Four members of advocacy group Palestine Action vowed to continue their hunger strike this week as a medical alert and fellow protester was hospitalized.
Members of the group are being held in five British prisons on suspicion of involvement in the break-ins at Israeli defense company Elbit Systems’ British subsidiary facility in Bristol and at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire. They are protesting for better prison conditions, the right to a fair trial and a change in policy in July when Britain designated the movement as a “terrorist” group.
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Palestine Action denies the charges against the eight detainees, including “violent insurrection.” Relatives and loved ones told Al Jazeera that the members’ health had deteriorated during the hunger strike, leading to repeated hospitalizations. Lawyers representing the detainees have announced plans to sue the government.
The case drew international attention to Britain’s treatment of groups in solidarity with Palestinians during Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Every week, thousands of people rallied to support Palestinian action.
Hunger strikes have been used throughout history as an extreme non-violent method of seeking justice. Its effectiveness often lies in the moral weight it places on those in power.
Historical records show that hunger strikes date back to ancient India and Ireland, where people would fast to publicly humiliate criminals on their doorsteps. But they have also proven powerful as political statements in modern times.
Some of the most famous hunger strikes in recent world history are listed below.
Irish republican movement hunger strike
Some of the most important hunger strikes of the 20th century occurred during the Irish Revolutionary period, or the period of unrest. The first wave was the hunger strike in Cork in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence. Approximately 65 suspected republicans were held in Cork County Jail without proper court proceedings.
They began a hunger strike, demanding their release and to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals. They were joined by the Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, whose profile brought great international attention to the independence movement. The British government attempted to disband the movement by transferring the prisoners elsewhere, but their fast continued. At least three prisoners, including McSweeney, died after 74 days.
Later, in the run-up to the end of the conflict and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, imprisoned Irish republicans protested their internment and the lifting of their political prisoner status, which deprived them of certain rights (such as the right to wear civilian clothing and the right not to perform forced labor).
They began “dirty protests” in 1980, refusing to bathe and covering walls with excrement. In 1981, large numbers of people refused to eat. The most prominent of these was Bobby Sands, a member of the IRA who was elected as a representative to the British Parliament while still in prison. Mr Sands eventually starved to death along with nine others during the period, leading to widespread criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s government.
India’s Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, later widely known as Mahatma Gandhi, used hunger strikes on several occasions as a means of protest against the British colonial masters. His fast, called satyagraha, meaning clinging to truth in Hindi, was seen by politicians and activists as not only a political act but also a spiritual one.
Gandhi’s strikes sometimes lasted from days to weeks, during which he drank mostly water and sometimes a little lime juice. They achieved varying results. Sometimes British policy changed, but sometimes there was no improvement. However, in many of his writings, Gandhi philosophized that this act was not compulsory for him, but rather an attempt at personal redemption and public education.
One of Gandhi’s most important hunger strikes occurred in February 1943, after British authorities placed him under house arrest in Pune for starting the Quit India movement in August 1942. Gandhi protested against the mass arrests of Congress leaders and demanded the release of prisoners by denying them food for 21 days. This strengthened public support for independence and sparked unrest across the country as workers walked off the job and people took to the streets in protest.
Another popular figure who used hunger strikes to protest British rule in colonial India was Jatindra Nath Das, better known as Jatin Das. Das, a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, refused food during his 63-day detention starting in August 1929, protesting the poor treatment of political prisoners. He died at the age of 24, and his funeral drew more than 500,000 mourners.
Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prison
Palestinians held in Israeli prisons have long carried out hunger strikes as a form of protest, often without trial. One of the most well-known figures was Kader Adnan, whose shocking death in May 2023 after an 86-day hunger strike brought the world’s attention to the horrific treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government.
Adnan, who was 45 when he starved to death in Ayalon Prison, leaving behind nine children, had been repeatedly targeted by Israeli authorities since the early 2000s. The baker, who is from the occupied West Bank, once joined the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group as a spokesperson, but his wife later left the group and publicly stated that he had never been involved in any armed operations.
However, Adnan was arrested multiple times and held without trial, and some estimates say he has spent a cumulative eight years in Israeli prisons. Adnan frequently went on hunger strikes during his detention, usually protesting what he called his humiliating arrest and groundless detention. In 2012, thousands of people in Gaza and the West Bank showed bipartisan support for his 66-day fast, then the longest in Palestinian history. He was released after several days of mass protests.
In February 2023, Adnan was arrested again. He immediately began a hunger strike, refusing to eat, drink or receive medical care. He was detained for months even though medical experts warned the Israeli government that he had lost so much muscle mass that he had reached the point where eating him would do more harm than good. On the morning of May 2, Adnan was found dead in his cell, becoming the first Palestinian prisoner to die on a hunger strike in 30 years. Former Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti described his death as an “assassination” by the Israeli government.
Hunger strike at Guantanamo
After the opening of the US Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba in 2002, hundreds of “terrorism” suspects were held without formal charges, but they went on a wave of hunger strikes to protest their detention. The camp is notorious for inhumane conditions and torture of prisoners. By January 2025, 15 detainees remained.
Due to the secretive nature of the prison, news of previous hunger strikes remained hidden from the public. However, in 2005, US media reported a large-scale hunger strike by at least 200 inmates, a third of the camp’s population.
Authorities force-fed people whose health had deteriorated significantly through nasal tubes. Some were handcuffed, restrained, and force-fed daily. One detainee, Lakhdar Boumediene, later wrote that he had not eaten for two years, but was force-fed twice a day. He was strapped to a restraint chair, which detainees refer to as a “torture chair,” and had a tube inserted into his nose and another tube into his stomach. His lawyer told reporters that he usually wears a mask on his face, and that when one side of his nose broke, a tube was inserted into the other side. Sometimes food would get into my lungs.
Hunger strikes would continue on and off at Guantanamo for years. In 2013, another wave of strikes began, with at least 106 of the remaining 166 detainees taking part by July. Authorities force-fed 45 people at the time. One of the strikers, Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Diab, petitioned the government to stop authorities from force-feeding him, but a court in Washington, D.C., rejected his lawsuit.
Protests against apartheid in South Africa
Black and Indian political prisoners held for many years on Robben Island went on a mass hunger strike in July 1966 to protest the harsh conditions. Detainees, including Nelson Mandela, faced reduced food rations and forced labor in lime quarries, even though they were not criminals. They were also angry at attempts to separate themselves based on racial lines.
Mandela wrote in his 1994 biography, Long Walk to Freedom, that prison authorities began offering larger rations, including more vegetables and chunks of meat with meals, to break up the strike. Prison wardens smiled as prisoners refused food, he wrote, and men were subjected to particularly harsh labor in the quarries. Although many would collapse from hard work and starvation, the strike continued.
The key plot twist began when the prison wardens, who had taken great care to befriend Mandela and other political prisoners, began their own hunger strike for better living conditions and food. The authorities immediately made peace with the guards and were forced to negotiate with the prisoners a day later. The strike lasted about seven days.
Then, in May 2017, South Africans, including then-Vice President Cyril Ramaphosa, who had been imprisoned in a separate facility during apartheid, supported Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike by collectively fasting for a day. At the time, the late Robben Island veteran Sunny “King” Singh wrote in the South African newspaper Sunday Tribune that the situation in the prison never changed beyond a week of hunger strikes, and compared it to the prolonged situation of Palestinian strikers.
“Although we were beaten by our captors, we never experienced the kind of abuse or torture that some Palestinian prisoners of war have complained about,” he wrote. “It was rare for us to be put in solitary confinement, but it seems to be common in Israeli prisons.”
