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Four members of the advocacy group Palestine Action have pledged this week to continue their hunger strike amid grave medical warnings and the hospitalisations of their fellow protesters.

The group’s members are being held in five prisons in the United Kingdom over alleged involvement in break-ins at a facility of the UK’s subsidiary of the Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems in Bristol and a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire. They are protesting for better conditions in prison, rights to a fair trial, and for the UK to change a July policy listing the movement as a “terror” group.

Palestine Action denies charges of “violent disorder” and others against the eight detainees. Relatives and loved ones told Al Jazeera of the members’ deteriorating health amid the hunger strikes, which have led to repeated hospital admissions. Lawyers representing the detainees have revealed plans to sue the government.

The case has brought international attention to the UK’s treatment of groups standing in solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Thousands of people have rallied in support of Palestine Action every week.

Hunger strikes have been used throughout history as an extreme, non-violent way of seeking justice. Their effectiveness often lies in the moral weight they place upon those in power.

Historical records trace hunger strikes back to ancient India and Ireland, where people would fast at the doorstep of an offender to publicly shame them. However, they have also proved powerful as political statements in the present day.

Here are some of the most famous hunger strikes in recent world history:

Irish Republican Movement hunger strikes

Some of the most significant hunger strikes in the 20th century occurred during the Irish revolutionary period, or the Troubles. The first wave was the 1920 Cork hunger strike, during the Irish War of Independence. Some 65 people suspected of being Republicans had been held without proper trial proceedings at the Cork County Gaol.

They began a hunger strike, demanding their release and asking to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals. They were joined by Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork, whose profile brought significant international attention to the independence cause. The British government attempted to break up the movement by transferring the prisoners to other locations, but their fasts continued. At least three prisoners died, including MacSwiney, after 74 days.

Later on, towards the end of the conflict and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, imprisoned Irish Republicans protested against their internment and the withdrawal of political prisoner status that stripped them of certain rights: the right to wear civilian clothes, or to not be forced into labour.

They began the “dirty protest” in 1980, refusing to have a bath and covering walls in excrement. In 1981, scores of people refused to eat. The most prominent among them was Bobby Sands, an IRA member who was elected as a representative to the British Parliament while he was still in jail. Sands eventually starved to death, along with nine others, during that period, leading to widespread criticism of the Margaret Thatcher administration.

India’s Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was later popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, used hunger strikes as a tool of protest against the British colonial rulers several times. His fasts, referred to as Satyagraha, meaning holding on to truth in Hindi, were considered by the politician and activist not only as a political act but also a spiritual one.

Gandhi’s strikes sometimes lasted for days or weeks, during which he largely sipped water, sometimes with some lime juice. They achieved mixed results – sometimes, the British policy changed, but at other times, there were no improvements. Gandhi, however, philosophised in his many writings that the act was not a coercive one for him, but rather an attempt at personal atonement and to educate the public.

One of Gandhi’s most significant hunger strikes was in February 1943, after British authorities placed him under house arrest in Pune for starting the Quit India Movement back in August 1942. Gandhi protested against the mass arrests of Congress leaders and demanded the release of prisoners by refusing food for 21 days. It intensified public support for independence and prompted unrest around the country, as workers stayed away from work and people poured out into the streets in protest.

Another popular figure who used hunger strikes to protest against British rule in colonial India was Jatindra Nath Das, better known as Jatin Das. A member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, Das refused food while in detention for 63 days starting from August 1929, in protest against the poor treatment of political prisoners. He died at the age of 24, and his funeral attracted more than 500,000 mourners.

Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons

Palestinians held, often without trial, in Israeli jails have long used hunger strikes as a form of protest. One of the most well-known figures is Khader Adnan, whose shocking death in May 2023 after an 86-day hunger strike drew global attention to the appalling treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government.

Adnan, who was 45 when he starved to death at the Ayalon Prison, leaving behind nine children, had repeatedly been targeted by Israeli authorities since the early 2000s. The baker from the occupied West Bank had once been part of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group as a spokesperson, although his wife later stated publicly that he had left the group and that he had never been involved in armed operations.

However, Adnan was arrested and held without trial multiple times, with some estimates stating that he spent a cumulative eight years in Israeli prisons. Adnan would often go on hunger strike during those detentions, protesting against what he said was usually a humiliating arrest and a detention without basis. In 2012, thousands in Gaza and the West Bank rallied in a non-partisan show of support after he went 66 days without food, the longest such strike in Palestinian history at the time. He was released days after the mass protests.

In February 2023, Adnan was once again arrested. He immediately began a hunger strike, refusing to eat, drink, or receive medical care. He was held for months, even as medical experts warned the Israeli government that he had lost significant muscle mass and had reached a point where eating would cause more damage than good. On the morning of May 2, Adnan was found dead in his cell, making him the first Palestinian prisoner to die in a hunger strike in three decades. Former Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti described his death as an “assassination” by the Israeli government.

Hunger strikes at Guantanamo

Following the 2002 opening of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp of the United States in Cuba, where hundreds of “terror” suspects were held prisoners, often with no formal charges, they used hunger strikes in waves to protest against their detention. The camp is notorious for its inhumane conditions and prisoner torture. There were 15 detainees left by January 2025.

The secret nature of the prison prevented news of earlier hunger strikes from emerging. However, in 2005, US media reported mass hunger strikes by scores of detainees – at least 200 prisoners, or a third of the camp’s population.

Officials forcefully fed those whose health had severely deteriorated through nasal tubes. Others were cuffed daily, restrained, and force-fed. One detainee, Lakhdar Boumediene, later wrote that he went without a real meal for two years, but that he was forcefully fed twice a day: he was strapped down in a restraining chair that inmates called the “torture chair”, and a tube was inserted in his nose and another in his stomach. His lawyer also told reporters that his face was usually masked, and that when one side of his nose was broken one time, they stuck the tube in the other side, his lawyer said. Sometimes, the food got into his lungs.

Hunger strikes would continue intermittently through the years at Guantanamo. In 2013, another big wave of strikes began, with at least 106 of the remaining 166 detainees participating by July. Authorities force-fed 45 people at the time. One striker, Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab, filed for an injunction against the government to stop officials from force-feeding him, but a court in Washington, DC rejected his lawsuit.

Protests against apartheid South Africa

Black and Indian political prisoners held for years on Robben Island protested against their brutal conditions by going on a collective hunger strike in July 1966. The detainees, including Nelson Mandela, had been facing reduced food rations and were forced to work in a lime quarry, despite not being criminals. They were also angry at attempts to separate them along racial lines.

In his 1994 biography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote that prison authorities began serving bigger rations, even accompanying the food with more vegetables and hunks of meat to try to break the strike. Prison wardens smiled as the prisoners rejected the food, he wrote, and the men were driven especially hard at the quarry. Many would collapse under the intensity of the work and the hunger, but the strikes continued.

A crucial plot twist began when prison wardens, whom Mandela and other political prisoners had taken extra care to befriend, began hunger strikes of their own, demanding better living conditions and food for themselves. Authorities were forced to immediately settle with the prison guards and, a day later, negotiate with the prisoners. The strike lasted about seven days.

Later, in May 2017, South Africans, including the then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was imprisoned in a different facility during apartheid, supported hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners by participating in a collective one-day fast. At the time, late Robben Island veteran Sunny “King” Singh wrote in the South African paper Sunday Tribune that hunger strikes in the prison never lasted more than a week before things changed, and compared it with the protracted situation of Palestinian strikers.

“We were beaten by our captors but never experienced the type of abuse and torture that some of the Palestinian prisoners complain of,” he wrote. “It was rare that we were put in solitary confinement, but this seems commonplace in Israeli jails.”

Theme parks have long had a checkered reputation when it comes to dining.

And theme park designer Eddie Sotto once wanted to put an end to such a reputation. “Why,” Sotto reflected to me in 2023, “are we not thinking more holistically as to what we’re putting inside the guest as to what we’re putting in front of the guest?”

“The old joke is that people don’t expect the food to be any good in an immersive environment,” Sotto said. “I don’t believe that. I believe it should all be good. You’re paying a lot. The opportunity is for it all to be transformative.”

Sotto, whose outspoken passion for theme park design made him a favorite among Disney’s vast fanbase, died on Dec. 17 in Orange County after a long battle with various heart-related issues, said his wife of 48 years, Deena. He was 67.

While Sotto’s best-known masterworks are overseas, be it the creation of Main Street, U.S.A., for Disneyland Paris or overseeing the development of the early trackless attraction Pooh’s Hunny Hunt for Tokyo Disneyland, he had a reputation for fighting tirelessly to enhance the theme park experience, pushing for improvements to everything including ride vehicles and the food on guests’ plates.

In the early ’90s while working for Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s secretive arm devoted to theme park experiences, Sotto took it upon himself to hold a chef-led symposium for Imagineers.

“They taught us Imagineers a lot about the ritual of dining, and understanding what foods do to you,” he said, describing how theme park dining should go beyond developing a burger with a cute name.

He was also an early designer on Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure, brought music to Space Mountain and elevated a Los Angeles landmark: He led an interior refresh of the now-shuttered Encounter restaurant at LAX.

Born in Hollywood on March 14, 1958, and raised in La Mirada and Fullerton, Sotto grew up obsessed with Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland. He married Deena, his high school sweetheart, when he was 19. Sotto initially followed in his late father’s early footsteps, working at Sears. His meteoric rise in theme park design would be unheard of today, as Sotto never attended college and was self taught, drafting theme park designs in his down time while selling appliances.

His hiring at Imagineering caused some debate, says Tony Baxter, the Disney legend who oversaw the creation of such attractions as Big Thunder Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure, Star Tours and Splash Mountain. Outgoing and driven, Sotto began reaching out to Baxter for advice in the late ‘70s, says Baxter. It would take nearly a decade for Baxter to persuade his superiors to take a chance on Sotto, who was eventually hired by Imagineering in 1986 after stints at Knott’s Berry Farm and the Landmark Entertainment Group. It was at Landmark where he met one of his key mentors, Herb Ryman, a fine artist and longtime concept designer with Imagineering.

Eddie Sotto’s most famed Disney work is the design of Main Street, U.S.A., at Disneyland Paris.

(Michel Euler / Associated Press)

“For people in management, they kind of want to see a portfolio of something solid,” Baxter says. “But for me, it’s what’s going on in someone’s mind. And Eddie’s mind was sharp as a tack.”

So savvy, believed Baxter, that he was given the task of reimagining Main Street, U.S.A., for a French audience at Disneyland Paris. Sotto’s take on the introductory turn-of-the-century land is widely regarded as its finest, with its grand Victorian-inspired designs diving more deeply into factual American history than its predecessors. Enclosed archways line each side of the street behind the shops. The arcades serve as a shield from Parisian weather but also gave Sotto the opportunity to design installations that focus on the Statue of Liberty, American inventions and the bond between the United States and France.

The goal, says Baxter, was “to create shops in competition with European architecture.” Tom Morris, a retired Imagineer who worked closely with Sotto, says Sotto’s Main Street possesses “an extra layer of storytelling,” adding that Sotto gave the thoroughfare “more of an opportunity for exploration.”

“It’s excessive in the best way possible,” adds Christopher Merritt, a theme park designer and author who worked with Sotto on Pooh’s Hunny Hunt.

Morris recalled first meeting Sotto when they were teens in the 1970s. Morris jokes that he and Sotto both went to Disneyland “more than our parents thought was healthy, which was four or five times per year.” Their paths initially crossed at the Anaheim public library, where they went to peruse its Disneyland collection.

“There were files and files of photographs and employee newsletters — all sorts of weird and interesting things,” Morris says. “I always thought I must be the only weirdo who is interested in all of this, but one day there was another person in there and that person was Ed Sotto. That’s where we met, and I was really surprised, actually, that there was someone else afflicted with the same obsession for Disneyland.”

At Knott’s, Sotto was tasked with reimagining a motorcycle chase ride. Sotto, as recalled in the book “Knott’s Preserved” by Merritt and J. Eric Lynxwiler, took four buttons off a coat and created a mini soapbox car and ran it around a conference table as if it were a Matchbox toy. This would lead to the creation of the Wacky Soap Box Racers, in which the makeshift cars would careen through painted facades of cartoon-ish animals cheering on the guests. The attraction emphasized silliness, taking riders into “Catnip Junction” and through rat-infested sewers.

Eddie Sotto in 2015. In his 13-plus years at Imagineering, the designer touched multiple Disneyland attractions.

(Courtesy of Deena Sotto)

“He told me that everyone backed away from the project because he was the new kid,” says Merritt. “He got literally no budget. There was an end scene in a fireworks factory and they were making bombs out of rubber beach balls that they spray painted black. There were doing this by hand. And it’s a big hit.”

Sotto in his 13-plus years at Imagineering had an influence on Disneyland. As a concept designer on Indiana Jones Adventure, Sotto, says Baxter, conceived the idea in which the ride vehicles would appear to go through one of three different doors, an illusion accomplished by a rotating wall. Repeat visitors would sense as if the car was moving on an alternate track. Today, the walls no longer move and the effect is attempted via projection technology. “I felt my rolling ball [at the ride’s end] and Eddie’s choice room were the two things that really made the ride unique in terms of, ‘Wow, how did they do that?’” Baxter says.

Sotto ascended quickly while at Imagineering, rising to the position of senior vice president, concept design.

“Eddie just kept sketching and drawing,” Morris says. “He was inspired by Herb Ryman and that was Herb’s motto: ‘Just keep drawing.’ I just think when you have a lot of quick sketching acuity, word gets out. People know. This is someone you want on your team, especially in the early stages, to help concept, bring forth and pitch an idea.”

In the mid-’90s, Sotto realized a dream of many an Imagineer, particularly Morris, of bringing onboard audio onto a roller coaster, specifically Disneyland’s Space Mountain. Today, it’s commonplace for coasters to have synced music or sound effects, but Morris says there were technical hurdles that needed to be solved, most notably related to the engineering of the speaker sets on individual cars.

Sotto pushed it through, but not without some personal touches. An avid fan of rock ‘n’ roll, Sotto tapped surf rock guitar legend Dick Dale for a part of the composition, which heavily pulled from Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium” section of “The Carnival of the Animals.” The result was otherworldly, but also rooted in a sound associated with riding the Southern California waves. Dale’s riffs, wrote Sotto on his website, “were to be triggered to compliment each twist, turn and drop of your ‘rocket.’”

“He loved Orange County surf guitar music,” says Merritt. “So he hires Dick Dale for this intergalactic soundtrack for Space Mountain. They did some promotional thing where they put Dick Dale standing on Space Mountain playing his guitar. That’s just the audaciousness of Eddie.”

In fact, Sotto wrote on his site, it was the promise to play atop Space Mountain that sold Dale on the gig. Sotto would leave Imagineering in 1999 to soon after establish his own Laguna Beach-based SottoStudios, but not before getting an opportunity with Imagineering to remodel Encounter at LAX. Sotto’s vision was a space-age bachelor pad, a place, he said in 2023, “where George Jetson and Barbarella might meet for a drink,” with lava lamp-inspired pillars and soda fountains modeled in the shape of vintage sci-fi ray guns, complete with sound effects.

A remodel of the interior of LAX restaurant Encounter was one of Eddie Sotto’s career highlights.

(David McNew / Getty Images)

Sotto long spoke of the restaurant, which closed in 2013, as one of his favorite projects.

“Theme has to go deep,” Sotto said. “It has be something that’s relevant and exciting to people. I spent weeks putting together 11 hours of music for Encounter. What you were hearing could be a B-side from William Shatner’s space album. Theme has to reward your close inspection at a rich level. That’s why people return.”

SottoStudios over the years was heavily involved in the automobile industry, as Sotto led the design of many car showrooms. Sotto also had a passion for restaurants, and worked on numerous L.A. establishments including John Sedlar’s shuttered but acclaimed Rivera. Sotto’s career would also take him to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin offices, for which he designed a Jules Verne-inspired rocketship fireplace that doubles as a lobby meeting space.

And his passion for theme parks never wavered, says Baxter, even as his heart issues worsened. At their monthly lunches, Baxter notes that he and Sotto would continue to brainstorm new Disney attractions or alternative directions to what the company was announcing. Sotto, says Baxter, spent his final few days at Orange’s UCI Medical Center, but was given a room with a view of Disneyland’s fireworks, which he looked forward to watching each evening. Baxter recalled a picture of the two of them eating chili cheese dogs at Disneyland.

“He sent it to me, and said, ‘I’m dreaming of a day when we can do this again,’” Baxter says. “That was just two weeks ago.”

In addition to his wife, Deena, Sotto is survived by their son Brian, daughter Venice and her husband, Rocky.