I know this road. I have its map etched into my bones. I carry scars that won’t heal without justice, without accountability.

I learned it in Guantánamo, when the only thing left that I could control was my own body.

We were disappeared. Isolated. Turned into silence. Our words were redacted. Our letters were stamped secret. Lawyers were blocked. Time stretched and rotted. No court dates. No real charges. No end.

I was reduced to a number in an orange uniform, locked in a metal cage. The US government had already named me. “The worst of the worst.” “Terrorist.” “Enemy combatant.” Labels designed to make torture sound necessary.

And torture came. Day and night. Relentless. Mechanical. Meant to break the mind first, then the body. So I stopped eating. Not as a gesture. Not as a plea. I stopped because everything else had been taken. My body was the only territory the state hadn’t yet occupied.

Hunger strike is not symbolic. It is not dramatic. That’s a lie sold by the media, by people who have never watched a body collapse from the inside, who turn slow death into headlines and panels and clean sentences.

A hunger strike is slow. It hurts. It dismantles you piece by piece. Muscles shrink. Vision fades. The heart stutters. Organs begin to fail. Every beat is a warning. Every hour drags you closer to death, whether you want it or not.

A hunger strike begins when every other door is slammed shut. When the system makes it clear your life has no value, as long as you stay quiet and obedient. When it looks straight at you and tells you you’re already dead.

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So, you answer with your body.

At least eight imprisoned pro Palestine activists in the UK have refused food. Some have passed fifty days without eating. Some have already been taken to hospital. They’re scattered across prisons, cut off from each other, torn from their families, buried under the word terrorist so cruelty can be dressed up as law.

I have lived inside this story before. They are meant to strip you of your humanity so the public doesn’t have to feel the sting of your suffering.

When Jeremy........

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