Today, 27th January 2026, we announce the end of Umer Khalid’s hunger and thirst strike, who was the last remaining hunger striker, and with it, the end of the collective open-ended hunger strike campaign that started on Balfour day, November 2nd 2025.
8 hunger strikers across 6 different British prisons chose to use their own incarcerated bodies to resist from deep within the prison walls for Palestine. In every demand they made, and every statement they wrote, they centered Palestinian liberation, and inspired by the unconquerable spirit of Palestinian resistance, they resisted until their bodies gave up on them, and after that too.
This hunger strike has forever changed the landscape of British activism for Palestine, just as it has permanently altered the bodies of the hunger striking prisoners, challenging the boundaries of what we deem is possible in standing up to the Zionist military-industrial complex on British soil, and proving to us, above all, that our bodies are all we need to fight for Palestinian liberation, no matter where we are or what conditions we find ourselves bound to.
Umer ended his strike after 17 days of hunger striking and 3 days of a thirst strike, during which he met with the prison governor of HMP Wormwood Scrubs, Amy Frost, in order to discuss prison censorship, one of the main demands of the hunger strike campaign. As a result of the meeting, Umer has now received all of his previously withheld mail and clothes, and his restrictions on visits, which have been heavily limited ever since being held on remand in July 2025, have also been lifted. Umer won this victory – of being deserving of the fundamental human rights for all prisoners – after he had starved his body to draw attention to the barbaric cruelty of the prison system, operating on orders from the British state – treatment our prisoners have all been subjected to just because they dared to stand up to Elbit Systems, the military arm of the Zionist entity Britain is courting for genocide. Umer and the other hunger strikers are proof that the British state is willing to let its own citizens die at the behest of a foreign genocidal entity. Despite their best efforts, the hunger strikers were not silenced, but live, resisting and defiant.Throughout the hunger strike campaign, directly because of the courageous resistance and sacrifices of the hunger strikers, Elbit has been exposed and its days are numbered. The loss of the £2billion defence contract it had been set up to win is a victory for the hunger strikers; because Elbit’s entire business model, its very existence, is built on the destruction of Palestinian life, the lucrative profits it would have received would allow it to test more weapons in its business to annihilate the Palestinian people. The loss means it has lost its foothold here, and as the hunger strike has demonstrated to us, direct action will soon drive it out for good.
The greatest achievement of the hunger strikers is that they have reinvigorated a movement on the streets: they have awakened an uprising. The state thought they could crush dissent and for a few months it seemed they may have been right. But what we have seen with this hunger strike is an upsurge of people’s refusal to accept watching from a distance, a refusal of the government’s participation in genocide – and a return to direct action against the direct architecture of the genocide itself.
Umer, Kamran, Heba, Lewie, T, Amu, Qesser, and Jon have taught us that we create our own justice. Their resistance, which has changed their bodies forever, is not confined to a hunger strike, or to prison walls; it is a commitment that will not fade or die, but will continue, forcefully and powerfully, until liberation. We pledge to fight alongside them on the outside, using our bodies to get in the way of the machinery of Zionist violence and colonisation, never slowing down, on the path they have paved for us using their incarcerated bodies.
Until every factory is shut down, until every cage is empty, until every inch of Palestine is liberated, our resistance continues.