Belfast, Northern Ireland — On New Year’s Eve, as fireworks lit the Belfast sky, the city’s streets were abuzz — and not only in celebration.
Hundreds gathered in solidarity with activists from the Palestine Action group who are on hunger strikes in prison. Their chants echoed past murals that do not merely decorate the city, but testify to its troubled past.
Along the Falls Road, Irish republican murals sit beside Palestinian ones. The International Wall, once a rolling canvas of global struggles, has become known as the Palestinian wall. Poems by the late Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, killed in an Israeli air strike in December 2023, run across its length. Images sent by Palestinian artists have been painted by local hands.
More recently, new words have appeared on Belfast’s famed walls. “Blessed are those who hunger for justice.” Painted alongside long-familiar images of Irish republican prisoners like Bobby Sands are new names now written into the city’s political conscience: the four pro-Palestinian activists currently on hunger strike in British prisons, their bodies weakening as the days stretch on.
“This is not a city that will ever accept any attempt to silence our voice or our right to protest or our right to stand up for human rights,” said Patricia McKeown, a trade union activist who spoke at the protest.
“These young people are being held unjustly and in ridiculous conditions – and they have taken the ultimate decision to express their views … and most particularly on what’s happening to people in Palestine – why would we not support that?” she asked.
A hunger strike reaches Belfast
The protest in Belfast is part of a growing international campaign urging the British government to intervene as the health of four detainees deteriorates behind prison walls. All are affiliated with Palestine Action and are being held on remand while awaiting trial, a process campaigners say could keep them imprisoned for more than a year before their cases are heard. With legal avenues exhausted, supporters say the hunger strike has become a last resort.
The Palestine Action members are being held over their alleged involvement in break-ins at the United Kingdom subsidiary of Elbit Systems in Filton near Bristol, where equipment was reportedly damaged, and at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire, where two military aircraft were sprayed with red paint. The prisoners deny the charges against them, which include burglary and violent disorder.
The prisoners are demanding release on bail, an end to what they describe as interference with their mail and reading materials, access to a fair trial and the de-proscription of Palestine Action. In July, the British government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer banned Palestine Action under a controversial anti-terrorism law.
Heba Muraisi is on day 61 without food. Teuta Hoxha is on day 55. Kamran Ahmed on day 54. Lewie Chiaramello on day 41. Hoxha and Ahmed have already been hospitalised. Campaigners describe it as the largest hunger strike in Britain since 1981, one they say is explicitly inspired by the Irish hunger strikes.
In 1981, Irish Republican Army and other republican prisoners went on hunger strike in Northern Ireland, demanding the restoration of their political status. Ten men died, including their leader, Bobby Sands, who was elected to the British parliament during the strike. Margaret Thatcher took a hardline public stance, but behind the scenes, the government ultimately sought a way out as public opinion shifted.
One prisoner, 29-year-old Martin Hurson, died on the 46th day. Others, including Raymond McCreesh, Francis Hughes, Michael Devine and Joe McDonnell, died between days 59 and 61. Sands died after 66 days on a hunger strike.
Sue Pentel, a member of Jews for Palestine Ireland, remembers that period vividly.
“I was here during the hunger strike,” she said. “I went through the hunger strikes, marched, demonstrated, held meetings, protested, so I remember the callous brutality of the British government letting 10 hungers die.”
“The words of Bobby Sands, which are ‘Our revenge will be the laughter of our children’. And we raised our families here, and they’re the same people, this new generation who are standing in solidarity with Palestine.”
‘If this continues, some will die’
Standing beneath a mural of Bobby Sands, Pat Sheehan fears history is edging dangerously close to repeating itself. He spent 55 days on a hunger strike before it was called off on October 3, 1981.
“I was the longest on that hunger strike when it came to an end in 1981, so in theory I would have been the next person to die,” he said.
By that stage, he said, his liver was failing. His eyesight had gone. He vomited bile constantly.
“Once you pass 40 days, you’re entering the danger zone,” Sheehan said. “Physically, the hunger strikers must be very weak now for those who have been on hunger strike for over 50 days.”
“Mentally, if they have prepared properly to go on hunger strike, their psychological strength will increase the longer the hunger strike goes on.”
“I think if it continues, inevitably some of the hunger strikers are going to die.”
Sheehan, who now represents West Belfast as an MLA for Sinn Fein, believes that Palestine Action-linked hunger strikers are political prisoners, adding that people in Ireland understand Palestine in a way few Western countries do.
“Ireland is probably the one country in Western Europe where there’s almost absolute support for the Palestinian cause,” he said. “Because we have a similar history of colonisation; of genocide and detention.”
“So when Irish people see on their TV screens what’s happening in Gaza, there’s massive empathy.”
Ireland’s stance
That empathy has increasingly translated into political action. Ireland formally recognised the state of Palestine in 2024 and has joined South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice, alleging genocide in Gaza, a charge Israel denies.
The Irish government has also taken steps to restrict the sale of Israeli bonds, while Ireland has boycotted the Eurovision Song Contest over Israel’s participation and called for its national football team to be suspended from international competition.
But many campaigners say the government’s actions have not gone far enough. They argue that the Occupied Territories Bill, which seeks to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements, has been stalled since 2018, and express anger that United States military aircraft transporting weapons to Israel are still permitted to pass through Ireland’s Shannon Airport.
Meanwhile, in the northern part of Ireland that remains part of Britain, the war in Gaza has dominated domestic politics.
The Stormont Assembly was thrown into crisis after Democratic Unionist Party education minister Paul Givan travelled to Jerusalem on a trip paid for by the Israeli government, prompting a no-confidence vote amid fierce criticism from Irish republican, nationalist, left-wing and unaligned political groups.
Belfast City Hall’s decision last month to fly a Palestinian flag was also fervently opposed by unionist councillors before it was eventually approved.
For some loyalist and unionist groups, support for Israel has become entwined with loyalty to Britain, with Israeli flags also flying in traditionally loyalist parts of Belfast.
With a legacy of identity rooted along sectarian lines, the genocide in Gaza has at times been recast along the old fault lines of division.
‘Solidarity reaches Palestine’
Yet on the streets of Belfast, protesters insist their solidarity is not rooted in national identity, but in humanity.
Damien Quinn, 33, a member of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, said hunger strikes had always carried a particular weight in Ireland.
“We are here today to support the hunger strikers in Britain. But we are also here for the Palestinian people for those being slaughtered every single day,” he said.
Palestine Action, he said, “made it very clear they have tried signing petitions, they have tried lobbying, they’ve tried everything”.
“So when I see the way they are being treated in prison, for standing up against genocide, that’s heartbreaking.”
For Rita Aburahma, 25, a Palestinian who has found a home in Belfast, the hunger strike carries a painful familiarity.
“My people don’t have the luxury of speaking out, being in Palestine – solidarity matters,” she said.
“I find the hunger strikers are really brave – it’s always been a form of resistance. It does concern me, and many other people, how long it has taken the government to pay attention to them, or take action in any form.
“Nothing will save those people if the government doesn’t do something about them. So it is shocking in a way, but not that surprising because the same government has been watching the genocide unfold and escalate without doing anything.
“Every form of solidarity reaches the people in Palestine.”
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