2025-06-11
31 分钟This is The Guardian.
Today,
the mother starving herself in a London hospital to free her son from an Egyptian prison.
when you go through a hunger strike
because at the beginning you are very weak and you can't even imagine that you will go a day or two or three without it.
And then a week or a bit more into the process something biologically shifts in your body.
This is Muna Saif describing what it feels like to voluntarily refuse food for days and then weeks.
And your body kind of turns on a different switch.
And it starts depending on the reserve you have of fats.
And suddenly it doesn't feel the same and it feels like a completely different process until your body is consumed and then you start deteriorating.
So it's a whole process.
Muna has launched two hunger strikes over the past few years.
It's a desperate tactic that her family knows too well.
Her mother, Leila, is on one right now.
I'm taking just water and sugarless drinks and rehydration sweets.
Leila El-Swaif, 69 years old, hasn't eaten anything for over 250 days.
Doctors say she could die any time.
Like Muna in the past, she's taken this drastic step to free her son,
the activist Alaa Abdul-Fatah.
He should never have been in prison in the first place,