Category World News

To the government of the United Kingdom:

We, the undersigned, write to you today as survivors of state violence.

We are a collective of former hunger strikers from Palestine, Ireland and Guantánamo Bay. Hunger strikes end only when power intervenes, or when people die. We learned, through pain, permanent damage, and watching our comrades fall, how states behave when prisoners have no choice but to refuse the only right afforded to them: food.

As such, we write in uncompromising solidarity with the hunger strikers held today in British prisons: Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed, Teuta Hoxha, Jon Cink, Lewie Chiaramello, and Muhammad Umer Khalid. They are imprisoned on remand, without trial and without conviction. For some, their remand has lasted over a year, and for most, they will not see trial for two.

The UK government has chosen prolonged remand, isolation and their censorship. It has chosen to restrict their contact with loved ones, allow medical neglect, and deployed the language of terror in an insidious attempt to deliberately strip these prisoners of public sympathy and basic rights before any trial takes place.

We cannot forget what the hunger strikers today stand for. They stand for Palestine. They stand for dismantling the infrastructure of weapons that kills Palestinians. They stand for the end of the apartheid regime implemented by the Israeli government. They stand in solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners. They stand for the complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

For years, Palestinian prisoners have been subjected to systematic abuse inside Israeli prisons, including well-documented torture, extreme sexual violence, medical neglect, and death in custody. Yet, the UK government, through its unwavering support for the Israeli state continues to choose to be complicit in its actions. It chooses to continue to arm Israel and shield Israeli officials from accountability while Palestinian bodies – men, women and children – are violated and destroyed in their streets, in their homes, and behind bars.

The Palestine Action political prisoners began their hunger strike when they had no other choice. The state’s decision to rely on the use of the classification of “terror” to enforce the systematic repression of those who refuse to conform has left them with no other alternative as they seek the rights they are entitled to by law.

This is not a new phenomenon: the use of the word “terror” has long been used to manufacture fear, to poison public perception, to justify the repeated violation of even the most basic human rights. Once this label is attached, rights become conditional, liberty becomes transactional, and the presumption of innocence evaporates. The rule of law that is so proudly claimed to be upheld is swiftly desecrated in the face of a singular word, deployed by unscrupulous politicians determined to protect their own interests: “terrorist”.

The proscription of Palestine Action was not about safety. It was about control. The repeated and flagrant breaches of sub judice were not about convincing the public that this was a dangerous organisation; it was about condemning the prisoners before they stood trial. It was about isolating them, criminalising solidarity, and sending a warning to anyone who might speak or organise against the Israeli war machine.

No trial held under an atmosphere of state-manufactured fear can be deemed as fair, and no jury exposed to decades of terrorism rhetoric can operate free of bias. These prisoners were smeared the moment the announcement of their arrest made mention of a “terrorism connection”, despite those proceedings not having taken place.

We therefore demand the following:

1. An urgent ministerial meeting with families and legal representatives to agree on actions that will preserve the lives of the hunger strikers. Immediate bail for the Palestine Action prisoners (known as the Filton 24) and all hunger strikers.

2. Dropping of terror charges designed to criminalise dissent.

3. Fair trial conditions free from fear-driven narrative and political interference.

4. Immediate access to independent medical care chosen by the prisoners.

5. An end to censorship and restrictions on family visits.

In 1981, Britain chose to let the Irish hunger strikers die in the Long Kesh prison. In the 2000s, Britain chose silence over the plight of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. For decades, Britain – along with other governments – continued to choose inaction in Palestine. Each time, British officials claimed responsibility rested elsewhere. Each time, history recorded the truth.

The Suffragettes, despite being force-fed and labelled as terrorists, are today celebrated as heroes and freedom fighters. The Long Kesh prisoners, despite the smears they faced, are now seen as a vital part of the peace achieved under the Good Friday Agreement. The Guantánamo Bay prisoners, despite their inhumane treatment and public consent for torture, remained untried and were largely released without conviction.

Just as they were all vindicated, history will too vindicate the Palestine Action prisoners who sought to stop the slaughter of innocent people, against the wishes and interests of the British government.

We are not merely observers, but witnesses to the injustice currently being dispensed by the hands of the state against people who history will no doubt vindicate, as it has done those hunger strikers who have gone before.

Signatories:

Shadi Zayed Saleh Odeh, Palestine

Mahmoud Radwan, Palestine

Othman Bilal, Palestine

Mahmoud Sidqi Suleiman Radwan, Palestine

Loay Odeh, Palestine

Tommy McKearney, Ireland

Laurence McKeown, Ireland

Tom McFeely, Ireland

John Nixon, Ireland

Mansoor Adayfi (GTMO441), Guantanamo

Lakhdar Boumediene, Guantanamo

Samir Naji Moqbel, Guantanamo

Moath Al-Alwi, Guantanamo

Khalid Qassim, Guantanamo

Ahmed Rabbani, Guantanamo

Sharqawi Al-Hajj, Guantanamo

Saeed Sarim, Guantanamo

Mahmoud Al Mujahid, Guantanamo

Hussein Al-Marfadi, Guantanamo

Osama Abu Kabir, Guantanamo

Abdul Halim Siddiqui, Guantanamo

Ahmed Adnan Ahjam, Guantanamo

Abdel Malik Al Rahabi, Guantanamo

Ahmed Elrashidi, Guantanamo

A second round of voting has been held in Myanmar’s controversial election, which critics say will cement the military’s grip on power. Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng has visited rebel-controlled areas where millions of civilians, living in fear of attacks, are excluded from the process.

A Palestinian man has died from gunshot wounds after Israeli forces opened fire on his vehicle in Hebron, amid escalating violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza shows no signs of abating.

Shaker Falah al-Jaabari, 58, succumbed to his injuries on Sunday morning after being shot the previous night in eastern Hebron, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The Israeli army said forces opened fire at a vehicle that accelerated towards soldiers in the Haret al-Sheikh neighbourhood; however, in a later statement, the military acknowledged that an initial review found no evidence that the incident was an intentional attack.

Israeli authorities seized his body following the shooting, the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported. The Palestine Red Crescent Society told Al Jazeera that its crew was prevented from reaching the man.

The killing came as Israeli forces besieged a house in the Old City of Nablus on Sunday, with undercover units infiltrating neighbourhoods before military vehicles stormed the city from multiple directions.

Two Palestinians were arrested as troops deployed across several areas and live gunfire echoed through the eastern market, according to Palestinian security sources cited by Wafa.

In a separate incident, Israeli forces raided a Palestinian wedding in occupied East Jerusalem, firing live ammunition and stun grenades at attendees.

Several men were arrested, including the groom, with footage showing soldiers inside the hall and security forces throwing stun grenades as guests were forced outside.

The escalation follows stark findings from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which documented that 240 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank in 2025, including 55 children.

The year also saw more than 1,800 settler attacks, the highest since the United Nations began recording such incidents in 2006, with five attacks occurring each day on average.

More than 1,190 Palestinians were injured in these attacks, with 838 wounded directly by Israeli settlers, an average of two Palestinians injured daily by settlers alone.

The violence coincides with a landmark UN human rights report released on Wednesday, labelling Israeli policies as resembling “apartheid”, the first time a UN rights chief has used the term.

Volker Turk called for Israel to “dismantle all settlements”, describing a “systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank”.

Hours after the report’s publication, Israel cleared the final hurdle to begin constructing the controversial E1 settlement project near Jerusalem.

A government tender published on Tuesday seeks developers for 3,401 housing units on land that critics say would effectively bisect the West Bank and prevent the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state.

Initial construction could begin within weeks, according to the anti-settlement group Peace Now.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees settlement policy, declared in August that “the Palestinian state is being erased from the table not with slogans but with actions,” adding that “every settlement, every neighbourhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea”.

Settlement expansion drives mass displacement

Al Jazeera correspondent Nida Ibrahim, reporting from a Bedouin camp in Ras al-Auja being dismantled under Israeli orders, described it as “one of the largest shepherding communities in the West Bank”.

She noted that 26 families had already left, with 20 more preparing to depart.

“The other location is completely unknown; they still don’t know where they’re going to go,” Ibrahim said, adding that Israeli settlers were “coming in and intimidating people” as filming took place.

More than half a million Israeli settlers now live in West Bank settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.

United States Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has described the actions of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer on Wednesday, as “domestic terrorism”.

Noem said Good refused to obey orders to get out of her car, “weaponise[d] her vehicle” and “attempted to run” over an officer. Minnesota officials disputed Noem’s account, citing videos showing Good trying to drive away.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a member of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said on Thursday on the CNN news channel that Noem’s statement is “an abuse of the term” “domestic terrorism”.

President Donald Trump’s administration has turned to the phrase in recent months, including in an October immigration enforcement-related shooting.

In September, the administration issued a memo calling on law enforcement to prioritise threats including “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement”, saying “domestic terrorists” were using violence to advance “extreme views in favour of mass migration and open borders”. Experts said it violates free speech laws.

Good, a mother of three and a poet, lived in the Minneapolis neighbourhood where she was fatally shot. She was a US citizen and had no criminal background, The Associated Press news agency reported. Good’s ex-husband told AP that she wasn’t an activist and he hadn’t known her to participate in protests. Good had dropped off her 6-year-old son at school and was driving home when she encountered ICE.

The Trump administration has ramped up Minneapolis immigration enforcement in recent weeks after news reports about allegations of daycare funding fraud involving the local Somali community.

What is ‘domestic terrorism’?

Federal agencies have their own definitions of “domestic terrorism”.

According to a 2020 memo, the FBI, citing a specific section of the US Code, defines “domestic terrorism” as acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state criminal laws and appear intended to intimidate or coerce civilians; influence government policy by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses a similar definition, citing a different statute that defines “domestic terrorism” as dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote in 2023: “Unlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with domestic terrorism which sometimes makes it difficult (and occasionally controversial) to formally characterise someone as a domestic terrorist.”

In 2022, former FBI agent Michael German, then a fellow with New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, told PolitiFact that 51 federal statutes apply to “domestic terrorism”.

“I think there is and always has been confusion between rhetoric and the law in regard to terrorism,” German told PolitiFact after the Minneapolis shooting. “There is no law that authorises the US government to designate any group or individual in the US as a ‘domestic terrorist’.”

The federal government periodically revises how it describes threats. For example, in 2025, federal officials sometimes used the term “nihilistic violent extremists” to describe perpetrators who don’t subscribe to one ideology but appear to be motivated by a desire to, as one expert put it, “gamify” real-life violence. Experts told PolitiFact that the term is valid but cautioned against its overuse or citing it to obscure other ideological motivations, such as white supremacy.

The Trump administration has broadened the ‘domestic terrorism’ label

The DHS rhetoric around Good’s fatal shooting is similar to another immigration enforcement-related shooting in October. During DHS’s months-long immigration crackdown in Chicago called “Operation Midway Blitz”, a Border Patrol agent shot US citizen Marimar Martinez five times.

A DHS news release described Martinez as a “domestic terrorist” and accused her of ramming her vehicle into the Border Patrol agent’s car, carrying a semiautomatic weapon and having a “history of doxxing federal agents”.

A federal judge granted a motion from prosecutors to dismiss federal charges against Martinez in November.

“Ultimately, there was a determination when everything was evaluated that there were serious questions about the officers’ narratives,” legal analyst Joey Jackson told CNN.

The government’s use of the term goes beyond immigration and the DHS.

After conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump issued a September 25 memo ordering the attorney general to expand “domestic terrorism” priorities to include “politically motivated terrorist acts such as organised doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder”.

Trump signed an executive order a few days before designating antifa, a broad, loosely affiliated coalition of left-wing activists, as a “domestic terrorist” organisation.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi told federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to compile a list of groups “engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism”.

Legal experts have raised alarms about the memo’s potential infringements on the First Amendment.

“Both the order and the memo are ungrounded in fact and law,” Faiza Patel, the director of liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote. “Acting on them would violate free speech rights, potentially threatening any person or group holding any one of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution.”

Experts have also pointed to the memo’s focus on left-wing violence. It does not mention the politically motivated assassination of Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman, a member of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, months before.

“When a policy directive targets one ideological family and leaves others to the footnotes, it sheds any pretense of neutrality,” Thomas E Brzozowski, former Department of Justice counsel for domestic terrorism, wrote on December 12.

Experts raise questions about Noem’s ‘domestic terrorism’ label

Information is still surfacing about what transpired before Good was fatally shot. However, frame-by-frame analyses of video footage by The New York Times and The Washington Post found Good’s vehicle moved towards an ICE agent, but the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of the three shots from his gun from the side of the car as Good veered away.

Brzozowski told PolitiFact that because Good was trying to drive away, to “characterise that as domestic terrorism, I think, is a stretch.”

However, he said the larger concern is that Noem is using the “domestic terrorism” term absent any actual findings before an investigation.

“Essentially within hours of the incident occurring, labelling this activity as domestic terrorism, what that does is effectively strip domestic terrorism of its significance,” he said, calling it a “blatantly partisan effort to label it as domestic terrorism”.

“Now what is domestic terrorism? Whatever the DHS secretary says it is? She can characterise anything she wants as domestic terrorism. She is doing so without any facts to go on.”

Shirin Sinnar, a Stanford University Law School professor, told PolitiFact: “While intentionally ramming a vehicle for a political purpose could amount to terrorism in a different context, the videos of the Minneapolis incident appear to show a woman attempting to drive away from ICE officers, not hit them. Here, the administration’s calling her a domestic terrorist is simply an attempt to malign a protester and justify her killing by an ICE officer.”

German told PolitiFact there isn’t any public evidence to suggest that Good was “engaging in conduct that could have been prosecuted under the terrorism chapter of the US Code”.