Pro-Palestine Political Prisoners on Hunger Strike from the US to the UK

Casey and Hoxha are actually freer than us all, because they are resisting.

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To save Hoxha and Casey's lives, call and email HMP Petersborough to demand they meet all of Hoxha's demands. For the latest updates, instructions, and set of demands, go to instagram.com/prisoners4palestine and x.com/Workshops4Gaza.

28 August 2025 - Political prisoner T. Hoxha is dying.

She is on the 18th day of a hunger strike in HMP Peterborough in protest of the prison's politically-targeted abuses. One of the Filton 24 detained indefinitely under the UK's "Terrorism Act" while awaiting trial next spring, Hoxha is alleged to have participated in the heroic dismantling of an Elbit Systems weapons factory, causing €1 million in damages.

Over two weeks into her strike, Hoxha's loved ones report that her physical and mental health is deteriorating fast. Her hair is falling out, her jaw aches in pain, and her brain fog is worsening, while the prison neglects her medical care. Supporters on the outside are organizing a call-in campaign to demand the prison administration give her electrolyte sachets and meet her demands: the reinstatement of her job in the prison library and the delivery of her mail that the prison administration is withholding from her. On 27 August, she developed a fever, experienced a persistent headache, vomited after taking vitamins, and her skin became noticeably discolored. A nurse practitioner announced Hoxha is in the “danger zone." As of 28 August, supporters are urgently calling for her to be admitted to a hospital.

Now more lives are on the line. When Casey Goonan, the only political prisoner in the US from the 2024 student intifada, heard about Hoxha's hunger strike on 26 August, they and their cellmate at Santa Rita jail immediately declared a hunger strike in solidarity with Hoxha until her demands are met, internationalizing the strike. Refusing to intake food is especially risky for Casey as a diabetic, but they have organized successful collective hunger strikes in the past.

Like the Pal Action UK prisoners, Casey has been repeatedly targeted for the political nature of their alleged crime, and deliberately isolated from other inmates, a classic tactic used by the state against political prisoners to prevent them from organizing. Just this summer, Casey filed grievance against a threatening deputy and prison authorities retaliated by revoking their phone calls, visitations, and commissary for over a month. Several times, the state has pushed back Casey's sentencing hearing, supposed to be in April but now set for 23 September 2025. They are facing up to 20 years in federal prison with "terrorism enhancement" for allegedly burning police vehicles at the University of California, Berkeley. Also similar to the weaponization of counter-terrorism lawfare in the UK cases, this "terrorism enhancement" addition to Casey’s charges gives the federal government far more room for abuse and draconian overreach in their sentencing and treatment of Casey.

To announce the strike's expansion, Casey published the following statement:

Today I learned about T Hoxha, a Pal Action prisoner in the UK who is on Day 16 of her hunger strike at HMP Peterborough. As of 4pm EST on August 26, 2025, 2 out of 3 of her demands have been met, and she is still on strike to demand that the prison release the mail they have been withholding from her.

As captives imprisoned for our participation in the Palestinian liberation movement in the west, we have a responsibly to each other across borders to pursue our lives in prison with the same steadfastness as the Palestinian prisoner movement held captive in Israeli prisons.

The states that we have been captured by are the enablers of the Zionist entity’s accelerated genocide and the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the ongoing genocides of Black and Indigenous people whose lands they continue to occupy.

As the western left continues to move from crisis to crisis and avoid their responsibilities to Palestine, we are all that we have. By we I am referring to people facing repression for their support of Palestine, who are sacrificing, truly sacrificing. People such as T Hoxha, who has suffered through 16 days of starvation just to get her mail.

The Palestine solidarity movement in the west cannot abandon people like her who have risked their lives and continue to do so in resistance to this intolerable condition of genocide.

Solidarity is actions, not words. As of today, my cellmate and I are on hunger strike at Santa Rita jail until her demands are met. Solidarity with T. Hoxha and all prisoners of the Palestine solidarity movement!

RAZE THE WALLS! LIBERATE ALL PRISONERS OF SETTLER EMPIRE!

As Hoxha and Casey's bodies shrink and weaken and start eating themselves alive, it begs the question, why do we not hear their names chanted in the streets at pro-Palestine protests, their faces raised on signs and murals, their demands echoed in conferences and pamphlets? Where are the cash-rich NGOs that could be using their huge platforms to speak out for Casey and the Filton 24, if not donating to their legal funds, at least acknowledging their existence? What about Elias Rodriguez, Jakhi McCray, Tarek Bazrouk, the countless other political prisoners in the so-called United States? There are too many to name. How dare anyone here express defeatism from their warm homes or complain about how none of us will sacrifice, while doing nothing to escalate, and ignoring the people who have made sacrifices and are now stuck in cold cells? How many people will get to the end of this article but fail to make a call for the hunger strikers?

Why don’t Hoxha, the Filton 24, Casey, Elias, Jakhi, and longterm political prisoners like Mumia, Imam Jamil al-Amin, and those of the George Floyd Uprising get the kind of support they deserve from the movement, especially not from NGOs who identify themselves as the movement’s leadership? Because they are not "perfect victims." They are not accused of being peaceful, they are accused of resisting, and for that, they are unapologetic.

As one of Casey's comrades wrote in the piece On Casey Goonan and the Abandonment of Political Prisoners in the Pro-Palestine Movement, "Despite vague assertions of the interconnectedness of repression and struggles between the American policing and prison apparatuses to that of Israel, there has been little material manifestation from that understanding within the US pro-Palestine movement. Meanwhile, coordinated struggle between prisoners and outside militants has been a key point of success for Palestinian liberation." The author of this piece points to the petit bourgeois class character and NGOization of the "movement" in the US, and its reformist attitude toward US imperialism and settler colonialism, as likely explanations for its isolation of militants and failure to escalate in general. As D. Musa Springer put it in Mondoweiss, this tendency is opportunistic and suicidal — "to not see ourselves reflected in the faces of our political prisoners and organize accordingly...We have allowed our political prisoners to become ghosts, within a movement claiming to want radical exorcism of oppressive systems."

"Our prisoners are our compass" is not an empty slogan in Palestine, it is the material reality of struggle. When Lebanese revolutionary communist Georges Abdallah was released in July after decades in French prison, he explained this axiom in the clearest terms: "The one who resists is the one who has the final say and determines what should and should not be done. The ultimate decision-maker is the one who sacrifices himself to the resistance. All spectators have no right to discuss any topic." Prisoners of the Palestinian revolution are not forgotten, or only paid lip service, they are bled for. We cannot forget, after all, that the Al-Aqsa Flood was itself a prison break and it birthed the Toufan al-Ahrar, the Flood of the Free. But until we actually put the honoring of political prisoners into practice here in the west, "our prisoners are our compass" will be just that, just a slogan, and an increasingly hollow one.

There is not much more to say here that is not already referenced above about this tendency to abandon militants facing repression, but the stakes feel imminently higher when it is not just life in prison on the line, but physical life itself. I remember when I was in jail last year for taking direct action with Pal Action US, for a relatively very short bid (40 days), and at the time, Casey was the only other political prisoner from this iteration of the Palestine movement, along with the Pal Action UK prisoners. As I sat in my cell in New Hampshire, I felt like we were all breathing together, our spirits soaring across metal bars, concrete, mountains, and seas, never alone. We wrote happy birthday messages from our jail tablets to be passed on to prisoners in the UK. We asked our supporters to stop writing letters to us and instead to write to people inside for much longer, like Casey. It is like Casey said — "we are all that we have. By we I am referring to people facing repression for their support of Palestine, who are sacrificing, truly sacrificing." Since I was released I fear sometimes that I have slipped back into my comforts or my numbness, that I have lost touch with the raw clarity and urgency (not despair) that I felt while inside, that we should all feel, all the time, everywhere. But Casey's words jolt me right back into that clarity. They remind us that Casey and Hoxha are actually freer than us all, because they are resisting.

To save Hoxha and Casey's lives, call and email HMP Petersborough to demand they meet all of Hoxha's demands. For the latest updates, instructions, and set of demands, go to instagram.com/prisoners4palestine and x.com/Workshops4Gaza.

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