Eighty-six people have been arrested in the United Kingdom after gathering at a London prison in support of a Palestine Action-linked activist on hunger strike and in a perilous condition who is being held there, police say.

London’s Metropolitan Police wrote on X late on Saturday that officers were dispatched to Prison Wormwood Scrubs, where protesters “refused to leave the grounds when ordered to do so”.

Inside Wormwood Scrubs is Umer Khalid, a 22-year-old pro-Palestine activist who stopped eating 16 days ago. He had been on hunger strike since November, briefly pausing in December due to severe ill health.

The group “allegedly blocked prison staff from entering and leaving, threatened police officers and a number managed to get inside a staff entrance area of a prison building”, the police said.

Videos of the incident verified by Al Jazeera show police officers shoving protesters to the ground and handcuffing them as shouts ring out in the background. Two groups of police also appeared to kettle protesters – a police tactic that involves officers surrounding and closing in on a group of demonstrators in an effort to contain them.

“Why are you assaulting me?” a woman can be heard asking at one point.

Those arrested were detained under suspicion of aggravated trespass, the police said.

Khalid told Al Jazeera last week that he planned to escalate his hunger strike to exclude all fluids starting on Saturday, the day of the protest.

After speaking with him on Monday by phone, Khalid’s mother, Shabana Khalid, told Al Jazeera that a prison guard remains outside his cell in case he needs urgent medical attention. She added that he is also being monitored closely with hourly medical observations.

“I’m reassured in one sense,” she said, “but the fact he’s on [hunger strike] still is quite scary. He’s starting to get tired. You can hear in his voice.”

Umer Khalid is among a group of five activists accused of breaking into the United Kingdom’s largest airbase, Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire in June and spray-painting two Voyager refuelling and transport planes. The group has pleaded not guilty.

At the time, the pro-Palestine protest group Palestine Action said two of its members were involved and red paint “symbolising Palestinian bloodshed was also sprayed across the runway and a Palestine flag was left on the scene”.

Within days, the UK government moved to ban the group under “antiterrorism” laws and made it illegal to support or promote the group.

The decision – which has been challenged in court and heavily criticised as “unjustified” by the United Nations – has led to multiple protests with hundreds of arrests in the months since.

Ongoing hunger strikes

Aside from Umer Khalid, seven other protesters have been involved in rolling hunger strikes since November.

Khalid became the only one still refusing food after three members of the group ended their protests this month. They said one of their demands had been met after a UK-based subsidiary of the Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems was denied a UK government contract.

“Our prisoners’ hunger strike will be remembered as a landmark moment of pure defiance; an embarrassment for the British state,” the Prisoners for Palestine Group said.

Two of the prisoners who concluded their hunger strikes, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed, were on the brink of death after more than two months without food. Still, Muraisi told Al Jazeera in the days before the announcement that she felt “it’s important to fight for justice and for freedom”.

The group’s list of demands includes bail, the right to a fair trial and the de-proscription of Palestine Action as well as for Elbit sites to be closed in the UK. They’re also seeking an end to what they call censorship in prison, accusing authorities of withholding mail, calls, books and visitation rights.

Before starting to refuse liquids on Saturday, Umer Khalid told Al Jazeera: “The only thing that seems to have any impact, whether that is positive or negative, is drastic action.”

“The strike reflects the severity of this imprisonment,” he added. “Being in this prison is not living life. Our lives have been paused. The world spins, and we sit in a concrete room. This strike reflects the severity of my demands.”

By any measure, Gaza’s devastation demands urgent and serious reconstruction. Homes, hospitals, schools, farms, cultural heritage, and basic infrastructure lie in ruins. Entire neighbourhoods have been erased. The humanitarian need is undeniable. But urgency should never become an excuse for illusion, spectacle, or political shortcuts.

The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be sharper. While United States President Donald Trump and a group of world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to sign the charter of the so-called Board of Peace and unveil glossy reconstruction plans, the killing in Gaza continued.

Since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, no fewer than 480 Palestinians have been killed. Four of them were killed on the very day the charter was signed by 19 ministers and state representatives, many of whom were less interested in the issue of Gaza and much more in being seen alongside Trump.

Against that backdrop, the board’s carefully staged optimism feels like performance rather than transformation. It resembles a sandpit where those signing up get to build sandcastles with Trump that will wash away with the first real wave.

The proposals may look impressive and sound hopeful, but structurally, they are hollow. They sidestep the real drivers of the conflict, marginalise Palestinian agency, privilege Israeli military priorities over civilian recovery, and align uncomfortably with longstanding efforts to maintain the occupation, displace Palestinians, and deny the right of return for the population uprooted in 1948 and 1967.

Gaza is not a real estate prospectus

The glossy vision of presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner treats Gaza not as a traumatised society emerging from catastrophic violence, but as a blank investment canvas for luxury housing, commercial zones, data hubs, beachfront promenades, and aspirational gross domestic product (GDP) targets.

It reads less like a recovery plan and more like a real-estate prospectus. Development language replaces political reality. Sleek presentations replace rights. Markets replace justice.

But Gaza is not a failed start-up looking for venture capital. It is home to more than two million Palestinians who have endured siege, displacement, repeated wars, and chronic insecurity for decades. Reconstruction cannot succeed if it is detached from their lived experiences or if it treats Gaza primarily as an economic asset open to speculative investment, including by extreme Zionists, rather than as a human community struggling to preserve its identity and social fabric.

For many families, even modest homes in Gaza’s formal refugee camps represented a fragile bridge worth holding on to as a step towards an eventual return to places from which they were forced to flee, in what is today known as Israel.

These homes were valued not for their comfort or market worth, but for the social networks they sustained and their symbolic links to continuity, memory, and political claims. Palestinians are therefore unlikely to be swayed by offers of glitzy towers, luxurious villas, or promises of a “market economy” under siege. Their experience over the past decades has taught them that no level of material improvement can substitute for deeper aspirations tied to dignity, rootedness, and the right of return.

A future designed without Palestinians

A glaring flaw of Trump’s plan is the systematic exclusion of Palestinians themselves from shaping the vision of their future. These plans are unveiled in elite conference halls, not debated with the people whose neighbourhoods have been flattened.

Without Palestinian ownership, legitimacy collapses. Experience from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has shown repeatedly that reconstruction imposed from the outside — however well branded — reproduces the very power imbalances that fuel instability in the first place.

Equally troubling is the plan’s deliberate avoidance of addressing the root causes of Gaza’s suffering: occupation, blockade, and military control. You cannot rebuild sustainably while continuing to preserve and fund the machinery that repeatedly destroys what is built.

No amount of concrete, branding, or foreign investment can substitute for political resolution. A territory that remains militarily besieged, economically sealed, and politically subjugated will never achieve durable recovery.

Prosperity cannot flourish inside a cage. The European Union learned this lesson the hard way through multiple reconstruction cycles it funded in Gaza, which may help explain why none of its members rushed to join the board, despite being able to afford the permanent membership fee and despite the political incentives of cultivating a more cordial relationship with Trump in light of the war in Ukraine and his threats on Greenland.

Aiding Israel’s military control through spatial redesign

There is also a serious risk that the proposed physical design of Gaza would entrench Israeli military strategy rather than restore Palestinian life. The plans envision buffer zones, segmented districts, and so-called “green spaces and corridors” that would break up the territory internally.

This kind of spatial engineering would facilitate surveillance, control, and rapid military access. Urban planning would become security architecture. Civilian geography would turn into militarised space. What is sold as modernisation would constitute a sophisticated system of containment, just like the illegal settlement networks and road systems in the occupied West Bank.

The emphasis on reclaiming land from the sea using rubble may repeat the problems of Beirut’s reconstruction after the civil war, where newly reclaimed areas attracted disproportionate investment because they were free of unresolved ownership claims, ultimately allowing elites to appropriate the city’s waterfront and pull it away from public use.

The demographic implications of the plan are equally profound. Shifting Gaza’s population centre southward — closer to Egypt and further from Israel’s settlements — would quietly alter the political and social centre of gravity of Palestinian life.

It may ease Israeli security anxieties, but it would do so at the expense of Palestinian continuity, identity, and territorial coherence. Population engineering under the banner of reconstruction raises serious ethical concerns and risks externalising Gaza’s long-term humanitarian burden onto neighbouring states. This may also help explain Egypt’s absence from the signing ceremony and its decision to limit participation to its intelligence leadership.

No amount of political theatre can replace freedom

The Board of Peace itself also deserves careful scrutiny. Its branding suggests neutrality and collective stewardship, yet its political framing remains highly personalised around Trump, with little clarity about how it is meant to operate in practice.

This is not the kind of multilateral peacebuilding mechanism envisaged by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 2025; it is political theatre. Peace mechanisms anchored in personalities rather than institutions and international law rarely survive political change.

At the heart of all this lies a familiar but dangerous assumption: that economic growth can substitute for political rights. History teaches the opposite. People do not resist simply because they are poor; they resist because they lack dignity, security, freedom of expression, and self-determination. No master plan can bypass these realities. No skyline can compensate for political exclusion.

This does not mean Gaza must wait for the perfect peace before rebuilding. Recovery must proceed urgently. But rebuilding must empower Palestinians rather than redesign their constraints. It must dismantle systems of control, not embed them into concrete and zoning maps. It must confront the political roots of destruction rather than cosmetically repackage its aftermath.

Until those foundations exist, the Board of Peace and Kushner’s vision risk becoming exactly what they resemble — a form of sandcastle diplomacy: impressive to the global public, comforting to elites, and destined to wash away when the first serious wave of political reality arrives.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.