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It seemed like a distant dream when rumors about a ceasefire started to surface in October. Even though we feared believing it, we clung to any thread of hope. We had grown to know about “ceasefires” that never existed for two years.

The streets erupted with cheers and ululations when the announcement was finally made. Yet, I began to worry that this tranquility might just serve as a pause before yet another attack.

My fears were justified. More than 400 people have been killed by Israel’s army so far, and daily deadly attacks have continued. Numerous others have died as a result of Israel’s destruction of the Strip.

Yet, the attention span of the world was starting to wane. I noticed that, starting in November, other Palestinian journalists and writers started to lose interest in what I wrote about in terms of social media and media outlets. Because the general public was quickly persuaded that the war had ended, the world’s interest decreased.

The real purpose of the ceasefire was not to stop the violence or deaths, nor to stop the bloodshed and genocide. The real goal was to stop people from discussing Gaza, the crimes committed there, and the daily suffering of people there.

As other “hot spots” in the world media spotlight have come to dominate, Gaza has now become largely invisible.

Mass murder continues in the interim.

On October 28, the Israeli army launched a massive bombing campaign, killing 104 people, less than two weeks after the ceasefire was declared. My loved ones and I were both deeply concerned about the future.

Israel moved my heart more than it did on November 20. The Abu Shawish family’s home was attacked by the Israeli army in the central Gaza refugee camp. She lost her entire family, along with her sisters Habiba, 11, Tima, 16, and brothers Youssef, 14, and Mohammed, 18, along with her mother Sahar, 43, and Rami, 50, as well as her parents Rami, 50. Despite the fact that the family was all civilians, they were all political prisoners, and were massacred, they were all civilians. Batoul must now face the genocide alone.

The Israeli genocidal strategy was used to create mass death through collapsed buildings, unexploded bombs, floods, hypothermia, starvation, and illness, all of which are continuing. Without adequate food, heating, electricity, or potable water, we continue to struggle.

People are dying from the winter because of it.

Just another storm hit us. Tents were completely blown off. Alaa Juha, age 30, was killed when a wall slammed against her in the rain. Arkan Musleh, a baby who was two months old, passed away from hypothermia. This month’s cold has left 15 people dead overall. When you can’t find a way out of the freezing cold and the flood, it’s difficult to describe the sense of helplessness that permeates your home.

Israel continues to violate the ceasefire through its attacks as well as its refusal to meet its commitment to allow for the agreed-upon number of aid trucks, a complete supply of tents and medicines, shelter materials, and mobile homes.

Israel is also limiting access to international organizations that work to alleviate Gaza’s suffering. NGOs with a size as large as Save the Children are now unable to register under new laws. This stifles international efforts to bring some relief, along with Israel’s ongoing refusal to grant humanitarian requests by NGOs.

Palestinian organizations that are attempting to alleviate our suffering are currently receiving insufficient funding. After the ceasefire was declared, the Samir Project, a donations-based initiative that provides material support to poor families and students, has lost a sizable number of donors and supporters. The project’s director, Dr. Ezzedine al-Lulu, confirmed to me that the decrease in donations has hindered their ability to provide essential assistance.

Israel is also preventing crossing the Rafah border. If you pay exorbitant amounts of money to Israeli-linked war profiteers and agree to never return, you are denied the right to travel outside. More than 1, 000 people have died while awaiting medical clearance from Israel, and over 16, 000 have been prevented from leaving.

Low-grade mass killing in Gaza has reached a new stage of genocide, which is less controversial than carpet bombing campaigns. The end result, however, is the Palestinians’ extermination in Gaza. Politicians in Israel continue to discuss colonizing our land, which is no wonder. They still believe that a Palestinian-free Gaza is a very real possibility that is within reach.

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 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, Qesser Zurah, Amu Gib, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed, Lewie Chiaramello, Jon Cink, and Umer Khalid.

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 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!

Belfast, Northern Ireland — On New Year’s Eve, fireworks lit the city’s streets, and not just to celebrate.

Hundreds of people show their support for Palestine Action prisoners who are currently on hunger strikes. Their chants echoed earlier murals that not only depict the city but also reflect its troubled past.

Palestinian murals are next to Irish republican ones along the Falls Road. The Palestinian wall is now known as the International Wall, which was once a symbiotic canvas for global struggles. Refaat Alareer, a late Palestinian author who died in a 20-year Israeli airstrike, wrote poetry throughout the length of the book. Local artists have hand-painted Palestinian artists’ images.

New words have recently appeared on Belfast’s famed walls. The “who hunger for justice” is blessed. The four pro-Palestinian activists who are currently on a hunger strike in British prisons are now known as the city’s political conscience, their bodies deteriorating as the days pass.

A trade union activist who spoke at the protest, Patricia McKeown, a city activist, stated, “This is not a city that will ever accept any attempt to silence our voice, our right to protest, or our right to defend human rights.”

Why wouldn’t we back the statement that “these young people are being held unjustly and in ridiculous conditions” and that they have made the ultimate decision to express their opinions, especially regarding what is happening to Palestinians? she inquired.

Belfast is the target of a hunger strike.

As the health of four detainees continues to decline behind prison walls, the protest in Belfast is a part of a growing international movement. All of them are associated with Palestine Action, and according to campaigners, they could spend more than a year in jail before their cases are heard. Supporters claim that the hunger strike has only been used as a last resort as legal avenues are exhausted.

The members of Palestine Action are being detained for their alleged involvement in break-ins at an Oxfordshire Royal Air Force base and a United Kingdom subsidiary of Elbit Systems, where equipment was allegedly damaged, and at an Oxfordshire Royal Air Force base where two military aircraft were spray-painted with red paint. The prisoners contest the charges brought against them, including violent disorder and burglary.

The prisoners want a fair trial, the release of Palestine Action, and the end of what they call “interference with their mail and reading materials.” According to a contentious anti-terror law, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government in Britain banned Palestine Action in July.

Heba Muraisi is starving on day 61. Day 55 of Teuta Hoxha is complete. on day 54, Karna Ahmed. On day 41, Lewie Chiaramello. Ahmed and Hoxha have already been admitted to the hospital. The largest hunger strike in Britain since 1981, according to campaigners, was expressly inspired by the Irish hunger strikes.

In Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army and other republican prisoners demanded the restoration of their political status in 1981. During the strike, Bobby Sands, one of the ten men who were killed, was elected to the British parliament. Margaret Thatcher took a harsh public stance, but the government ultimately sought redress as the tide turned in the back of the house.

Martin Hurson, 29, passed away on the 46th day of a prisoner. Between days 59 and 61, other people passed away, including Joe McDonnell, Francis Hughes, Michael Devine, and Raymond McCreesh. Sands went on a hunger strike for 66 days before succumbing.

Sue Pentel, a Jew for Palestine Ireland member, vividly recalls that time.

She claimed, “I was here while the hunger strike was taking place.” I recall the callous brutality of the British government allowing ten hungers to end because I experienced them, as I marched, protested, met, and protested.

Bobby Sands’s words, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” are true. And we raised our families here, and they are the same people from the newest generation who show solidarity with Palestine.

Some people will die if this persists.

Pat Sheehan, who is seated beneath a Bobby Sands mural, fears that history is getting near to repeating itself. Before the hunger strike was called off on October 3, 1981, he endured 55 days of it.

In theory, I would have been the last to die because I was the longest member of the hunger strike when it ended in 1981, he said.

He claimed that his liver was failing at that point. His vision was lost. He constantly vomited bile.

Sheehan said, “You’re entering the danger zone once you’ve had 40 days.” For those who have been on a hunger strike for more than 50 days, “the hunger strikers must be very weak now physically.”

According to the quote, “Mentally, the longer the hunger strike lasts, the more they will become mentally ill.”

“I believe that some of the hunger strikers will die inevitably if it continues,” she said.

Sheehan, who is currently serving as the MLA for Sinn Fein in West Belfast, claims that those who are involved in the Palestine Action hunger strike are political prisoners.

He claimed that Ireland is probably the only nation in Western Europe with almost total support for the Palestinian cause. “Because we have a similar history of colonization, genocide, and detention.”

“So there is a lot of empathy when Irish people see what’s happening in Gaza on their TV screens.”

Ireland’s position

That political action has a growing need for empathy. Israel joined South Africa’s legal fight against the international court of justice, alleging genocide in Gaza, a charge Israel denies. In 2024, Israel formally acknowledged the state of Palestine.

Ireland has boycotted the Eurovision Song Contest and requested that its national football team be expelled from international competition while the Irish government has also taken steps to enforcing a ban on the sale of Israeli bonds.

However, many campaigners contend that the government’s actions are insufficient. They contend that Ireland’s Shannon Airport is still a source of business for the Occupied Territories Bill, which attempts to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements, and that it has been delayed since 2018.

The conflict in Gaza has dominated domestic politics in the northern region of Ireland, which is still a part of Britain.

Following fierce criticism from Irish republican, nationalist, left-wing, and unaligned political parties, Democratic Unionist Party education minister Paul Givan traveled to Jerusalem on a trip funded by the Israeli government, leading to a no-confidence vote.

Unionist councillors vehemently opposed Belfast City Hall’s decision to fly a Palestinian flag last month before it was ultimately approved.

Support for Israel has become ingrained in some loyalist and unionist organizations with a commitment to Britain, with Israeli flags flying in Belfast’s once-traditional loyalist areas as well.

The genocide in Gaza has been recast along the old fault lines of division because of its legacy of identity that is rooted in sectarian lines.

“Solidarity reaches Palestine”

Protesters in Belfast claim that their solidarity is grounded in humanity rather than national identity.

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement’s 33-year-old Damien Quinn argued that Ireland’s history had always had a particular weight in the wake of hunger strikes.

“We are here to support the British hunger strikers today. But we are also present for the Palestinians, he said, “for those who are being brutally murdered every day.”

He claimed that Palestine Action “made it very clear that they have tried everything, including trying to lobby and sign petitions.”

“So it’s heartbreaking when I see how they are being treated in prison for fighting the genocide.”

The Belfast-based Palestinian Rita Aburahma, 25, is painfully familiar with the hunger strike.

She said, “My people don’t have the luxury of speaking up because they are in Palestine. Solidarity matters.”

“I think the hunger strikers are really brave; they have always been in the face of opposition.” How long has it taken the government to address them or take any action, in any way, worries me and many others.

If the government doesn’t take action against those people, nothing will save them. In some ways, it’s shocking, but not entirely unsurprising because the same government has been monitoring the genocide from beginning to end and never intervened.