Heba Muraisi’s Hunger Strike and the UK’s Palestinian Activist Crackdown
Heba Muraisi knows exactly what is happening to her body. “My organs are slowly but surely shutting down,” she said late Monday via phone call from HMP New Hall, a prison in northern England. The 31-year-old Londoner and pro-Palestinian activist is refusing food as part of a coordinated hunger strike—the longest the United Kingdom has seen in decades.
“I’m pushing through each day, consciously aware of each minute that goes by,” said Muraisi, now on day 73 of her hunger strike.
CNN was not able to speak with her directly by phone in prison. Instead, a member of the campaign group Prisoners for Palestine relayed CNN’s questions to her and then shared her answers.
Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed, 28, who is on day 66, began their hunger strike late last year as part of a group of eight imprisoned pro-Palestinian activists protesting their lengthy pre-trial detention and what they see as a crackdown on political dissent related to the war in Gaza.
Both Muraisi and Ahmed were arrested in November 2024 as part of the so-called “Filton 24,” a group of Palestine Action-linked activists accused of breaking into and vandalizing a UK research and development site near Filton, west of London, belonging to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.
The activist group aims to disrupt the operations of weapons manufacturers connected to the Israeli government. Prosecutors allege the Filton incident caused an estimated £1 million ($1.3 million) in damage. Muraisi and Ahmed have been charged with burglary, criminal damage, and conspiracy. They deny the charges and are awaiting trial.
Although neither have been charged under terrorism legislation, they, along with others from the Filton group, were initially held and interrogated under counterterrorism powers. Human rights groups decried the use of such legislation, saying it has shaped the activists’ treatment in custody and paved the way for the government’s later move to ban the group.
Prisoners for Palestine as a terrorist organization last summer. The Palestine Action ban—which put the group on the same legal footing as Hamas, ISIS and al Qaeda—sparked a fierce debate in Britain about the government’s use of counterterrorism laws and the limits of freedom of expression.
Then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper framed the move as necessary to safeguard national security, saying the group was “not a non-violent organization” and had a history of “unacceptable criminal damage.” Rights groups and civil liberties campaigners accuse the government of a grave overreach to clamp down on legitimate protest in the country.
Muraisi and Ahmed began their hunger strike alongside six other detained activists after letters from their lawyers to the Home Office, raising concerns about their prolonged pre-trial detention, went unanswered. Twenty-two-year-old Lewie Chiaramello continues to fast on alternate days because of diabetes while Umar Khalid, also 22, restarted his hunger strike over the weekend after a
