[Pnews] Why I Am On Hunger Strike In Solidarity With Pal Action Detainees

[Prisoner News]

Why I Am On Hunger Strike In Solidarity With Pal Action Detainees

   - By Mansoor Adayfi, Al Jazeera
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/2/why-i-am-on-hunger-strike-in-solidarity-with-pal-action-detainees>.



   - January 11, 2026
   -
   https://popularresistance.org/why-i-am-on-hunger-strike-in-solidarity-with-pal-action-detainees/

Above photo: The author speaks at an event in support of the Palestine
Action hunger strikers on December 13, 2025 in Rome Italy. Provided by
Mansoor Adayfi.
In the mistreatment of the Pal Action detainees, I see my own story.

* I see clear evidence that Guantánamo did not end; it spread.*

I know this road. I have its map etched into my bones. I carry scars that
won’t heal without justice, without accountability.

I learned it in Guantanamo, when the only thing I could control was my own
body.

We were disappeared. Isolated. Forced into silence. Our words were
redacted. Our letters were stamped secret. Lawyers were blocked. Time
stretched and rotted. No court dates were given. No real charges were made.

I was reduced to a number in an orange uniform, locked in a metal cage. The
US government had already named me. “The worst of the worst.” “Terrorist.”
“Enemy combatant.” Labels designed to make torture sound necessary.

And torture came. Day and night. Relentless. Mechanical. Meant to break the
mind first, then the body. So I stopped eating. Not as a gesture. Not as a
plea. I stopped because everything else had been taken from me. My body was
the only territory this foreign state hadn’t yet occupied.

A hunger strike is not symbolic. It is not dramatic. That’s a lie sold by
the media, by people who have never watched a body collapse from the
inside, who turn slow death into headlines and panels and clean sentences.

A hunger strike is a slow, painful journey towards death. It dismantles you
piece by piece. Muscles shrink. Vision fades. The heart falters. Organs
begin to fail. Every beat is a warning. Every hour drags you closer to
death, whether you want it or not.

A hunger strike begins when every other door is slammed shut. When the
system makes it clear your life has no value, as long as you stay quiet and
obedient. When it looks straight at you and tells you you’re already dead.

So you answer with your body.

At least eight imprisoned pro-Palestine activists
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/29/pro-palestine-activists-target-uk-labour-offices-over-hunger-strikers>
 in the UK have refused food. One has been on hunger strike for more than
two months. Others have passed 50 days without eating. Some have already
been taken to hospital. They are scattered across prisons, cut off from
each other, torn from their families, buried under the word “terrorist” so
cruelty can be dressed up as law.

They are Heba Muraisi
<https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/heba-muraisi/>, Qesser Zurah
<https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/qesser-zuhrah/>, Amu Gib
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/12/31/live-israels-ban-on-aid-organisations-in-gaza>
, Teuta Hoxha <https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/teuta-hoxha/>, Kamran
Ahmed <https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/kamran-ahmed/>, Lewie
Chiaramello <https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/lewie-chiaramello/>
, Jon Cink <https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/jon-cink/>, and Umer
Khalid. <https://prisonersforpalestine.org/prisoner/umer/>
Photos of the eight Pal Action hunger strikers are displayed during an
event in Rome, Italy on December 13, 2025 Courtesy of Mansoor Adayfi.

United Nations human rights experts have expressed grave concern for hunger
strikers’ lives. They warned the activists face heightened risks of organ
failure, neurological damage, and death without proper medical care and
called on the UK government to ensure timely emergency care, to engage with
the activists’ demands and to address rights issues linked to prolonged
pretrial detention and restrictions on protest activity.

I have been inside this story before. Violent words are meant to strip you
of your humanity so the public doesn’t have to feel the sting of your
suffering.

When Jeremy Corbyn raised the hunger strike in Parliament, some MPs
laughed. Laughed. Not whispers. Not quiet discomfort. But open mockery.
Smirks from padded seats while people’s bodies were breaking down in cells.
While people were collapsing, being dragged to hospital wards, organs
failing. This is untouchable power.

David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, has dodged meeting the families of
the hunger strikers. He has avoided even the barest human gesture of
listening. Cowardice wrapped in protocol. This is deliberate contempt.

In 1981, during the Irish hunger strike, men were dying in prison cells
while politicians dismissed them as criminals, attention-seekers,
terrorists. The mockery came first. The jokes. The coldness. The refusal to
engage. Then came the funerals. Power always laughs before it kills. Humour
becomes a shield for cowardice.

Nothing has changed. The accents are different. The suits are better
tailored. The cruelty is the same.

This is not democracy. This is rot at the centre of the state.

We were held for years in Guantanamo without charges, without evidence,
without a path to release. In the UK today, people are kept on extended
remand, sometimes for years, while trial dates are pushed further away.
Time itself becomes the punishment. Time becomes a weapon. A weapon against
prisoners and their families.

Isolation comes next.

In Guantanamo, isolation was designed to break us. Months, sometimes years,
without meaningful human contact. Silence so heavy it pressed against your
skull. A silence meant to erase you. In UK prisons, hunger strikers
<https://prisonersforpalestine.org/> are separated. Transferred. Harassed.
Stripped of routine, stripped of connection. Isolation is framed as safety.
It is not. It is punishment. It is control.

Then comes censorship. Letters delayed. Phone calls cut short. Visits
restricted. Information filtered. Families left in the dark. Lawyers forced
to fight for the barest access. At Guantanamo, every word leaving the camp
was monitored. In the UK, the same instinct survives. Control the
narrative. Control the person.

Then comes medical coercion. In Guantanamo, hunger strike was met with
force. Shackles. Restraint chairs. Tubes forced through noses into stomachs
while guards pinned our limbs. They called it medical care. It was
violence. Pure, deliberate, crushing violence designed to make resistance
unbearable.

The UK likes to pretend Guantanamo was an American mistake. Something
distant. Something finished. It was not. It was a laboratory. The
experiments were exported. Absorbed. Normalised. And now, they are applied
inside their prisons.

You see it in the extended remand.

You see it in the proscription laws twisted to criminalise protest.

You see it in prisons used as warehouses, places to store people
indefinitely while the state takes its time building a case.

And you see it in the quiet cooperation between systems. Guantanamo fed the
black sites. Black sites fed domestic counterterror policing. The same
logic shows up again and again. In places like Alligator Alcatraz in
Florida. In British prisons holding political activists under terrorism
laws. Different flags. Same playbook.

Abuse travels faster than accountability.

I have watched governments study each other. Share techniques. Refine the
language. Learn how to cage people legally. How to stretch the law without
snapping it. How to crush dissent while calling it order.

This is not about agreeing with the politics of the prisoners. This is
about whether a state is allowed to disappear people before trial, isolate
them, censor them, then punish them for refusing to cooperate with their
own erasure. If the UK wants to claim it is nothing like Guantanamo, then
it has to prove it with action.

End prolonged remand without trial.

End isolation as a response to protest.

Restore full access to lawyers and families.

Provide medical care that protects life, not policies that quietly endanger
it.

Listen to the hunger strikers. Meet their families face to face.

Abolish the terror laws used to criminalise dissent, stretch guilt by
association, and disappear people behind language instead of evidence.

Force members of parliament to step out of silence and take responsibility.

These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum. The floor, not
the ceiling, for any society that claims to respect human rights.

I am not writing this as an observer. I am writing as someone who has
already lived the ending. I am telling you plainly, without euphemism and
without distance. Systems like this do not correct themselves. They do not
slow down out of shame. They only stop when they are confronted, directly
and without fear. Now.

I refuse to be silent. I am joining this hunger strike in solidarity. I do
this because I recognise the system at work. I do this because I know
Guantanamo did not end, it spread. It embedded itself in other prisons,
other laws, other governments that tell themselves they are better. I do
this because standing with the oppressed against the oppressor is not
symbolic for me. It is a responsibility earned through survival. I do this
because I am able to, and because doing nothing would make me complicit.

This hunger strike is not about food. It is about dignity. It is about
justice. It is about remand used as punishment, silence used as policy, and
a state that believes if it waits long enough, people will break and
disappear. It believes silence will protect it, shield it, absolve it. It
will not.

I stand with the hunger strikers. I will not look away. I will not soften
this. I will not be polite about slow death carried out in clean buildings
and legal language.

And I will not let them be erased. Free the hungers strikers!

   - Hunger Strike <https://popularresistance.org/tag/hunger-strike/>,
Palestine
   Action <https://popularresistance.org/tag/palestine-action/>, Prisoner
   rights <https://popularresistance.org/tag/prisoner-rights/>, Solidarity
   <https://popularresistance.org/tag/solidarity/>, United Kingdom (UK)
   <https://popularresistance.org/tag/united-kingdom/>
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