An Update from Critical Resistance, an organization committed to challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.

For the month of April, we honor two dates that speak to the resilience of life under violent systems of control: Palestinian Prisoners Day on April 17, and Earth Day on April 22. Though they may seem unrelated, both are powerful reminders that the fight against cops and cages is a fight for the right to live—a struggle for collective survival and liberation.

This week, Palestinian Prisoners Day uplifts the courage and resistance of Palestinians caged and tortured in apartheid-Israeli prisons as part of a settler colonial regime that uses imprisonment as a key tool of control. Next week, Earth Day calls us to confront the global systems that exploit land and people.

From the 9,600 Palestinians currently incarcerated by apartheid-Israel, including over 3,300 prisoners in administrative detention without charge or trial, to the escalated crackdowns on student activism for Palestine and collaborating with attacks on immigrant communities in the US as seen by the Trump administration and ICE’s targeting of Mahmoud Khalil, we uplift the brave resolve of imprisoned Palestinians who continue to organize hunger strikes, create underground political education spaces, and remain part of the larger struggle for land, dignity, and freedom in the face of brutal repression in historic Palestine and across the diaspora.

From apartheid-Israel’s ecocide of Palestinian lands and greenwashing of settler colonialism to extractive industries poisoning water in Indigenous territories in Turtle Island (ie the “US”) or expanding prisons and jails on toxic landfills, the prison industrial complex (PIC) is deeply entangled with ecological destruction worldwide. This Earth Day, we champion movement victories intersecting struggles for ecological preservation, Indigenous sovereignty, and the fight against the still-rapidly-expanding PIC, like the resourceful organizers in Central Appalachia, who successfully returned land to Indigenous hands while halting prison construction in Letcher County, Kentucky.

Across geographies, we see how the forces that cage people are the same ones that poison the earth: militarism, capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. But we also see resistance rooted in care for life – from prisoners organizing against solitary confinement to land defenders halting pipelines.
People are fighting back—not only to survive, but to build a new, liberated world.

Read full post here! (https://criticalresistance.org/updates/palestine-prisoners-and-earth-day-2025/)

This Earth Day and Palestinian Prisoners Day, we recommit to an abolitionist vision that refuses to separate freedom for people from freedom for the land. We honor those imprisoned for their resistance, and those who resist from within the walls. And we continue to raise the call for a free Palestine, for an end to all cages, and for the restoration of life everywhere. Another world is not only possible—it’s necessary. And it’s already being grown in the cracks of this one.