Irish Artists for Palestine Solidarity with Hunger Strike

Irish Artists for Palestine have issued a powerful statement in solidarity with the pro-Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Britain. It is signed by most of the great Irish musicians active today (Kneecap, Fontaines DC, Mary Wallopers, Christy Moore, The Pogues, Kevin Rowland, David Holmes), as well as writers and other cultural figures (including Sally Rooney, Annie Mac and Aisling Bea):

'We, Irish Artists for Palestine,  write to express our solidarity with the political prisoners currently engaged in hunger strike within British prisons. Their decision to place their bodies on the line is a profound act of resistance — one that echoes the long histories of both Irish and Palestinian political prisoners who have used hunger strike as a non-violent act of sacrifice to assert their dignity in the face of state violence and repression. This collective protest is the largest hunger strike in British prisons since the 1981 hunger strikes, and it demands urgent public attention. 

The prisoners — Qesser Zuhrah, Teuta Hoxha, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed (the Filton 24), Amu Gib, Jon Cink, Umer Khalid and Lewie Chiaramello (Brize Norton 5) - have been incarcerated by the state without trial for allegedly protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza, in which the British government has been actively complicit. Some individuals have been imprisoned for over a year without trial and it will be up to two years before they are heard. This is a grotesque violation of the UK's standard pre-trial custody time limit of six months. 

Prisoners have now entered their fifth week without food. Their bodies are deteriorating, with five hospitalisatjons so far and, the risks to their lives are escalating rapidly. Throughout this period. their basic rights have been heavily restricted and their demands have gone unanswered. Mainstream media outlets remain silent on the issue and there has been little to no coverage of this protest or of their demands. 

The hunger strikers have five demands:

1. End to all prison censorship and withholding of all letters, phone calls and books 

2. Immediate bail for an Palestine Action prisoners currently held in UK prisons 

3. Right to a fair trial for all Palestine Action prisoners held in UK prisons 

4. Deproscription of Palestine Action and the removal of its terror classification 

5. Shutdown of all Elbit Systems sites and subsidiaries in the UK 

We, the undersigned, call on the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Justice Secretary David Lammy. MPs and public representatives across Britain and Ireland to take immediate action, using all parliamentary and civic channels available to ensure these demands are addressed with urgency and transparency. 

We  demand that media organisations uphold their duty to the public by reporting the hunger strike, as well as the demands of the hunger strikers, to the public at this critical stage.

We believe this state repression is unfolding within a wider global crackdown and criminalisation of the Palestine solidarity movement. Increasingly, artists, activists and other dissenting voices are being censored, silenced, or smeared with baseless 'terror' allegations as a means of suppressing political  expression. These systemic and structural efforts to marginalise dissent affect all of us — not only those targeted at the moment. 

Our solidarity with the hunger strikers is rooted in our broader commitment to freedom and justice for the Palestinian people who have faced seventy eight years of occupation and over two years of genocide in Gaza. There are currently 3,368 Palestinian prisoners being held hostage in Israeli prisons under administrative detention, without a trial. 

We stand with the hunger strikers, Palestinian hostages and with all those who continue to struggle for freedom and justice in Palestine. 

In Solidarity, 

Irish Artists for Palestine 

(note - many other artists have signed since above list was first published)

Update:

Hundreds of people protested in support of the hunger strikers at the Ministry of Justice in London last night (23 December 2025), before staging an impromptu march round central London streets.

Irish supporters of Palestine have been prominent in these London protests - the 'Support the Hunger Strike - do not let them die' banner was from 'The Irish Brigade', while another banner featured the slogan 'Tiocfaidh ar la - our day will come - support the hunger strikers' with Irish and Palestinian flags. Sadly there are echoes of the 1981 Irish hunger strike with British politicians refusing to act as prisoners become seriously ill, content to label them as 'terrorists' - in the current cases, people who have been accused of largely symbolic acts of criminal damage without a gun, bomb or even fire in sight.

Palestine solidarity pots and pan protests

Lewisham protest, 1 August 2025

In the past few weeks many 'Stop Starving Gaza' pots and pans protests called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have been held around the UK:

'Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are starving to death due to Israel’s blockade – a blockade designed specifically to use starvation as a weapon of war and of genocide. We’ve all seen the haunting images of Palestinian adults and children reduced to skeletons, the exhausted people holding empty pots and pans waiting for any small amount of food aid available, and cruelly, often meeting their deaths this way. Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been shot to death by Israeli soldiers whilst queuing for food' (PSC)

I took part in one in Lewisham, South London where a 200+ people turned out and banged pans in solidarity with Gaza. On the same day (1 August 2025), Georgina Cook took part in a similar event in Hastings, and at her substack she has reflected on this kind of public gathering:

'It sounds the alarm. Turn’s pots and pans, the very tools that should prepare nourishment, into instruments of protest against weaponised hunger. It alerts our neighbours and community that plenty of people oppose this weaponisation of hunger, as they do the wider genocide that it's part of, despite the involvement and/or complicity of our governments and media [...]

'The simple act of showing up with a saucepan might not stop a genocide, but it reminds us that we're not as alone or as powerless as so many of us feel. It creates a moment where the silence around atrocity gets punctured by the clatter of kitchen utensils'

As Georgina mentions, historian Matthew Kerry has written of the radical history of this practice which in its modern form he traces back to 1970s Chile:

'Pots and pans are some of the least offensive objects in the kitchen, yet their very mundanity and the ease with which they can be employed by anyone to contribute to a deafening wall of noise make them a media-friendly, uncomfortable reminder of the collective conscience and a challenge to the voice of the state. Pot-banging is malleable to different political contexts, from dictatorships to democracies, as well as spatial performances, including refuge or confinement in the home [...]  Despite attempts to quash noisy protests, the history of pot-banging and its radical mundanity suggests the clanging discordant beat of pots and pans will echo on. (Radical Objects: the Pot and Pan, History Workshop, 2024)

Banging pots has also been a feature of protests in Myanmar against the military government that took power in a coup in 2021 where punks formed a collective named Cacerolazo after the Spanish name for this kind of protest (the name derived from Spanish word for “casserole”).  As a form of protest it is particularly associated with women in  Latin America and women. A 2002 manifesto of the Housewives Union in Argentina (Sindicato de Amas de Casa de Santa Fe) argued at a time of economic crisis and austerity:

'Although women have always been involved in the popular struggle, from the Indigenous and slave rebellions at the time of the Conquest, to the movement of the mothers during the dictatorship, to today's "cacerolazo," we have not been listened to and our demands have been postponed in the name of "more urgent"  needs. Other women in Latin America and in the world are banging their pots not only in support of the Argentinian people but on their own behalf, because beyond national realities, we women have needs and demands which bring us together as sisters'. 

Commenting on this manifesto, Krista Lynes remarks 'The cacerolazo is thus a special drumbeat—a beat that announces through the mundane materiality of kitchen tools the publicity of the private in the face of the privatization of the public sphere' (quoted in Feminist Manifestos: a Global Documentary Reader, edited by Penny A. Weiss, 2018).  In the case of Palestine today today though we have to raise noise against something more - the extinction of both the private and the public sphere through starvation, slaughter and destruction.

(photos from Stop Starving Gaza protest at Lewisham Clock Tower, 1 August 2025)