In light of Teuta Hoxha’s 28-day hunger strike in HMP Peterborough ending victoriously, I interviewed one of her comrades about their major takeaways for the political prisoners’ movement and their concrete lessons from the strike for people both on the inside and outside.
For more background, you can read my previous articles on US-based captives Casey Goonan and Malik Muhammad joining the strike, and follow Prisoners for Palestine, Workshops4Gaza, the Filton 24’s Substack, and Hoxha’s Substack.
This interview was conducted on 9 September 2025 and the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Calla Walsh: To start off, could you please introduce yourself and explain how you are connected to comrade T Hoxha, and anything you want to add about the actions that you allegedly participated in against Elbit Systems?
Audrey Corno: Hi! I’m Audrey, I’m 23, I live in London, I’m a dancer and a drama facilitator. I have a theater company with my friends that I adore. I took action for the first time last year against the UK Ministry of Defense. We sprayed it red to symbolize the Palestinian blood that is on their hands. Then earlier this year, I did a rooftop occupation of GRID Defense Systems, a military hardware supplier for Elbit Systems, which is Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer who produce 85 percent of their killer drone fleet. GRID is an important target because they specialize in targeting systems and are obviously directly complicit — or not even complicit, I don’t like to use that word anymore, they play a very active role in committing a genocide.
As a result of the second arrest, I was remanded to prison in the UK. Remanded means that you are imprisoned before trial. In my case, I had zero convictions and hadn’t been to trial, but was remanded to prison on the basis that the judge was afraid that I would “re-offend.” In those two months at HMP Bronzefield — HMP stands for His Majesty’s Prison — I got to meet eight of the now Filton 24 who have been arrested for allegedly being connected to this Filton action. That action was against the Filton site of Elbit Systems, their brand new research and development facility where they research and develop drones and ammunition to genocide Palestinians. So they allegedly broke in and caused — the figures depending on who reports — up to two million pounds worth of damage. This has been a very iconic case in the UK. Some of them have been remanded for over a year now.
Hoxha was on my house block and we became really, really close friends. I became very close with all the Filton actionists that I met, just naturally having the camaraderie, you know, being in there for very similar reasons. That connection of our values was so special and kept me so strong. Hoxha took such good care of me; she gave me my first batch of books in prison, always made sure I had the TV program for the evening, would check in on us every morning. I hate that it’s under these circumstances, but I’m grateful that I was able to somewhat take care of her and be there for her on the outside because that’s what she did for me.
Calla: It’s a really weird and awful feeling to be on the outside when your comrades are still inside. You get so close to people in jail — nothing else forges that kind of bond like being locked in close quarters against your will with someone. But of course you can be more useful in a lot of ways fighting for them from the outside. Do you want to speak more to what your experience in prison was like? Especially in terms of how you all related to “regular” prisoners in there for reasons that were not necessarily overtly political. I’m aware that’s one of the reasons that the Filton 24 have been targeted and isolated from other prisoners, because of the prison administration’s fears of their politics radicalizing and organizing the general prison population and whatnot.
Audrey: 100 percent, that is exactly the reason they’re so scared of the prisoners for Palestine. There’s a lot of contention about that term [political prisoners] amongst the people I met, because I think once you’re in prison, you come to the understanding that all prisoners are political prisoners. The women I met on like, domestic violence charges, maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising, but it was surprising to me how many of those women are in there for defending themselves against abusive partners, or because they stabbed their partner who was abusing their kid for years — women I met who were in for consistent shoplifting, that’s political, right? So yeah, just a note on that term, “political prisoner,” but I think it is still a useful term. With the “non-political prisoners,” or just maybe “non-actionists” is the term I’ll use, I think I definitely had this fear, growing up middle class, I was really scared of going to prison because of TV and the propaganda that we all grow up around. You know, it’s the worst and you only go to prison if you’ve done something really, really wrong. But all of that fell away very quickly when you meet and talk to these people.
Being in prison was real political education for me. And I very quickly realized that the situation that I was in in prison is very different to everyone else, and that that was my own choice. I mean, I didn’t choose to go to prison, no one would ever choose to go to prison, but it was my choice to take action in a way that breaks the law, and I went into that understanding that there was a risk I could go to prison, and that’s just not the case for everyone else. I had a very different prison experience, all actionists in prison will have a very different experience to most other people in prison, because innately, from being part of a movement, we all have incredible support systems, people who understand why we’re there. We are in visits almost every day, because we have that support system outside. So I think it reflected how privileged I am back to me.
I’m careful to not romanticize prison. At least in the UK, there’s some movements who almost view going to prison as a sort of badge of honor. And I think it’s really important to reject that because the aim is never to go to prison. That’s unfortunately a potential consequence, but we don’t do this to go to prison and I don’t want to romanticize it. It wasn’t good, but I’m glad that I went because it taught me a lot. It was a real time of education. And I met some comrades for life. It’s made me much more resilient. So I wouldn’t take it back.
Calla: Thank you. I relate to so much of what you said, which is wild because it is hard to find people, especially people my age, who relate to this kind of experience at all. You put it perfectly. Whenever I talk about my jail time, I don’t want to make it seem like it was all like fun and laughter, because of course it wasn’t, but I also don’t want to like, portray it as something that is unsurvivable, because more people in our movement are going to need to prepare to survive it and realize they have the strength to.
Audrey: Also just bringing it back to Palestine, in the hard times, I just had to remind myself the worst that could happen to me in the UK in a women’s prison. That’s a massive privilege, right? Which, you know, isn’t usually the case. But for prisons, it is so good to be AFAB [assigned female at birth] because the “men’s” prisons — of course there are trans and non-binary people there — just have such a harder time. The worst that could have happened to me, and, I’m assuming to you in a prison in the West, pales in comparison to what people in Gaza and people held in Israeli detention are living through every day. I think our job as Prisoners for Palestine is to amplify the Palestinian prisoners movement, which I think is exactly what Hoxha has done.
Calla: Exactly. So to bring it back to the hunger strike, now that it’s ended, why do you think it was a win? What did it achieve and expose? And what was your experience throughout it? I imagine it was super intense for you and your comrades.
Audrey: This strike was bigger than we could have ever imagined. Its victories came from not only the material improvements in Hoxha’s conditions, like getting her mail, which was just such a welcome surprise, and being reinstated into all of her recreational activities — which, without them, you’re just locked behind the door all day. It was such a material improvement in her conditions, which is on its own a massive victory.
But beyond that, so much information was uncovered in the strike that we can use to take forward into legal action and to exposing just the wider corruption and systematic failures of the prison system. A lot of information about JEXU, the Joint Extremism Unit, and the Pathfinders we’ve managed to look into. It was presented to [Hoxha] like Pathfinders is just a vetting thing, like they just help you decide what’s the best job for you, but with the strike and the information we’ve got, we’ve been able to find out that actually Pathfinders is an organization to that serves the government only to identify prisoners that have a “terrorist” link. They work clearly work very closely with the Joint Extremism Unit. Both of those things, she was never supposed to find out. These were just staff that panicked. As someone who’s been in prison as well, you know that guards will lie, or they’ll tell you things to confuse you or say things in a really vague way, all in an attempt to get you to shut up and tell you what you need to hear so that they can get on with their job, right. In this panic of the guards just trying to do anything they could to get her to eat, they revealed a lot of information that they shouldn’t have.
We’ve also got a lot of material to take action against them with what the phone operators at HMP Peterborough were saying, you know, making allegations about actions that have nothing to do with [Hoxha]. Actually, the law says that the prison phone operators aren’t even meant to confirm whether a prisoner is there or not. So a lot of the pushback when people were calling in for her was, “Oh, we can’t give out any information.” The thing is, we weren’t asking for any information; we were telling them what we already knew and we were making demands. Because of data privacy regulations (GDPR), they’re not even meant to confirm that a prisoner is there. And yet they were making crazy allegations, calling her a terrorist over the phone. So the fact that we have this recorded and published on social media is really vital to not only exposing them, but then being able to take action and make sure that this can never happen again. And it’s leverage for future demands.
So yeah, this was such a victory for her materially. It set a really important precedent for other prisoners, and I think it really empowered other prisoners on her wing as well. The fact that there are some people on her wing who maybe started off a bit skeptical, like, “Why are you doing this?” were then, just by witnessing her, able to see how effective it was, and able to see what it means to defend yourself and to protest and what that looks like in a prison context. It was a real moment of education for other prisoners as well. I think the wins just cannot be overstated, really.
Calla: I’m ashamed to say I was not really following the strike too closely or well aware of it at all before Casey Goonan joined. And I like to think I follow Pal Action and political prisoners pretty closely, so that speaks to how much of a media blackout there is on prisoners’ issues, not just from the mainstream media, but also left independent media and movement organizations. But I wanted to ask you, how did you and Hoxha react when you found out political prisoners in the US were joining the strike? What future potential is there to keep building these kind of international bonds and solidarity in action?
Now that she’s been recovering and her mind’s a bit clearer, she has been talking about it so much, and I hope it’s clear also from the open letter that she wrote how grateful she was, not only for Casey’s solidarity, but also the attention that it brought. Casey is so right in saying that their aim was to bring international attention to this, and boy, did they succeed. It’s just such an honor for her. I think I can say that quite comfortably. Frankly, we were all in such panic mode around her that I guess we hadn’t even considered that as a possibility, that someone would want to do that.
I guess the learning is, it sounds so cheesy, but dream big, nothing is impossible. What you said about future links and building future infrastructures may look like is to organize more preemptively and to have those links of communication. Maybe different actionists in prison could write to each other and stay in contact before being in crisis like this, right? So that these bonds can be formed, people can be aware of each other, be in contact, and support each other before it gets to such a critical point.
For Casey to have done that was so gracious. Just person to person I cannot thank them enough. I think it showed Hoxha the potential that this has. It’s really exciting to organize for the future. The importance, not just symbolically, was the fact that Casey mobilized so many people in the US to call in as well. It brought more visibility to HMP Peterborough, which they obviously didn’t want. To have people calling in and emailing in from the US was really crazy and scary for HMP Peterborough. But this also linked their struggles, right?
After Casey and their cellmate joined, Malik Muhammad joined in a solidarity strike the day or the night before Hoxha declared victory. Malik Muhammad, actually, this blew my mind, is this Palestinian political prisoner, who has pled guilty to 14 charges related to militant action against the police during the George Floyd Uprising. The connection between George Floyd, the police/prison abolition movement, and Casey, the US student intifada, and then obviously the UK arms factories direct action movement — the story writes itself, right? It shows so clearly how linked these struggles are, how we’ve all got each other’s backs, because, of course, what we’re doing is so interlinked, and we need each other, not just in our movements, but so literally, we need each other to support each other when we’re in prison. It’s undeniable that Casey joining in when they did was a pivotal part of why this hunger strike was so successful. So I think this is a really massive lesson to learn for, globally, for anyone doing work supporting prisoners.
Calla: Yeah, I did a follow-up piece about Malik, his case, and him joining the strike, because he and all the prisoners of the George Floyd Uprising have been so erased. It worked both ways, Hoxha’s strike and its ripple effect also helped raise awareness for these captives in the US. And it’s notable how Casey and Malik are both being targeted with terrorism lawfare and politically-targeted discrimination parallel to what’s happening in the UK. Malik has been in solitary for almost two years straight, and Casey is being sentenced with “terrorism enhancement.” And obviously, the intelligence agencies of the imperialist countries are constantly collaborating and sharing information and co-developing new tactics, so we should too, since we have this common enemy.
Also worth saying, if someone hadn’t passed the information on to Casey and Malik about the strike happening, they would never have heard about it or joined, it would not have developed in this way. That speaks to the importance of staying in constant communication with our prisoners, passing on updates about what’s happening on the outside in the movement, not treating people as if they’re dead just because they’re locked up. This strike was a needed reminder that people locked up are still political subjects and active participants in struggle.
Audrey: And arguably more active, right? When I was inside and I felt like I was useless to the movement, and I felt immobilized, something that brought me a lot of comfort was what some of the Filton 24 told me — “No, this is part of the action. You serving your sentence, you being in prison, familiarizing yourself with the mechanics of power, this is part of the action.” And I’d argue that, actually, [our prisoners] are even more at the center of the movement because of their focus. We’re all distracted by having to work, to sustain ourselves, outside life distractions, noise. When you’re in prison, this is the most focused anyone will ever be. And I think that we need to learn from their laser focus on the struggle.
Calla: Absolutely. So it was really after the first two weeks that the strike started picking up attention in media coverage — of course as T’s condition got so much more dire, and pressure escalated. But throughout the entire strike, there was still notable silence from a lot of the main organizations and media platforms that kind of position themselves as leadership of the Palestine solidarity movement in the west. This is not new, obviously. There’s been many reports published on how the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK, for example, has been undermining Palestine Action for years, pushing people not to work with them, or any organizations that are more militant, radical, resistant. The BDS National Committee is another key example. I was wondering if you want to speak to that at all, this phenomenon of the abandonment of political prisoners. Because as repression intensifies, this problem will only grow more acute. There’s only going to be more prisoners, and a need for more outside support structures.
Audrey: Yeah, I mean, frankly, as you say, you put it beautifully, that this didn’t come as a surprise at all. As you say, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, that’s really the main one in the UK. If the PSC is not going to back the frontline direct action campaign in the UK for Palestine, while Palestine Action wasn’t proscribed, while they were achieving significant wins — like, Palestine Action is responsible for shutting down 4 out of 10 Elbit sites in the UK — then it’s completely unsurprising that they’re not going to support a Palestine Action prisoner going on a hunger strike. Frankly, we didn’t waste our time even trying to get their support because we knew what the answer would be.
It is deeply disappointing, this overall trend. And it’s dangerous, because I think that these organizations dilute the movement and people’s energies in the West, right in the belly of the beast, in the US and the UK, the countries literally the most responsible for fueling and enabling Israel. Sorry, this just makes me angry. For us to be content with holding some banners and marching on a police approved route, you know, which tidily finishes and everyone packs up their tents at four o’clock is insane. It’s insane.
Can we please wake up? So, frankly, I find it very dangerous to accept these organizations. Unfortunately, they are the mainstream and they are what people are going towards because it feels safe, right? And it keeps our privilege intact. Anything that risks arrest, anything that risks any kind of personal sacrifice is just unthinkable. And so I think that’s why it’s even harder to imagine a political prisoner going on hunger strike. Like, it’s just so obscured and so on the fringe. It is really infuriating and I think it does harm because they detract attention from what is the center of the struggle. I don’t really think I have any more to say. It’s just infuriating.
Calla: I think that says it all. And moments like these really expose how deep those contradictions are, or that we’re not all in it for the same reasons or vision for revolution. Are there any tangible, practical lessons you learned from this experience that you want to share with people doing prisoner support work or people who are locked up themselves, for how resist those conditions? Because certainly this won’t be the last of this sort of action.
Audrey: Yeah, a hundred percent. For the person in prison, for a hunger strike, practically, if you could give a little notice — one, so that you can prepare yourself and two, so that your support network can also build a little infrastructure, start contacting press before, so that it can all go smoothly and maximize the impact of your hunger strike from the jump. Because as you pointed out, the media coverage and everything going up significantly after two weeks — that’s two weeks on a hunger strike that we didn’t make the biggest potential of, and that did a lot of damage to her health. So I would really advise, just subtly, discreetly, before going to prison or in a visit, establishing a code word that you can say over the phone. Give both yourself and the people supporting you a little bit of time to prepare to maximize the impact of the hunger strike.
Also for the prisoner, research. If there’s books in the library — I mean, you’d be surprised, in HMP Bronzefield, there’s some really political stuff. Read up, get your people supporting you to send you resources. If you have any preexisting health conditions, figure out what adjustments maybe you would need to make, decide in advance what exactly you consider a win, at what point. What are the cues from your body that you’re going to take that mean maybe you need to pause, or maybe you need to stop altogether?
This is also part of the prep because obviously the further down into a hunger strike, the ability to make decisions becomes so much harder and takes so much effort. I can witness just through the phone and through visits how exhausted she was, especially by the end. When your brain cannot hold a conversation for a few minutes, how are you going to make such massive decisions around your campaign, around your body? And so that’s why as much as possible, these things need to be decided in advance so that when you’re in the thick of a hunger strike, you can just focus on getting to the next day and your immediate needs rather than thinking about the bigger picture all the time.
While on hunger strike, there’s some real emotional low points and there may be a temptation to withdraw or start to self-isolate. This is the biggest one to reject and to fight. The whole weapon and the whole strength of a hunger strike is the media, the attention and the only way that you will survive is by letting people have your back. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly how it works in the US, but in the UK, there’s no way for us to call in, you need to wait for the prisoner to call you, right? Because of the infrastructure, there’s no way for us to reach out to you on the inside.
Calla: It’s the same in US prisons and jails.
Audrey: You owe it to yourself and to the strike and therefore to the movement to stay in contact for your wellbeing. Not that [Hoxha] ever like completely broke contact, but she would find it harder and harder to call. The advice is basically just push yourself to stay in contact with people and to let people know how you’re feeling, even though it’s shit all the time, you need to let people know that.
Anyway. People supporting really, really, really need to read up on hunger strikes, on the history, on your specific country and context, how hunger strikes were won in the past. Read the fuck up, because that will also be the reason that your comrade will be victorious. Knowledge is power. That’s not new, but yeah, you need to really, really inform yourself so that you can keep your comrade informed too. It is very emotionally intense.
Oh my gosh. I’m getting a call from prison right now.
We pause, Audrey takes the call and tells the comrade on the other line to call back in twenty minutes. Then we resume the conversation.
Audrey: It’s about the person striking and it’s obviously going to be much harder on them, but it shouldn’t be ignored that there will be a real mental toll on you as well [as someone in the outside support system]. I really advise ensuring a good support system around you as well, because to witness your comrade getting weaker every day, to witness and hear about the pain that they’re in and how they’re being treated, it’s awful. It’s obviously worse for them, but just be emotionally prepared for that and take care of yourself as well in this time.
Because the decision-making for them gets way harder and mood swings are very normal on a hunger strike, especially if you know this person well and you’re good friends, then trust yourself in this time, especially past the two week mark, to start being assertive with them. Obviously, person to person, that’s going to look different, you need to do it sensitively, but just because it will be so hard for them to make decisions, you need to be assertive and like, just make strong recommendations. I think this is the right thing to do, just based off of what you know about them, how they would be thinking if they were thinking a little bit clearer. And that’s of course while respecting their autonomy, but also just honoring the fact that they will have extreme mood swings and be confused sometimes and have a lot of brain fog and sometimes a reassuring voice telling telling them what they need to hear or what they need to do is exactly what they’ll need.
Calla: Thank you. My last question is just — how is T doing? How is her recovery going? Are there any updates you can share with people and any ongoing calls to action in the meantime to support the Filton 24?
Audrey: Umer Khalil, who’s being held in relation to the Royal Air Force Brize Norton action, his visits are being heavily restricted right now. And he’s asking for call-ins. There’s almost always bad shit going on for our prisoners for Palestine, unfortunately. So there will almost always be updated calls of action on the Prisoners for Palestine Instagram.
As for T, she is just recovering. No call to action. Just keep up to date with her on Prisoners for Palestine again. She also has just started a Substack, where she’s going to be releasing poetry and bits and pieces of writing from her. As you will have heard from her letter to Casey, she’s an incredible writer. Physically it’s still difficult because she has been feeling quite dizzy and gets quite breathless even from talking, but that’s to be expected after four straight weeks of hunger strike.
She definitely already feels much better. She’s on day two of re-feeding today [9 September]. She’s had a little bit of protein and boiled veg, and is just so excited to recover mentally. She’s not anywhere near where she was, but she’s already seen such an improvement and looks forward to getting back to where she was. I think a lot of the symptoms from before are still true and ongoing, but just easier, and she is in less pain and just so excited to eat again.
source: Calla’s Newsletter