Ember Bureau - Culture & Society

Left to Die on a Cell Floor: Palestine Action Survivors Speak Out

They were 19, 21, 28, 30 years old. They had committed no violent act. They were convicted of nothing. And yet they spent 15 months in British prisons, enduring what they describe as deliberate medical neglect, physical assault, and solitary confinement - all while refusing food for up to 73 days to be heard. Now, free on bail, they are telling the world what happened to them.

Heba Muraisi was 45 kilograms and 43 days into refusing food when the guards left her on the cell floor. She could not stand. Her muscles had wasted to the point where sitting caused unbearable pain. She would remain on that floor, paralysed and unattended, for 22 hours.

"They left me to die on my cell floor," she told a press conference in London on March 25, 2026. "Or at least let me believe that they would."

This is not a war story from a distant country. It is a story about what Britain does, right now, to young people who protest weapons sales to Israel. Muraisi, who worked as a florist and lifeguard before her arrest, had been held on remand for 15 months at the time. She had been convicted of nothing. Her crime, in the eyes of the British state, was taking part in a protest at an arms factory that supplies drones to Israel's military.

She refused food for 73 days.

The story of Palestine Action and its imprisoned members has been one of the most contested, suppressed, and misrepresented stories in British public life over the past year. Most of the coverage has focused on the legal and political battle - the banning, the court rulings, the government's response. Almost none has focused on what actually happened inside those prisons, to real people with real bodies, real families, and real consequences that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

Until now.

Who They Are - Before the Headlines

The four who spoke at the March 25 press conference are not the caricatures that the British government's "terror" designation tried to make them. They are young adults who, watching the war in Gaza, made a choice that most people would not make - and are now paying a price that most people cannot imagine.

Heba Muraisi, 31, is a Londoner. She worked as a florist and a lifeguard. She is described by those who know her as someone who had always cared deeply about justice. She was arrested in connection with the August 6, 2024 raid on the Elbit Systems UK factory in Filton, near Bristol. Elbit Systems is Israel's largest arms manufacturer; its drones have been used extensively in Gaza and have been described by the company itself as "the backbone" of Israel's drone fleet.

Muraisi refused food for 73 days - one of the longest hunger strikes in UK prison history. She lost so much weight and muscle mass that even sitting became unbearable. She suffered neurological damage. Her memory declined. She had muscle spasms. Her organ function was in question for days. She was hospitalised multiple times. She was 29 when she was first arrested.

Qesser Zuhrah, 21, was 19 years old when, as she put it, she was "kidnapped from my home by counter-terrorism police in a very violent raid." She is now one of the youngest people ever to have been designated a terrorism suspect under UK law in connection with protest activity. She refused food for almost 50 days. She said she was left feeling "like a ghost of myself."

Kamran Ahmed, 28, is a Londoner who worked as a mechanic before his arrest. He refused food for 66 days, his seventh hospitalisation coming in the final week. His sister Shahmina Alam, a pharmacist, told Al Jazeera she watched him become "paper-thin" and believed he might die. His heart muscle shrank. He lost 25 percent of his body weight. He still has chest pains and breathlessness that follow him every day.

Teuta Hoxha, 30, underwent two separate hunger strikes while on remand. During the second, she lost 20 percent of her body weight, was hospitalised and, as she told the press conference, was "defecating my muscle mass in hospital whilst chained to an officer like a dog."

A Calculated Regime - What They Say Happened Inside

What makes the accounts striking is not just their individual severity - it is their consistency. The four were held at different prisons across England. They had limited contact with each other. And yet they describe virtually identical treatment: systematic isolation, denial of basic medical support during their hunger strikes, confiscation of religious items, physical force, and deliberate psychological pressure.

This is what they are describing as "a calculated regime."

Zuhrah said that from the beginning of her imprisonment, she was "blocked from making any friends, especially other young people and Muslims." A Muslim woman she met was warned by a guard to stay away from her because there were "dangerous people" present. When two prisoners died in one week and Zuhrah asked guards to unlock the cell of a suicidal, claustrophobic prisoner, she said the response was an assault.

"Female guards grabbed my arms, exposed my body, dragged me through the landing and up a metal staircase, and threw me into my cell against the metal bed frame." - Qesser Zuhrah, at the London press conference, March 25, 2026

Muraisi's keffiyeh - her headscarf - was confiscated. So she used a pillowcase while praying. She was moved from Bronzefield prison, where her mother could visit, to a jail in northern England. Prison authorities "refused to tell me where I was going," she said. Her mother, who is unwell, was unable to visit for five months. The transfer was widely seen as punitive - designed to isolate her from family support at her most physically vulnerable moment.

During her hunger strike, Muraisi says she was not provided with electrolytes. She only received vitamins after 30 days. She was offered food by guards using what she called "cruel tactics." Then, on approximately day 45 or 46, she was left paralysed on her cell floor for 22 hours.

Ahmed says he was handcuffed to a prison officer while showering - a measure normally reserved for prisoners considered violent escape risks. The cuffs were applied so tight that, as of March 2026, he says he still bears the marks. He was also made to walk without shoes to communal toilets where he had to "dodge stains of urine and faeces."

Hoxha says she witnessed guards threaten other prisoners with 14-year sentences for saying the words "free Palestine." When she raised this with the prison's counter-terrorism lead - a meeting she secured specifically through the leverage of her hunger strike - he used a neo-Nazi symbol as a comparison, apparently to minimise her concern. She claims that other prisoners were told not to associate with the hunger strikers because they were "terrorists."

Throughout all of this, the UK Ministry of Justice repeatedly stated that prison welfare procedures were being followed, and that the prisoners were not being mistreated. Al Jazeera has contacted the Ministry of Justice for comment; this publication is also reaching out for a response.

The Law That Called Them Terrorists

To understand what happened to these four people, you have to understand what the British government did to their movement.

Palestine Action was founded in 2020. Its stated aim, straightforward and public: shut down Elbit Systems UK factories. Not through lobbying. Not through petitions. Through direct action - occupying sites, spray-painting buildings with red paint meant to symbolise blood, causing property damage. In the group's own words: if you see a building on fire with children inside, you don't stand outside and call someone. You go in.

This logic - radical direct action targeting complicit infrastructure - has a long lineage in British protest history. The suffragettes used it. Anti-apartheid activists used it. Palestine Action was doing something similar, with similar clarity of moral purpose, in the context of a conflict that has killed over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023.

Then, in July 2025, after activists broke into an RAF base in Oxfordshire and spray-painted two Voyager refuelling planes, the UK government under Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer did something unprecedented. It placed Palestine Action on the same legal register as ISIL, al-Qaeda, and far-right terrorist organisations. Palestine Action became a proscribed terrorist group.

The consequences were immediate and sweeping. Nearly 3,000 people were arrested for raising placards that said things like "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action." (Al Jazeera, February 2026). Membership, support, or expression of solidarity with the group became potentially criminal acts. The United Nations human rights chief decried the ban. Irish author Sally Rooney, who had pledged to fund the group's legal defence, was warned by UK authorities. Writers signed solidarity declarations.

The people imprisoned on remand - convicted of nothing, awaiting trials that were consistently pushed back - suddenly found themselves legally designated as linked to a terrorist organisation. That designation transformed how they were treated inside.

"The government committed a huge crime against its own population. It was unlawful for them to ban Palestine Action, and when they banned Palestine Action, they subsequently did thousands of unlawful arrests against their own citizens and tried to prosecute them through the courts for terrorism offences, for holding up signs." - Huda Ammori, Palestine Action co-founder, February 13, 2026

The High Court Verdict That Changed Everything

On February 13, 2026, the UK High Court handed the Starmer government one of its most significant judicial defeats.

Two judges found that the government's proscription of Palestine Action had been "disproportionate." The ruling was blunt: the ban was unlawful. Palestine Action could not be legally designated a terrorist organisation on the basis of its activities as they were understood by the court.

The implications cascaded quickly. The 12 activists still in prison were granted bail by the High Court shortly after, ending detentions that had stretched in some cases to 15 months. Their bail came on February 20. They walked out of prison to cheers, many of them visibly weakened, their bodies still recovering from the damage of months of hunger strike and what they described as medical neglect.

Huda Ammori, Palestine Action's co-founder, was direct about what had happened: "They've made Palestine Action a household name. They have spread the message and the power that ordinary people have to shut down weapons factories across the country and across the world. So for that, I thank them."

Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said she was "disappointed" by the ruling and would appeal. The ban technically remains in place pending that appeal, with an April 2026 date reportedly set. Labour MP John McDonnell, who had voted against the proscription, called on the government to respect the court's ruling: "We have a right to protest, to assemble, and to speak freely in this country - that has been secured largely by direct action over centuries."

What the Hunger Strike Won - and Didn't Win

The activists and their supporters claim several concrete victories from the hunger strike - though none of them come without caveats, and not all of their demands were met.

The most significant claimed win is a contract. In early 2026, it was reported that the UK government chose not to award Elbit Systems UK a two-billion-pound military training contract. The contract went instead to Raytheon UK, the British subsidiary of the American defence giant - which itself has major deals with the Israeli military and whose CEO said in October 2023 that the Gaza war would "eventually lead to additional orders." The moral calculus here is imperfect at best. But Palestine Action and its supporters counted it as proof that the campaign to make Elbit commercially toxic in the UK was working.

Muraisi's transfer back to Bronzefield prison, close to her family, was also counted as a win. She had been moved to a jail in northern England without warning while her ill mother could not reach her. The transfer back happened as a direct result of pressure generated by the hunger strike.

A meeting between Hoxha and the head of the prison's Joint Extremism Unit - which she had demanded to discuss the surveillance and isolation she was experiencing - was also listed among the gains. That it happened at all, activists say, was a form of institutional acknowledgment.

What was not achieved: immediate bail (which came much later, through the courts), de-proscription (still pending appeal), closure of all 16 Elbit UK sites, and any formal acknowledgment by the government of mistreatment in prisons.

Suing the State - What Comes Next

At the March 25 press conference, campaigner Lisa Minerva Luxx announced that the four activists - and others who were detained - are planning legal action against the prisons themselves. The claim: medical neglect, deliberate mistreatment, and unlawful conditions during their detention.

If the cases proceed, they will force British courts to examine in detail exactly what happened inside those cells. The Ministry of Justice has repeatedly denied mistreatment; the activists have detailed, consistent, corroborated accounts that say otherwise. Courts will have to weigh prison records, medical reports, witness statements, and the testimony of the activists themselves.

The legal landscape is complicated by the fact that the proscription appeal has not yet been heard. If the Home Office succeeds in reinstating the terror designation, the legal jeopardy facing the activists shifts significantly. If the April appeal fails - if the courts again find the proscription unlawful - the government faces not just the embarrassment of having banned a protest group illegally, but the prospect of compensation claims from thousands of people arrested for holding signs.

Ahmed's sister Shahmina Alam, the pharmacist who watched her brother become paper-thin on her phone screen while working hospital shifts, is among those who see the legal route as the only meaningful form of accountability available. "There were some wins," she said, but she is clear-eyed about what has not yet happened: no formal inquiry into conditions, no ministerial accountability, no acknowledgment that young people in British jails were left to suffer for their politics.

"Our prisons mistreated us in the most elaborate ways, in order to teach us that our bodies don't belong to us." - Qesser Zuhrah, London press conference, March 25, 2026

Twenty-three of the Filton 24 are now free on bail. One, Samuel Corner, remains in prison on an additional charge of allegedly assaulting a police sergeant. Four other hunger strikers remain imprisoned in connection with the RAF base break-in, accused of involvement in a separate incident. Their cases are ongoing.

Elbit, Raytheon, and the Moral Geometry of Arms Deals

At the heart of this entire story is a question that the British government would very much prefer not to answer in public: what does it mean that UK weapons factories are supplying drones that kill people in Gaza?

Elbit Systems UK is not a peripheral actor. Its drones - the Hermes and Watchkeeper systems among others - have been described by the company itself as the "backbone" of Israel's drone fleet. They are surveillance drones, strike drones, targeting systems. They have been operational throughout the war on Gaza. Elbit has UK manufacturing sites, UK contracts, UK government relationships, and until recently, a potential 2-billion-pound training contract.

Palestine Action's argument is simple: if you know a weapons factory is producing instruments of mass death, and the government will not stop it, and the companies will not stop it - then you go and stop it yourself. Direct action on infrastructure rather than symbols. The spray paint is not the point. The production line is the point.

This argument is controversial. The legal system does not generally permit individuals to unilaterally decide which factories deserve to be shut down. But in the context of a conflict where more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, where the International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures against Israel, and where the UK government has maintained arms relationships with Israel while verbally expressing concern - the moral geometry is messier than any government statement acknowledges.

The decision to give the 2-billion-pound training contract to Raytheon instead of Elbit does not resolve this. Raytheon is itself a major arms supplier to Israel. The company's CEO celebrated the commercial opportunities of the Gaza war in 2023. Switching from one weapons manufacturer to another, in response to protest pressure, is not the same as reckoning honestly with what British weapons do to Palestinian bodies.

Palestine Action knows this. Their campaign is not over. It is, in their framing, just getting started.

The Body as Battleground - What a 73-Day Hunger Strike Actually Does

For those who have not watched a loved one stop eating, the medical reality of a prolonged hunger strike is difficult to fully comprehend. It helps to understand what was actually happening to these four people's bodies during the months they were imprisoned.

After approximately three days without food, the body enters ketosis - it begins burning fat for energy. After the fat reserves are exhausted, which typically takes two to three weeks for someone with normal body mass, the body begins consuming muscle. The heart is a muscle. So is the diaphragm that drives breathing. So are the legs, arms, and hands.

By the time Muraisi was on day 45, her body had been consuming its own tissue for over a month. At 45 kilograms, there was almost no reserve left. Her neurological symptoms - the memory problems, the muscle spasms - indicate that even the brain was being affected by the deficiencies accumulating in her system. The risk of refeeding syndrome, which occurs when a severely malnourished person begins eating again and can trigger cardiac arrest, was significant and required careful medical management.

Ahmed lost hearing in one ear. His heart muscle shrank measurably. His sister, a pharmacist, says she and consulting physicians are concerned about "irreversible health damage" from starvation whose full effects can take years to manifest.

Zuhrah says she was left paralysed on her cell floor. Hoxha says she was "defecating muscle mass" in hospital while handcuffed to a guard.

And through all of this - through hospitalisations, through muscle collapse, through the moment when the body begins visibly consuming itself - these young people continued to refuse food. Not because they wanted to suffer. Because they believed that only by placing their own lives in the balance would anyone pay attention to what was happening in Gaza, and to what British weapons were enabling there.

Muraisi, near the end, told Al Jazeera: "I think about how or when I could die." She said she had resigned herself to that possibility. She continued anyway.

That is not insanity. That is conviction. And whatever one thinks of Palestine Action's methods, the willingness of a 30-year-old florist to starve herself to the edge of death rather than be silent about genocide is not a fact that can be comfortably dismissed by any government press release.

Britain's Reckoning With Dissent - A Pattern Larger Than One Group

Palestine Action's story does not exist in isolation. It sits within a broader pattern of how the UK under Starmer's Labour government has responded to protest, to dissent, and to demands for accountability over Gaza.

The same period that saw Palestine Action banned saw the UK maintain its arms export licences to Israel, despite pressure from opposition MPs, legal challenges, and a UN human rights chief who explicitly called on the UK to halt weapons sales. The government continued to affirm Israel's "right to self-defence" in language that remained largely unchanged as the civilian death toll in Gaza climbed past 50,000.

Critics within the Labour Party itself - including veterans like John McDonnell - have repeatedly called the government's position a betrayal of Labour values. The irony is sharp: Keir Starmer, who built his career as a barrister defending civil liberties and serving as Director of Public Prosecutions, now leads a government that proscribed a protest group as terrorists, arrested 3,000 people for holding signs, and is appealing a court ruling that found all of this unlawful.

The UK is not uniquely authoritarian in this. France has similarly cracked down on pro-Palestine protest. Germany banned some demonstrations outright. The United States has seen university encampments broken up by police, federal charges brought against protesters, and immigration enforcement weaponised against foreign students who spoke out. The mechanisms differ. The pattern is consistent: Western governments that support Israel's military operations have responded to protest against those operations with escalating legal and policing force.

Palestine Action's response to that force was unusual. They did not step back. They walked into factories. They stopped weapons production lines. They got arrested, and when arrested, they refused food. When their group was banned, their supporters held up signs and also got arrested. The message was simple: you can make us stop, but you cannot make us agree that what you are doing is right.

The High Court, in February 2026, effectively agreed with that framing. The proscription was disproportionate. The arrests for holding placards were unlawful. The UK government is appealing, but it is fighting uphill - legally, morally, and in the court of public opinion.

"Palestine Action's ban will be lifted. We won today in the High Court. If they try and appeal, we'll beat them again." - Huda Ammori, Palestine Action co-founder, February 13, 2026

The Stories That Stay

There are details from the March 25 press conference that resist the tendency of political coverage to abstract everything into legal questions and policy implications.

Qesser Zuhrah, who was 19 when counter-terrorism police came through her door, wore a grey sweatsuit to the press conference. She chose it deliberately - it resembled her prison clothes, and also the clothes of Palestinians detained by Israel. She spoke through tears. She said she felt "like a ghost of myself" during the long periods of solitary confinement.

Heba Muraisi's hair is still falling out. She cannot walk long distances without needing to stop. Her neurological symptoms have not resolved. She is 31 years old.

Kamran Ahmed still has marks on his wrists from the handcuffs applied in the hospital shower. A mechanic who loved football and his community in London. Chest pains. Breathlessness. At 28.

Teuta Hoxha described losing 20 percent of her body weight and said the British state had "failed to disappear our resistance." At 30, she has now been through two hunger strikes and 15 months of imprisonment, and she is already talking about what comes next.

These are not people who have been broken. That is, in its way, the most remarkable thing about all of this. The British state designated them terrorists, put them in solitary confinement, took their headscarves, moved them away from their families without warning, and left them on cell floors. And they came out talking about legal action, about continuing the campaign, about how the ban backfired.

Whether you agree with Palestine Action's methods or not, that kind of resolve is difficult to look at and feel nothing.

The legal cases will proceed. The Home Office appeal will be heard in April. The trials for the underlying charges - burglary, criminal damage - are still ahead. The 23 who are free on bail are not free from consequences. And four of their colleagues are still inside.

But for the first time, the four who spoke on March 25 have given the public a detailed account of what was done to them in British prisons in the name of counter-terrorism. Their names are Heba Muraisi, Qesser Zuhrah, Kamran Ahmed, and Teuta Hoxha. They were convicted of nothing. They were 19, 21, 28, and 30 years old.

And they say they were left to die on cell floors.

Sources: Al Jazeera reporting by Areeb Ullah (March 25, 2026; February 13, 2026; January 16, 2026); Prisoners for Palestine statements; Palestine Action press conference, London, March 25, 2026; UK High Court judgment, February 13, 2026; Ministry of Justice public statements. BLACKWIRE has reached out to the UK Ministry of Justice for comment on the allegations of mistreatment.