It’s New Year’s Eve in central London, and a group of several hundred demonstrators has gathered outside Pentonville Prison to see out the year with drums and raised voices. They are here to offer company and solidarity to an inmate who is, in medical terms, dying. Entering his fifty-fourth day of hunger strike, twenty-eight-year-old Kamran Ahmed now struggles to stand and to articulate coherent sentences. His hearing is fading: some days, he reports being deaf to the regular chanting from the street outside his cell.

Ahmed is one of four young Brits continuing a hunger strike started in November by eight imprisoned activists from the direct-action group Palestine Action. The organization was proscribed this past July by Keir Starmer’s Labour government, under the Terrorism Act (the ban is currently under judicial review). All have been detained on remand for over a year without trial — even though in Britain, pretrial remand is typically capped at six months — and some of their hearings are scheduled as late as 2027.

The individual strikers were arrested for participating in direct actions at a site of Israel’s largest private arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems, and a Royal Airforce Base in Oxfordshire, before the ban on Palestine Action. Although their charges amount to no more than criminal damage and trespass, all were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Through punitive detention conditions and a denial of legal rights, they are effectively being treated as terrorists — what Ahmed calls “punishment by process.”