Eight prisoners on remand, Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed, Lewie Chiaramello and Muhammed Umer Khalid. They are all on hunger strike in British jails – six of them into their second month. Five of them have already been hospitalised during their action and then returned to prison. During their hospitalisations, they were prevented from contacting their next of kin and legal team, a breach of their fundamental rights.

Yet it is only in the last few days that many will have heard anything of their fate as persistent campaigning by their many supporters has begun to crack the wall of silence. Protests have taken place several times at London’s Pentonville prison, on one occasion marching from there to the Ministry of Justice, in Bristol, and outside the BBC in London to demand it reports on the dangerous situation faced by the prisoners.

It was only on 10 December that the BBC carried its first story when lawyers for the prisoners asked to meet ministers. Even then, as with much of the intermittent coverage in the broadsheets, copy and audio are replicated with inaccuracies and fail to address why this situation has arisen, its desperate urgency or the complicity of the British state.

Complicit with genocide

The majority of the eight on hunger strike are alleged to have been involved in action against Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. Since 2012, Elbit has won 25 public contracts in the UK, currently totalling more than £355 million. Now, the Ministry of Defence is preparing to sign a £2.7 billion contract with Elbit that would designate it as a “strategic partner” and see the company train 60,000 British troops each year. The others are accused of damaging two military aircraft at an RAF base in Brize Norton, from which the RAF is apparently carrying out spying missions over Gaza.

The eight are among 33 prisoners on remand with similar charges, none of whom have been convicted of any crime. They are all facing lengthy pre-trial detention periods; some are not due in court until January 2027. Supporters believe this is a way of punishing the inmates despite their right to be presumed innocent.

That this is taking place when Israel has been – and continues – to carry out a genocide against the Palestinian people makes Britain completely complicit in that outrage in contravention of international law – and of any sense of human dignity.

The election of a Labour government in July 2024 has scandalously made no difference to Britain’s support for these barbaric actions by the Israeli state. Indeed, in terms of repression against the solidarity movement, it is this government that has criminalised people for standing against the settler colonialism that denies the Palestinian people human rights. These crimes against humanity are most obvious in Gaza, but are increasingly taking place in the West Bank and also against Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Context

This is the context in which many hundreds of thousands in Britain have marched in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thousands have organised to campaign for their pension funds to be divested from funds that benefit the Israeli state directly or indirectly, and for supermarkets to stop carrying products that do the same.

This is also the context in which activists have taken action against Elbit and companies like BAE, the world’s seventh largest arms manufacturer. They manufacture the M109 howitzer, a 155mm mobile artillery system that the Israeli military has been using extensively, firing tens of thousands of 155mm shells into the Gaza Strip, some filled with the toxins of white phosphorous.

And this is what has led to the situation where eight people so far have taken the dramatic, potentially life-threatening step of going on hunger strike.

Demands

The prisoners are demanding:

• End all censorship
• Immediate bail
• Right to a fair trial
• Deproscribe
• Shut Elbit down

These demands – with coherent motivations – were sent to the government before the hunger strikes began on 20 October, but they have been ignored. John McDonnell MP launched an early day motion on 1 December that has 41 signatures at the time of writing. McDonnell, followed by Jeremy Corbyn MP, raised points of order in the House of Commons on 10 December, complaining of Ministers’ silence. Even the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, seemed to show annoyance that ministers were not fulfilling their duty. McDonnell came back again later the same day after seeing a Ministry of Justice Press release which claimed that David Lammy:

The Deputy Prime Minister has responded to and will continue to respond to correspondence on this issue

This was not the case as far as McDonnell was concerned – he had had no response. It is not the first time Lammy has claimed ‘ignorance’. Constituents have been directly contacting him since before the strike started to ask that he act. Several parliamentarians, including Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum, as well as McDonnell and Corbyn, have written to him.

On 5 December, campaigners came across Lammy at a local market and attempted to speak with him. On 9 December, a protest was held outside his office when he again told those present he knew nothing.

Then on 11 December, Corbyn, Amu Gib’s MP, finally received a letter from Lammy in which he stated, “Considering the ongoing proceedings, it would not be appropriate for me to meet with you to discuss the situation in any greater detail.” As Corbyn responded, this answer failed to address “the very serious allegations of inconsistent and unequal medical treatment” of the detainees and repeated his request for a meeting.

Precedence

This is the biggest coordinated prison hunger strike in UK history since the 1981 H-Block strike in the North of Ireland, during which 10 political prisoners died, including the organiser Bobby Sands MP. Sands was elected to the Westminster Parliament more than a month into his hunger strike and more than 100,000 people attended his funeral after his death on 5 May after 66 days on hunger strike.

I also vividly remember that the British media covered the 1981 hunger strike, as they have the blanket protest, the dirty protest and the hunger strike that preceded it – all tools in their campaign for the restoration of Special Category Status withdrawn in 1976. I suppose Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was confident enough that her intransigence would win the day. It was only later in 1988 that she introduced a voice ban on the IRA and a host of other Irish organisations.

On 5 December, Bernadette McAliskey spoke to a packed meeting in central London in support of the hunger strikes for Palestine. Irish activists have been visible at most of the London protests. Paul Murphy TD raised the situation in the Dáil Éireann in Dublin, citing the H-Block as a precedent. The Irish movement in solidarity with Palestine is strong – those who have themselves been subject to occupation and colonialism are quick to understand what is at stake.

Act now

The Bristol Cable reporting on the local actions explained that protestors were moved when they played a voice note from Amu Gib, through the megaphone by a close friend of Gib who later passed this recording on to the Cable:

We will never be able to compute, let alone feel, the depths of devastation, the death, the dispossession, displacement, the attack on education, infrastructure, health care, farms and olive groves.

“We have enabled and profited from the conversion of Palestine into a battlefield. Its people, histories and infrastructures are a wet zone for increasingly impersonal tools of war.

Use the toolkit in solidarity with the hunger strikers now!

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