The body keeps its own calendar. Qesser Zuhrah knows this now, on day thirteen without food. At HMP Bronzefield, a women’s prison in Surrey that smells of industrial cleaner and confinement, her body is recording what official reports will not – the precise weight of her conviction, measured in disappearing kilograms.
I’ve been thinking about hunger strikes since I first learned that Qesser and five others stopped eating. This is the kind of story that pulls you in not through its politics but through its physics. What happens when a human being decides their body is the last territory they control?
On November 2nd, Qesser and Amu Gibb refused their morning meal at Bronzefield prison. No announcement, no fanfare. Just the quiet rebellion of a rejected tray. In the baroque architecture of prison bureaucracy, this is perhaps the most radical act available – to make yourself disappear, slowly, in plain sight.
By day nine, the medical staff finally began taking observations. Nine days. I try to imagine what that means – a human body entering its second week without sustenance before anyone in authority bothers to write down a blood pressure reading. The medical staff, according to reports filtering out, have been ‘hostile.’ In the vocabulary of institutional cruelty, hostility often masks fear.
At HMP New Hall in Wakefield, Heba Muraisi has entered her twelfth day of starvation, feeling what she describes as ‘tiredness and nauseous’ – the language of someone who has learnt that understatement in describing one’s suffering gives it a certain dignity that dramatic language cannot. But prison officials have their own language. They’ve explained to Heba, in medical detail, exactly how her body will break down. How her organs will begin consuming themselves. How death will come. This tactic was described as threatening by those around her, though I suspect a more accurate term exists somewhere in the literature of psychological warfare.
I keep returning to that detail – officials describing to a starving woman the specific mechanisms of her potential death. It’s a kind of bureaucratic sadism, dressed up as concern. ‘Look what you’re doing to yourself,’ they seem to say, as if the hunger strike exists in a vacuum, as if there isn’t a reason these people are using their bodies as weapons.
On November 6th, Jon Cink joined the hunger strike. On his ninth day, during a blood test, he fainted. This is the body’s inevitable mathematics. The staff, in what appears to be a grotesque fulfillment of their duty not-to-care, failed to monitor him afterward. Perhaps they were just following an unwritten protocol – if we don’t watch, we don’t have to see.
Teuta “T” Hoxha, at HMP Peterborough, knows something about this particular form of resistance. She’s done it before, in August, winning her demands after more than three weeks without food. Now she’s back at it, experiencing bouts of faintness six days into her second hunger strike. Her body remembers what this costs.
The newest striker is Kamran Ahmed, twenty-seven years old, held at HMP Pentonville in London. He joined on November 10th, refusing breakfast. Five days in, he reports of ‘brain fog,’ that peculiar mental haze that comes when the brain begins burning through its glucose reserves and switching to less efficient fuel sources. His medical observations began on day three – faster than some of the others, though still three days of bureaucratic silence.
Kamran’s story carries its own particular weight. In February, Mrs. Justice Cheema-Grubb granted him bail. There was a moment – how long does hope last? – when he thought he might go home to care for his elderly parents. Then, in March, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision. Now he faces up to two years on remand before trial. Two years that will pass whether he’s eventually found guilty or not. Time served for a conviction that hasn’t happened yet.
All six prisoners share a common origin story – they’re part of what has become known as the ‘Filton 24,’ activists arrested following an action on August 6th, 2024, at the Bristol (Filton) site of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. Counter-terrorism police arrested them under the Terrorism Act. But here’s the bureaucratic sleight of hand – they haven’t been charged with any terrorist offences. The label serves its purpose without requiring evidence. The Terrorism Act provides the authority for arrest, and extended detention – the absence of terrorism charges later becomes irrelevant. They remain in prison anyway, bail denied.
The hunger strike has generated its own ecosystem of solidarity. Luca Dolce – known as Stecco – an Italian anarchist held in Sanremo prison, joined on November 8th. His statement reads like a manifesto compressed into a gesture: “The struggle against prison and the military techno-industrial system is essential for a struggle of broader scope, of revolutionary and internationalist resistance.”
His comrade Massimo Passamani is refusing prison work, a smaller rebellion that compounds the larger one.
From New York, Jakhi McCray, a Black community organizer under house arrest, has begun a solidarity fast. He draws connections that the official narrative tries to sever: “Prison guards have forcibly removed hijabs from Muslim women prisoners, similar to the NYPD’s targeting of and physical violence against Muslim women during protests.” The geography of repression has a common language.
Two weeks before the strike began, the prisoners sent a letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood with their demands, including: immediate release on bail, the right to a fair trial, and the permanent closure of all Elbit Systems sites in the UK. The government’s response has been silence – that particularly British form of bureaucratic violence where the absence of acknowledgment becomes its own kind of answer.
On November 12th, two activists from People Against Genocide occupied the roof of Keysight Technologies in Berkshire, a supplier of electronics for Israeli military drones. They hung a banner – Support the Hunger Strike. The hunger protest metastasises, finding new forms.
This weekend, solidarity took physical form outside prison walls across England. On Saturday evening, dozens gathered outside HMP Bronzefield – the high walled fortress that holds three of the hunger strikers. It’s the largest women’s prison in Europe, though that scale does nothing to diminish its menace. If anything, the enormity makes it worse—a city of confinement, purpose-built to hold over five hundred women behind those forbidding walls.
On Saturday, protesters arrived at 5:30pm, assembling outside those walls that are designed to make witnesses feel small, irrelevant. Palestinian flags lifted and fell in the November evening wind. People chanted and spoke – short speeches tried to breach concrete, to reach the activists inside who were choosing to starve. The act of standing there, of being present outside the place of imprisonment, becomes its own kind of testimony. We see you, the gathering says. You are not disappeared.
The vigils multiplied across the country this weekend. Earlier on Saturday, people stood outside HMP Pentonville at 4pm – that Victorian pile in North London, cockroach-infested according to recent reports, now in special measures. There, holding signs and flags as darkness settled over the city, supporters gathered for Kamran Ahmed, the young man experiencing brain fog on day five of his refusal.
Tragedy marked that Pentonville vigil in ways that illustrated how protest exists in the world, not in a vacuum. A photographer collapsed and died at the gathering. The details remain unclear, but the death became part of the vigil’s record, a reminder that the hunger strike’s human cost extends in unexpected directions, that these acts of resistance ripple outward in ways no one can predict or control.
The same afternoon, other vigils formed:
- at HMP New Hall in Wakefield at 4:30pm where Heba was told how her organs would fail
- at HMP Styal in Wilmslow at 5pm
- at HMP Low Newton in Durham at 5pm.
- On Sunday, the ritual repeated at HMP Peterborough at 4pm for T Hoxha,
- and at HMP Eastwood Park in South Gloucestershire at 4:30pm.
Small gatherings of conscience, distributed across the British prison system like points on a map of moral witness.
I think about those vigils – people standing on pavements and trimmed lawns which butt up against towering concrete walls – people holding signs outside buildings designed to make looking away forgivable. But the vigils insist on attention. They plant bodies outside the places where other bodies are slowly consuming themselves. They hold space in the literal sense – occupying the ground near the imprisoned, making their presence known even when it’s not clear anyone inside can see or hear them. It’s a gamble, like the hunger strike itself – a wager that visibility matters, that witness has power, that someone, somewhere, will be moved to act.
Inside those walls, six people continue not eating. Their bodies are counting down in a language more fundamental than any legal brief. The average person can survive thirty to forty days without food, depending on hydration and pre-existing health. Some have made it longer.
But these aren’t statistics. These are people who wake up each morning weaker than the day before, feeling their bodies cannibalise themselves in slow motion, and choosing to continue. That’s what a hunger strike is – a sustained act of will against the body’s most fundamental imperative. It’s also a bet that someone in power will blink first, that the spectacle of self-destruction will become more unbearable than the status quo.
The British government hasn’t blinked yet. And so, the calendar keeps advancing, each day another entry in the ledger of the body’s protest, another day of empty trays and weakening pulses and the peculiar clarity that comes from hunger – the sense that you’ve stripped away everything inessential and what remains is the irreducible fact of your conviction.
I think about Heba, being told by prison officials exactly how she will die. I think about that as a form of theatre, a script where the state plays doctor, explaining physiology as if it’s separate from policy, as if the hunger is the problem and not the imprisonment without charge, the denied bail, the terrorism laws used to detain people who haven’t been charged with terrorism.
The hunger strike is entering its third week. Bodies continue counting down. The government continues its silence. And somewhere in the complicated calculus of protest, six people are wagering that their slow disappearance will finally make someone look, really look, at what’s being done in the name of security and the rule of law.
Whether they’re right about that remains to be seen. But they’re already winning one argument – they’ve proven that even in a maximum-security prison, even under the weight of the state’s most serious accusations, there is still one thing that cannot be taken away – the body, and what you choose to do with it.
— © 2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
[The trial of the first six Filton defendants begins on Monday (17th Nov) and is expected to continue for several weeks – the Judicial Review of Yvette Cooper’s proscription of protest group Palestine Action will be heard at the High Court 25th-27th November, but a judgement is not expected until January, most likely after the Filton trial is concluded. Reporting restrictions are expected or already in place on both hearings]
