By Tim Golden and Margot Williams

A new, long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees said.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ actions were driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum-security complex to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December.

The 13 detainees now on hunger strikes represent the highest number to undergo the force-feeding regimen on an extended basis since early 2006, when the military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of strapping prisoners into “restraint chairs” while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through their nostrils.

The hunger strikers are now monitored so closely that they have virtually no chance to starve themselves. Yet their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantánamo has continued even as the military has tightened its control.

“We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights,” one hunger striker, Majid al Joudi, told a military physician, according to medical records made public recently under a federal court order. “If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting.”

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