I know this path. I have that map etched in my bones. Without justice, without accountability, I have wounds that will never heal.
I learned that at Guantanamo, when the only thing I had control over was my own body.
we have disappeared. isolated. forced into silence. Our words have been edited. Our letters had secret stamps. Lawyer blocked. Time has stretched and rotten. A trial date was not disclosed. No actual charges were made.
I was reduced to a few people in orange uniforms and locked in a metal cage. The US government had already nominated my name. “Worst of the worst.” “Terrorist.” “Enemy combatant.” Labels designed to require torture sounds.
Then came the torture. day and night. Merciless. Mechanical. It means breaking the mind first and then the body. So I stopped eating it. Not as a gesture. Not as a plea. I quit because everything else was taken away from me. My body was the only territory this foreign country had not yet occupied.
Hunger strikes are not symbolic. It’s not dramatic. It’s a lie sold by the media, by people who have never seen a body disintegrate from the inside out, by people who make slow death into headlines and panels and pretty writing.
A hunger strike is a slow and painful journey towards death. It dismantles you piece by piece. Muscles shrink. My vision fades. My heart trembles. Organs begin to malfunction. Every beat is a warning. Every hour brings you closer to death whether you want it to or not.
The hunger strike begins when all the doors are closed. When the system reveals that your life has no value as long as you are quiet and obedient. When it looks you straight in the eye and says you’re already dead.
That’s why I answer with my body.
At least eight pro-Palestinian activists jailed in the UK have refused food. One of them has been on hunger strike for more than two months. Some people have gone 50 days without eating. Some people have already been taken to the hospital. They are scattered in prisons, insulated from each other, separated from their families, and buried under the word “terrorist” so that atrocities can be disguised as law.
They are Heba Muraishi, Kesser Zurah, Am Gib, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed, Rewi Chiaramero, John Sink, and Umer Khalid.
UN human rights experts have expressed grave concern for the lives of hunger strikers. They warned that without proper treatment, activists were at increased risk of organ failure, neurological damage and death, and called on the UK government to ensure timely emergency treatment, respond to activists’ demands and address rights issues related to prolonged pre-trial detention and restrictions on protest activities.
I’ve been inside this story before. Violent language is intended to strip you of your humanity so that the public does not have to feel the pain of your suffering.
Some MPs laughed when Jeremy Corbyn called for a hunger strike in Parliament. I laughed. It’s not a whisper. It’s not a quiet discomfort. But blatant ridicule. As bodies disintegrated in the cells, grins erupted from the padded seats. People collapsed and were dragged into hospital wards, their organs failing. This is untouchable power.
Deputy Prime Minister David Lamy has avoided meeting families of hunger strikers. He has avoided even the human act of listening. Sneakyness wrapped in protocol. This is intentional disrespect.
During the 1981 Irish hunger strike, men died in prison cells while politicians ignored them as criminals, show-offs and terrorists. The ridicule came first. Just kidding. Cold. Refusal to engage. Then came the funeral. Power always laughs before killing people. Humor is a shield for cowards.
Nothing has changed. The accent is different. Suits are better tailored. The cruelty is the same.
This is not democracy. This is corruption at the heart of the nation.
We were held in Guantanamo for years without any charges or evidence and no way to be released. In Britain today, people remain in extended detention, sometimes for years, and court dates are pushed further and further away. Time itself is a punishment. Time becomes a weapon. Weapons against prisoners and their families.
What comes next is isolation.
At Guantanamo, isolation was designed to break us. I haven’t had any meaningful human contact for months, sometimes years. The silence was so heavy that it pressed against my skull. Silence was meant to erase you. Hunger strikers are kept in isolation in British prisons. Transferred. I was harassed. Get rid of routine, get rid of connection. Isolation is considered safe. it’s not. It’s a punishment. It’s control.
Next comes the censorship. The letter was delayed. The phone call is cut off. Visiting restrictions apply. Information has been filtered. The family was left in the dark. Lawyers were forced to fight for minimal access. At Guantanamo, every word leaving the camp was monitored. The same instinct remains alive in Britain. Control the story. control people.
Then comes medical coercion. Armed hunger strikes were carried out at Guantanamo. Fetters. Restraint chair. Tubes were forced through our noses and into our stomachs while guards held our limbs down. They called it medicine. It was violence. Pure, intentional, overwhelming violence designed to make resistance intolerable.
Britain wants to pretend Guantanamo was America’s mistake. Something far away. Something is over. It wasn’t. It was a laboratory. The experiment has been exported. Absorbed. Normalized. And now they are being applied inside prisons.
You can see that by looking at the extended remand.
We can see this in the laws that have been twisted to criminalize protest.
This situation is common in prisons that are used as warehouses to hold people indefinitely while the state spends its time investigating cases.
And this can be seen in the quiet collaboration between systems. Guantanamo fed black sites. The dark sites have become fodder for domestic anti-terrorism police efforts. The same logic comes up again and again. Places like Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. A British prison where political activists are imprisoned under the Terrorism Act. various flags. Same playbook.
Abuse travels faster than accountability.
I’ve seen governments study each other. Share your techniques. Refine your language. Learn how to legally cage people. How to extend the law without breaking it. How can we crush dissenting opinions while calling ourselves orderly?
This does not mean agreeing with prisoner politics. This concerns whether states are allowed to disappear, isolate, and censor people before trial, and then punish those who refuse to cooperate in their own erasure. If the UK wants to claim it is not like Guantanamo, it has to prove it with action.
End long remands without trial.
Ending segregation in response to protests.
Restore full access to lawyers and families.
Providing life-saving medical care instead of policies that quietly put lives at risk.
Hear what the hunger strikers have to say. Meet their families in person.
Repeal terror laws that are used to criminalize dissent, amplify charges by association, and erase people behind language rather than evidence.
Force members of Congress to break their silence and take responsibility.
These are not radical demands. Those are the bare minimum. It is the floor, not the ceiling, for a society that claims to respect human rights.
I am not writing this as an observer. I write as someone who has already experienced the ending. I will tell you this clearly, without euphemism or distance. Such systems do not correct themselves. They won’t slow down because of embarrassment. They will only stop if confronted directly, without fear. now.
I refuse to be silent. I join this hunger strike in solidarity. I do this because I know the system works. I do this because I know that Guantanamo has not ended, it has expanded. It’s built into other prisons, other laws, other governments to tell themselves they’re better. I do this because it is not symbolic for me to stand on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors. It’s a responsibility that comes with survival. I do this because I am capable of it, and because doing nothing would make me an accomplice.
This hunger strike is not about food. It’s about dignity. It’s about justice. It’s about remand as punishment, silence as policy, and a state that believes that if you wait long enough, people will break and disappear. I believe that silence protects me, protects me, and forgives me. That won’t happen.
I support the hunger strikers. I won’t look away. I’m not trying to soften this. There is nothing civil about a slow death carried out in clean buildings and legal jargon.
And I won’t let them disappear. Free the hunger strikers!
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
