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Hunger Strike

Hunger Strike For Gaza At United Nations And In Jordan

Jennifer Koonings is a nurse practitioner and sexual assault forensic examiner for adults and children in New York City. She was a recent participant in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. She and others in New York are beginning a hunger strike Friday across from the UN, outside the U.S. mission “demanding an end to the siege, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement in Gaza.” This is being done in coordination with hunger strikers in Jordan who began a hunger strike on Nov. 1. Koonings can also connect media to hunger strikers in Jordan.

Yale Students Launch Hunger Strike Over School’s Connection To Gaza

Fourteen students at Yale University are on a hunger strike over the school’s connection to arms manufacturers currently supplying Israel with weaponry. The group sent Yale University Peter Salovey a letter declaring that their strike would begin if the school did not take immediate action on the issue. “We here at Yale University have witnessed this ongoing genocide from the comforts of not only the heart of the empire that is funding the military conquest and colonization of Palestine, but from the distance and security provided by the investments of this University which profit from this mass ethnic cleansing,” it reads.

How To Stop To Israel’s Genocidal Starvation Of Palestinians

Gaza has been under a blockade for over 15 years that created bare subsistence conditions for Palestinians, but since October 7, 2023, the noose has been tightened. Palestinians are dying of starvation and dehydration in addition to the massacres committed by Israeli soldiers. In Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC-Pal) has been struggling to provide water and materials to Palestinians to grow food and has been purchasing produce to provide to families in need. Clearing the FOG speaks with Fuad Abu Saif, director of UAWC-Pal, about their work and the global days of fasting in solidarity with Palestine. The next one is April 13. Click here to donate to the UAWC-Pal. Clearing the FOG also speaks with USAF Airman Larry Hebert, an active duty member of the military who began an open-ended hunger strike on March 31 to press the Biden administration for a ceasefire and an end to the starvation of Palestinians.

Active Duty Air Force Airman On White House Hunger Strike For Gaza

On Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024 at the White House, active-duty Air Force Senior Airman Larry Hebert began a hunger strike to highlight the plight of the starving children of Gaza.   He will be at the White House on Monday, April 1, 2024, for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll to remind parents and their children that while they are playing with Easter eggs on the White House lawn, children all over Gaza need eggs to stave off starvation. Hebert will be at the White House all next week, April 1-7.  Beginning Monday, April 8, when Congress returns from recess, he will be outside the houses of the U.S. Congress.

UAW Is Largest US Union To Call For An Immediate End To The Violence

The United Auto Workers have endorsed a cease-fire, making them the largest national union to do so in a major development for labor and the larger movement for peace and justice in Palestine and Israel. Brandon Mancilla, Director of United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A, which represents 50,000 active and retired workers within the larger UAW, announced the union’s call for a cease-fire publicly on Friday at a news conference outside of the White House where organizers and activists have been on a hunger strike. “We opposed fascism in World War II, we opposed the Vietnam war, we opposed apartheid South Africa and we mobilized union resources in that fight,” Mancilla says.

Frontline Communities On Hunger Strike Against Plastics Giant Formosa

Fishers, organizers, and concerned citizens in Texas, Vietnam, and Louisiana — areas that are home to existing or proposed Formosa plants — have supported each other’s efforts to mobilize against the Taiwan-based firm, forming the organization International Monitor Formosa Alliance (IMFA). Now the alliance is launching a hunger strike to demand that the victims of a 2016 environmental disaster in central Vietnam caused by Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corporation, a subsidiary of the Formosa Plastics Group, be compensated for their losses, that the polluted area be restored, and that those who have been jailed for protesting be released.

Hundreds Set To Launch Hunger Strike Inside Stewart Detention Center

Last weekend, hundreds of people detained at the Stewart Detention Center announced plans for a hunger strike in response to inedible food and inhumane conditions inside the notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in rural southwest Georgia. Though detainees have continued to eat while they negotiate with the facility’s staff, as many as 800 people are set to refuse food starting this week if their demands are not met. On the morning of Saturday, Aug. 26, roughly 300 people held inside the Stewart Detention Center were brought out of their holding cells for their morning meal.

ICE Detainees’ Hunger Strike Is Part Of A Long Fight For Freedom

At two Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in California’s Central Valley, a cycle of resistance and retaliation has been intensifying over the past three years. Detainees at the facilities, which are operated by for-profit prison company GEO Group, have organized against abysmal conditions, prompting detention center authorities to respond with increasing levels of punitive action. A motion was filed with the Eastern District Court of California on May 18 as part of an ongoing class-action lawsuit against GEO pertaining to the facilities. The filing marked a major escalation in a multipronged campaign being waged by current and former detainees, and outside advocates, to hold ICE and GEO accountable for their mistreatment.

Khader Adnan Unified The Palestinian People From An Israeli Prison Cell

Khader Adnan was not a ‘terrorist’ with ‘Israeli blood on his hands,’ as pro-Israeli propagandists have been repeating in the news and on social media. If the former Palestinian prisoner, who died in his Israeli prison cell following 87 days of an uninterrupted hunger strike, was indeed directly involved in armed resistance, the story would have had a completely different ending. Armed Palestinian resistors are either assassinated or detained and tried by Israeli military courts to spend prolonged sentences in Israeli prisons, following brief trials that lack fairness or due process. Adnan was a charismatic leader but not an actual fighter by the strict definition of the word.

Dozens Of Texas Prisoners Are Hunger Striking Against Solitary Confinement

Across the US, some 50,000 incarcerated people are kept under conditions of solitary confinement. Advocates and prisoners have pushed to define the practice as a form of torture, pointing to the devastating psychological and physical effects it has on victims. In Texas, dozens of prisoners are now hunger striking against the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons, which they say disproportionately targets Latinos. Jorge Antonio Renaud, National Criminal Justice Director of Latino Justice, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss the hunger strike and conditions of solitary confinement in Texas.

Palestinian Prisoners Go On Indefinite Hunger Strike

On Sunday, September 25, 30 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails started an indefinite hunger strike to protest the Israeli policy of administrative detention without charge or trial. The strike demanding an end to this policy has been organized under the slogan: “Our decision is freedom..our strike is freedom.”   The prisoners issued a joint statement before the formal commencement of their strike which was read outside the Israeli Ofer prison by their family members along with members of Addameer and other prisoner solidarity groups. Some of the leading figures participating in the hunger strike are Nidal Abu Aker, Ghassan Zawahreh, and the French-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hammouri. 

US Citizen Hunger Strikes To Stop Human Rights Abuses In Western Sahara

Washington, D.C./Boujdour, Western Sahara – Ruth McDonough, a US/British citizen, began a hunger strike on Wednesday, May 4, in order to bring attention to human rights abuses occurring in Boujdour, Western Sahara. Dr. Tim Pluta, US/Irish citizen, will be supporting McDonough as caretaker. Both McDonough and Pluta have been guests in the home of the Khaya family since March 15, 2022. Their arrival came on day 482 of an arbitrary detention in which Moroccan agents had periodically broken and entered the Khaya family home, attacked, beaten, and raped Sultana Khaya and her sister, Waara, in front of their 84 year old mother, Mitou. The agents had also destroyed nearly all furniture, cut electrical wires, turned off the water, poisoned the well water, tortured the sisters and injected Sultana with unknown substances, and forcibly prevented visitors entrance to the house.

From Rikers To Santa Rita: Close The Death Camps!

January 27, 2022/25th Sh’vat 5782, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, where so many of our ancestors were incarcerated and enslaved, raped and robbed, maimed and murdered. We are an anonymous collective of Jewish New Yorkers who are striking this day, across the five boroughs of NYC/across occupied Lenapehoking, in solidarity with the hunger strikers at Rikers Island and with all who are resisting this genocidal regime. This is a regime which took the lives of 15 fellow New Yorkers last year alone – a number which has continued to rise in the new year. Add that to the 44+ incarcerated people across New York State who perished after becoming infected with COVID in custody. We know a death camp when we see one, and Rikers Island is a death camp.

How Palestinian Hunger Striker Abu Hawash Forced Israeli Concession

As soon as media reports emerged regarding a deal between Palestinian prisoner, Hisham Abu Hawash and the Israeli prison authorities, Israeli extremists, led by Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir, angrily the Assaf Harofeh Hospital where Abu Hawash was being held. A Palestinian political activist, Abu Hawash, 41, is a father of five. He was arrested by the Israeli army from his home in the town of Dura near Al-Khalil (Hebron) in October 2020. For the last consecutive 141 days, prior to the agreement, Abu Hawash a hunger strike, which will go down in the history of Palestinian resistance as one of the longest and, arguably, most consequential. Ben-Gvir and other right-wing Israelis were enraged by the government’s to release Abu Hawash on February 26...

Former Hunger Strikers Reflect On Their Experiences

The huelga de hambre has been used for thousands of years. It has won many struggles,” said Ana Ramirez, 42, who fasted for 24 days this spring to demand that undocumented people and other excluded workers in New York receive stimulus and unemployment money. “Esther the reina won a battle with the hunger strike.” Ramirez is referring to Queen Esther of the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. The queen and her supporters fasted for three days in advance of going to ask her husband, Persian King Ahasuerus, for permission to have her enemies — who were trying to wipe out all Jews in the empire — killed. She prevailed. Mahatma Gandhi used the hunger strike. So too Cesar Chavez. South African political prisoners hastened the end of the apartheid era with their hunger strike.

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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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