A staff perspective – written collectively by the Wen Palestine Solidarity Group.
UK Prisoners for Palestine and the urgency of this moment
UK Prisoners for Palestine are currently on hunger strike in UK prisons in response to Britain’s ongoing complicity in the genocide of Palestinian people. Despite supposed ceasefires, violence continues, alongside the blocking and restriction of desperately needed humanitarian aid. The hunger strike is an act of protest against this violence and against the repression of those who oppose it.
Hunger strikes are never undertaken lightly. They emerge when all other routes to justice have been closed. In this case, people imprisoned in the UK, without charge, are risking their lives to oppose British complicity in genocide, demanding accountability for state violence and political repression.
Hunger strikes and the long struggle against imprisonment and state violence
Hunger strikes are part of a long global history of resistance against imprisonment, disappearance and state violence. Across contexts, people held in prisons and detention have used hunger strikes as a last resort when their voices are systematically ignored and their political agency denied.
In the UK alone, hundreds of people die in prisons each year. Prisons sit at the sharp edge of state power, disproportionately holding racialised and marginalised communities. When people in these institutions turn to hunger strikes, it reflects not only individual protest but structural failure.
Feminist and anti-colonial histories of hunger strike
Hunger strikes have a long history within feminist and anti-colonial struggles. Feminist movements have long understood how the body becomes a site of political control, particularly for women and marginalised people, and how refusing nourishment can become an act of resistance when autonomy is stripped away.
In the UK, suffragettes went on hunger strike repeatedly in response to their imprisonment for demanding the right to vote. The state responded with brutal force-feeding and the introduction of the ‘Cat and Mouse’ laws, releasing women when their health deteriorated, only to re-arrest them once they recovered. These actions exposed the violence of a state that denied women full political personhood.
Anti-colonial movements have also used hunger strikes to resist imperial power. Mahatma Gandhi’s hunger strikes were part of broader struggles against British colonial rule in India, including opposition to systems of caste division and political exclusion imposed by the colonial state. In each of these cases, hunger strikes were used to expose injustice and to mobilise wider movements beyond prison walls.
Hunger strike as resistance, not spectacle
Hunger strikes are not about martyrdom or spectacle. They are a response to conditions of extreme repression, where people are denied meaningful ways to challenge their treatment or the violence carried out in their name. They force uncomfortable questions about whose lives are considered disposable and whose suffering is allowed to continue at the hands of the state.
The hunger strike by UK Prisoners for Palestine sits within this long and painful history. It reflects the reality that people are being pushed to risk their bodies to demand an end to injustice, both within the prison system and beyond it.
A feminist politics of care
As staff working within a feminist organisation, we approach this moment with care and seriousness. We are deeply concerned about the health and lives of those on hunger strike – in full recognition of the conditions that force people to take such actions.
Feminist politics teaches us that justice cannot be separated from care. A world committed to dignity and liberation is one in which no one is driven to starvation in order to be heard.
These brave individuals demand the following: immediate bail, the right to a fair trial, an end to censorship of their communications, the de-proscription of Palestine Action, and the closure of Elbit Systems’ UK factories.
You can read more about their hunger strike, and learn about actions you can take.
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