Writers declare solidarity with prisoners on hunger strike for Palestine

Global writers and scholars have shown their support to hunger striking prisoners from the Palestine Action group.

Dozens of global writers and scholars have signed a declaration of solidarity to support hunger-striking prisoners from the proscribed Palestine Action group.

Author Naomi Klein, novelist Sally Rooney, activist and academic Angela Davis, philosopher Judith Butler and journalist George Monbiot are among the signatories backing three British activists in the United Kingdom who are refusing food until their demands are met.

Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed have been on hunger strike for 71 and 64 days, respectively, as part of a protest that began in November. A third prisoner, Lewie Chiaramello, is also refusing food on alternating days due to type 1 diabetes.

The activists are being held in different prisons over their alleged involvement in break-ins at the UK subsidiary of the Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems in Bristol and a Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Oxfordshire. They deny all the charges against them, which include burglary and violent disorder.

The hunger-striking prisoners are demanding bail and the right to a fair trial, as well as a reversal of the UK government’s designation of Palestine Action as a “terrorist organisation”.

They are also calling for the closure of all Elbit sites in the UK and an end to what they describe as censorship inside prison, including the withholding of mail, phone calls and books.

Five of the eight people who took part in the initial protest have ended their hunger strikes due to health concerns.

All eight of the activists will have spent more than a year in custody without trials, exceeding the UK’s usual six-month pre-trial detention limit.

There is growing international pressure on the UK government to take action to preserve the lives of the Palestine Action prisoners.

Former hunger strikers from Ireland, Palestine and Guantanamo Bay have issued an urgent appeal calling on British ministers to meet families and legal representatives of the activists.

Friends and relatives of the prisoners have told Al Jazeera that they are determined to continue refusing food until all of their demands are met, despite their rapidly deteriorating health.

On New Year’s Eve, hundreds in Belfast gathered in solidarity with the Palestine Action activists on hunger strikes. Their chants echoed past murals that do not merely decorate the city, but testify to its troubled past.

Along the Falls Road, Irish republican murals sit beside Palestinian ones. The International Wall, once a rolling canvas of global struggles, has become known as the Palestinian wall. Poems by the late Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, killed in an Israeli air attack in December 2023, run across its length. Images sent by Palestinian artists have been painted by local hands.

More recently, new words have appeared on Belfast’s famed walls: “Blessed are those who hunger for justice.”