The Waiting
In the early hours before dawn breaks over Bristol, while the sodium lights still cast their orange pallor across the industrial estates of Filton, a modified prison van sat idling outside the perimeter fence of Elbit Systems’ research and development facility. Inside, six activists checked their watches, their breath visible in the August cold of 2024, their hands steady despite what was to come. Within minutes, the van would crash through chain-link and steel, and within hours, production machinery would lie in twisted heaps, quadcopter drones – that Israeli forces programme to mimic the cries of women and children, luring Palestinian civilians from rubble to their deaths in Ghazzah – would be rendered inoperable. The reported damage? Over £1 million. And the cost to the activists and those alleged to have assisted them? That will be known in the coming months.
Today, in cells scattered across England’s prison system, twenty-four activists sit in a limbo that has stretched from weeks into months into years. They are known as the Filton 24, and they have become what many now call Britain’s first political prisoners of the Palestine solidarity movement.
The Architecture of Waiting
One prisoner turned twenty years old in a cell at HMP Bronzefield. For the first six days, they saw only walls—solitary confinement, they called it, though they had committed no infraction within the prison itself. They are a university student, or were before the arrest.
Two weeks passed before they heard their mother’s voice on the telephone. Three weeks before they could see her face across a visitors’ table, their hands unable to touch except in the brief, monitored embrace at the beginning and end. The letters came—dozens of them, postcards decorated with flowers and solidarity slogans, paintings from supporters they had never met—but were delayed for months. They sat somewhere, in some office, examined by some official for some reason the prison authorities couldn’t adequately explain.
In HMP Lewes, another prisoner (27) discovered one morning that their phone list had been wiped clean – family and friend were now unreachable. The prison staff offered no explanation, or rather, they offered the only explanation that mattered – new security protocols. The system had changed. They would have to reapply, resubmit, re-justify why a prisoner awaiting trial might need to speak to the people who loved them.
At HMP Peterborough, guards informed Filton 24 prisoners that they had been reclassified. The word they used was ‘terrorists.’ Not accused of terrorism – they have never been charged with terrorism, a fact that sits awkwardly in official documentation – but terrorists nonetheless, at least for the purposes of determining which privileges they would keep, and which would be stripped away. The reclassification came in July 2025, when the UK government added Palestine Action to the terrorist proscription list.
The Machinery of Justice, Slowly Turning
Some of the Filton 24 have now been behind bars for over a year, held on remand, which is to say held without conviction, which is to say held in the space between accusation and judgment where the law permits a kind of temporal suspension. The first of three connected trials begin in November 2025, with the second in April 2026, and the third in June 2026. By the time they stand before a jury, some will have spent more time in prison awaiting trial than many convicted offenders serve for their entire sentences.
T Hoxha (29) has been on remand since November 2024. Her trial is scheduled for April 2026. She will have been in prison for seventeen months when she finally hears the charges read in open court. Seventeen months of fluorescent lights and morning counts and meals delivered through slots in steel doors. The system moves at its own pace, indifferent to the lives suspended in its machinery.
The charges are criminal damage, aggravated burglary, violent disorder. Serious, certainly. But the prosecution has done something curious – they have alleged a “terrorist connection”, a legal designation that carries no formal definition but profound consequences. It permits harsher detention conditions. It justifies longer remand periods. It transforms protesters into something darker in the public imagination, something easier to forget behind prison walls. It also restricts what can be reported to public.
The Theatre of Interrogation
After their arrests, all twenty-four were detained without charge under the Terrorism Act. The law permits this for up to fourteen days, though most were held for approximately one week – long enough for the interrogations to acquire a certain rhythm. The questions came in waves, sometimes gentle, sometimes pointed, always circling back to the same territories – who planned this, who funded this, who else was involved? The activists, trained in the protocols of non-cooperation, mostly remained silent.
Six were arrested at the scene that August morning, tackled as they emerged from the facility or pulled from the modified van still idling outside. Four more were arrested in coordinated raids across the country, armed counter-terrorism police arriving at their doors at dawn, the kind of operation usually reserved for threats more serious than property damage. Eight more in November, another six in July 2025. With each wave, the same theatre repeated – the pre-dawn raids, the terrorism detention, the interrogation rooms, the eventual charges devoid of terrorism offences but laden with terrorism associations.
The Target
Elbit Systems’ drones circle above Ghazzah, its targeting systems guide missiles into apartment buildings, its surveillance technologies track Palestinians through the occupied territories. According to Israeli media reports, Elbit provides up to eighty percent of the Israeli military’s land-based equipment and eighty-five percent of its military drones. The Iron Sting munition, recently developed and deployed for the first time against Palestinians, came from Elbit’s laboratories. The company markets their merchandise as battle-tested, a euphemism that translates more bluntly – tested on Palestinian bodies, men, women and children.
In the UK, Elbit operates multiple facilities. Or operated – the five-year long campaign against the company has proven remarkably effective. From London to Bristol to Oldham to Tamworth, Elbit or Elbit suppliers have either vacated properties or ceased trading with the arms manufacturer.
Each closure potentially represent thousands of drones that would not fly, thousands of targeting systems that would not guide missiles, thousands of surveillance feeds that would not track Palestinian movement. The Filton raid was part of this broader campaign – a campaign that was winning, which may explain why the response has been so severe and disproportionate.
The Refusal of the Body
On August 11, 2025, Hoxha stopped eating. The decision was not impulsive. She had lost her library job without explanation, her recreational classes cancelled, her mail still withheld after months. The prison had taken everything it could take except her body, and so she reclaimed her body in the only way available to her – by refusing to sustain it.
The medical staff at HMP Peterborough responded with a curious strategy. They refused to acknowledge the hunger strike was happening. They declined to provide electrolytes. They noted her deteriorating condition in their logs but offered nothing to slow the decline except food, which was the one thing she would not accept.
In Santa Rita Jail in California, a thirty-five-year-old political prisoner named Casey Goonan heard about Hoxha’s strike. He and his cellmate joined her, issuing a statement about cross-border solidarity in the Palestinian liberation movement. The hunger strike was spreading, cell to cell, prison to prison, across oceans.
Hoxha ended her 28-day hunger strike on September 9, after securing several of her demands. Goonan and his cellmate ended their strike shortly afterwards.
Then on October 20, came the announcement that would transform individual acts of refusal into something larger. On November 2, 2025 – the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, that 1917 document that promised Palestine to the Zionist movement – a coordinated hunger strike would begin. Thirty-three people held on remand for actions against the genocide in Palestine would refuse food simultaneously, in prisons across the UK.
Prisoners for Palestine, the campaign group coordinating the action, issued demands to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood – the right to a fair trial, release on bail, the dropping of terror-related charges, an end to censorship of prisoners whose words are deemed too dangerous for publication. The demands were specific, practical, the kind of things that should not need to be demanded but apparently do.
The strike marks the largest coordinated prisoners’ hunger strike in Britain since 1981, when Bobby Sands and his fellow Irish republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the Maze Prison, their bodies transformed into weapons against a state that claimed to be impervious to moral argument. Ten men died that year before the British government relented on some demands. The hunger strikers of November 2025 will hope for a swifter resolution, but they are prepared, if necessary, to follow the same path to its conclusion.
The Historical Echo
The tactic is well-established. Suffragettes used it in Holloway Prison, refusing food until they were force-fed through tubes thrust down their throats, a procedure so brutal it amounted to torture. Irish republicans used it repeatedly throughout the twentieth century. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention have used it hundreds of times, individual strikes and collective ones, some lasting months, a few ending in death. Guantánamo Bay inmates used it, and were force-fed in medieval restraint chairs, the procedure condemned by medical ethicists worldwide but defended by the US government as necessary.
The logic of the hunger strike is simple and terrible: when the state has taken everything else—your freedom, your voice, your ability to act in the world—your body remains. And your body, you can refuse to sustain. It is the ultimate assertion of agency, the final act of defiance available to those rendered powerless by every other measure.
Bobby Sands wrote from his cell in the Maze: ‘They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.’ The Prisoners for Palestine website quotes these words on its homepage. The echo across four decades is deliberate.
What They Carry
In their cells, the Filton 24 carry what prisoners always carry – photographs going soft at the edges from handling, letters read and reread until the creases threaten to tear the paper, memories of the moment before the arrest when they were still free, and the future was still open. They carry the weight of their choice—to risk everything, to sacrifice years of their lives to resist a genocide. Inadvertently, they became test cases in the UK’s expanding definition of terrorism and the unchecked over-policing of its citizens.
They carry, too, the knowledge that their action allegedly cost Elbit Systems over £1 million, that facilities have closed, that suppliers ceased working with the company, that the campaign was working. Whether that knowledge sustains them through the fifteenth month, the seventeenth month, the twentieth month of waiting, only they can say.
With the hunger strike underway the British government remains unyielding. In the cells, the waiting continues, as it has for over a year, as it may for months more, the fluorescent lights humming their monotonous note, the doors clanging shut at count time, the letters arriving or not arriving, the phone calls permitted or denied, the bodies growing thinner, the resolve hardening into something that might be courage or might be desperation or might be both at once.
In Filton, the dawn still breaks over the industrial estates, indifferent to politics and protest. The Elbit facility sits quiet now, or perhaps it doesn’t—perhaps production has resumed, perhaps new drones are being tested, perhaps the machinery hums on despite everything. The activists cannot know. They are behind bars, waiting for their trials, waiting for justice, waiting to see if their sacrifice will mean anything at all.
— © 2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
