of writing, Gib and Qesser Zuhrah have been on strike for 50 days, making this the longest hunger strike in British prisons since the 1981 actions by Irish prisoners. On 1 March that year, Bobby Sands, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, initiated the strike at Maze prison outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. Twenty-two others joined; ten died after an average of 62 days.
“[I have] tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my comrades by four-and-a-half years of stark inhumanity”, Sands wrote in his diary. It’s the same inhumanity that we’ve seen over the last two years that has pushed the Palestine Action prisoners to act.
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister at the time, refused to concede that Sands and his comrades were political prisoners. She allowed them to starve to death.
Today, the justice secretary, David Lammy, refuses to meet with representatives of the hunger strikers. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, when pushed by left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, had nothing to say beyond some vague mumbling about rules and regulations. Will he follow in Thatcher’s footsteps and allow the prisoners to die?
Another echo of 1981 is the role of mass resistance. When Sands began his strike, 3,500 people marched through West Belfast. More than 100,000 people attended his funeral.
Two of the Palestine Action hunger strikers were transferred to hospitals only after protests outside the prison demanded that ambulances be let in. Several thousand people have been arrested for showing support for Palestine Action in sit-ins in London’s Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square.
At its peak, the Palestine solidarity movement brought 500,000 people into the streets of London to protest against the genocide and the UK government’s complicity. The prisoners’ resilience is heroic. If they’re to win freedom, they’ll need the full support of the movement. As Amu Gib wrote in the Guardian:
“We have the power, agency, responsibility, creativity, resourcefulness and love it takes to be fuelled and moved to action not just once, but every minute of every day ... It doesn’t ever feel like what we’re doing is enough, but in another way it feels like the best thing in the world.”
