Hunger strikes have long served as a tool of nonviolent protest

The death this week of a Palestinian prisoner, Khader Adnan, who starved himself to death in Israel to protest his detention, shed a spotlight on a method of nonviolent resistance, part of a history of protest that turns the prisoner’s body into an instrument to bring about change.

As a tactic of activism, it was most famously used by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who staged several hunger strikes while leading India’s struggle for independence from Britain. Prisoners around the world have been denied food to draw attention to a range of causes, ranging from resistance to dictatorships to improving conditions in prisons where they are held.

Here’s a look at hunger strikes throughout history.

Is it unusual for a prisoner to die during a hunger strike?

Hunger strikes can last for months, with some prisoners denied all food except water, while others have allowed themselves small amounts of sugar and salt. In some cases, authorities have intervened by force-feeding prisoners.

Although prisoners can often become seriously ill from prolonged protests, it is not common for a hunger strike to result in death. Here are a few:

• In 2020, Moustafa Kassem, a dual Egyptian-American citizen from New York, died of starvation after being imprisoned in Egypt for six years. He was arrested in Cairo in August 2013 in a bloody crackdown following the military takeover that brought to power Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, then army general and now president of Egypt.

• In Cuba, Orlando Zapata Tamayo starved himself to death in 2006 to protest prison conditions.

• Bobby Sands, a provisional member of the Irish Republican Army, was elected to the British Parliament in 1981 during a hunger strike at a prison in Northern Ireland, and died after not eating for 66 days. Two dozen Republican prisoners in the same prison participated in hunger strikes that year, including 10 who died.

How are hunger strikers viewed?

Authorities are typically eager to quell potential consequences of prisoners’ deaths and detest the spectacle that hunger strikes can create. They sometimes resort to force-feeding, although there has been a heated debate over the ethics of the practice for more than a century.

International groups such as the United Nations, the International Red Cross and the World Medical Association have long recognized the right of prisoners to refuse food. Force-feeding hunger strikers, usually by inserting a tube through the nose or mouth into the stomach, is called “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and ill-treatment. And it has been labeled “a form of torture and contrary to medical ethics,” according to the statement the World Medical Association.

Despite these concerns, the US military has force-fed prisoners on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay, saying it had no choice but to keep them alive, and that no one is starving. As many as 200 prisoners there – more than a third of the camp – went on a hunger strike in 2005 to protest conditions and their prolonged incarceration without trial, and many were force-fed.

In 2015, Israel’s parliament passed a law allowing authorities to force-feed prisoners under extreme conditions – despite the protests of the country’s medical association, which has condemned the practice.

In Germany in the 1980s, the government forced several prisoner members of the Red Army Faction, which was responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in the country.

Force-feeding became an international controversy when the British government applied the practice to captured suffragists on hunger strike from 1909. One of them, Mary Jane Clarke, died two days after her release from prison, and her allies blamed her death on her treatment there. Outrage over the force-feeding of suffragists led to a change in British law in 1913.

Some women who campaigned for the United States ballot were subjected to the same treatment in 1917.

Who organizes hunger strikes and why?

The strikes are almost always carried out by people, imprisoned or free, who claim to be fighting oppression in an attempt to draw attention to a cause.

Mr. Adnan, the Palestinian prisoner, protested Israel’s practice of administratively detaining people without pressing charges or revealing what evidence exists against them.

In August 2021, imprisoned Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny ended a three-week hunger strike while serving a prison sentence of more than two years. His goal was to demand that his doctors treat health problems that may have resulted from his poisoning with a chemical weapon.

Cesar Chavez, the union leader, went on several long fasts during his long career, the last time for 36 days in 1988, to protest the treatment of farm workers in the United States.

Irishmen imprisoned for resisting British rule went on hunger strikes in the pre-independence years in the early 1920s. Irish Republicans revived the practice in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Mr Sands and his fellow prisoners fought to wrest control of Northern Ireland from Britain, but more directly their hunger strike was to demand better prison treatment and recognition of them as political prisoners, not usually criminals.