Egypt’s new child safety rules require platforms to verify that users are old enough to have a social media account. The checks will operate within a legal system that gives security agencies exceptional access to personal information and uses family protection to justify prosecuting online expression.

Acting on president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s instructions, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation (SCMR) and National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) announced on September 17 that children under 13 cannot hold independent accounts. Users aged 13 to under 15 have a compulsory “safe mode,” which they cannot disable alone. Platforms must review existing accounts, verify ages, and comply within three months of the decision taking effect.

Two days later, Sisi reviewed the measures with prime minister Mostafa Madbouly, communications minister Raafat Hindy and Major General Hany Mahmoud Mansour, head of the Armed Forces’ Signals Department. In this setting, which has become the norm in The New Republic, children’s safety shared the agenda with integrating government databases and expanding investment in cloud computing and data centers. The military’s presence reflected its established authority over the infrastructure through which digital services reach Egyptians.

What this regulatory push will look like in practice remains unsettled, as the state has neither published a concrete executive framework nor clarified whether these directives will materialize as standalone legislation, executive decrees, or an administrative mandate enforced through the licensing of platforms. But while the statutory vehicle is still unwritten, the apparatus that will inherit it is already operational. Examining the legal statutes, biometric pilots, and state-backed corporate entities that form the country’s digital communications architecture offers a peek into the actual machinery awaiting any new mandate—and the interests that will inevitably govern it.

Enforcing protective defaults might reduce children’s exposure to unwanted approaches. However, the policy focuses on classifying users, while actual protection depends on how platforms distribute harmful material and how officials treat complainants.

Egypt’s record makes those institutional questions central to whether the new rules will work.

The minimum age itself is hardly new. Facebook and Instagram already require users to be at least 13, as does TikTok, which United Media Services (UMS), the General Intelligence Service (GIS)–run media conglomerate, penned a partnership with last year. Egypt is adding a government enforcement requirement to an existing corporate promise.

Its special protections also stop at 15, while Meta announced in April that it was expanding default content restrictions for Instagram users under 18 internationally.

So the question is what Egyptian regulation will make companies do that they don’t already claim to do.

Sisi cited Australia as a model, but Australia’s approach conflates enforcement with results.

Its regulator, eSafety, reported in July that three months after its under-16 restrictions took effect, account ownership among under-16s had fallen from 52.4% to 42.1%. Yet most children who previously had accounts had retained them or created new ones. Overall platform use, including without an account, fell only from 85.9% to 81.5%.

Still, the case for protecting Egyptian children online is not frivolous.

An investigation by Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalists, published by Raseef22 in March, found that Egypt’s school disciplinary rules already classified bullying, online defamation, and circulating photographs without permission as serious violations, with one teacher describing social workers whose administrative and clerical duties left insufficient time to handle difficult cases.

Share

Another obstacle identified earlier by the founder of the feminist initiative Speak Up, Jihad Hamdy, was the force of social stigma and fear of family reactions.

Similarly, lawyer Azza Soliman described police officers dismissing complaints or blaming complainants for sharing photographs, which effectively incentivizes blackmailers to exploit the expectation that exposure will bring punishment from the very people and institutions supposed to provide protection.

This was the particular case of Basant Khaled, whose suicide became national news in 2022. The schoolgirl’s father and sister told prosecutors that two men had obtained photographs from her phone, attached her face to a naked body, and threatened to circulate the fabricated images to coerce her into performing sexual acts

When she refused, they distributed them in her village.

Her death followed a threat whose force depended on other people seeing and judging her.

On the corporate front, a recent US Federal Trade Commission report found that advertising-based business models encouraged extensive data collection and engagement, alongside inadequate safeguards for young users.

Requiring companies to stop repeatedly recommending harmful material would cut against how they capture attention, whereas requiring them to classify users fits comfortably into how they already operate.

Regardless of the enforcement, the business model resumes on the other side of the age check. Unless Egypt specifies what a “safe mode” must change, a platform can obey the account rules while still competing to exploit teenagers as long as possible, and turning 15 would end the policy’s special protection without changing those incentives.

The new policy carries that problem into account regulation. NTRA spokesperson Mohamed Ibrahim said safe mode will restrict contact with strangers and give parents greater control. These measures cannot establish that a known contact is harmless, or prevent an image circulating through other people’s accounts. Removing a child’s account does not remove the child from the story others are spreading.

That requires platforms to interrupt distribution and authorities to act on threats without turning the complainant’s private life into evidence against them, and Egyptian law makes that distinction precarious. Article 25 of the 2018 cybercrime law criminalizes violations of privacy and violations of “family values” in the same breath, though the latter is never defined, and it carries penalties that include imprisonment.

The same provision can protect someone against unwanted exposure and punish conduct authorities consider “improper.”

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) documented at least 626 people, including 392 women, prosecuted in “family values” cases between 2020 and July 2026, in a campaign disproportionately targeting poorer women over their appearance, expression, and online content.

The Interior Ministry has publicized arrests with photographs of those detained, and official protection of reputation has included publicly humiliating the people arrested in its name.

Madbouly’s July 29 announcement on social media regulation proposed raising penalties and activating an NTRA monitoring unit, invoking public morals and family reputation.

The regulator now overseeing child protection was already assigned a broader role in policing acceptable expression.

Share

This matters to the practical effectiveness of Sisi’s initiative, as blackmail works by making exposure frightening. If seeking help risks scrutiny of the victim’s clothes, relationships or photographs, official morality policing can strengthen that threat.

Confidential reporting and protection against such prosecution would weaken the blackmailer’s leverage. An age check leaves it intact.

It also reveals a choice about investigative priorities. Monitoring citizens for moral offenses gives officials a continuing supply of accounts to investigate, regardless of whether anyone has suffered an identifiable injury, and giving the regulator more information will not, by itself, change what the authorities decide to pursue or how they decide to do so.

The NTRA spokesperson has also suggested using artificial intelligence to infer age from interactions with videos, photographs, games, and advertisements. Behavior already used to predict what someone might watch or buy would also help determine whether they may keep an account. An adult incorrectly classified as a child would somehow have to challenge the decision to recover access.

This expansion wouldn’t need to begin with a demand for an identity document. Under the approach he described, existing commercial profiling would become part of regulatory enforcement, which, if anything, makes restrictions on how information is reused as important as restrictions on how much is collected.

At the same time, the decision also promises “data minimization” and an appeal mechanism.

The difficulty is enforcing those limits against Egypt’s existing security powers.

Article 2 of the cybercrime law requires service providers to retain identifying, traffic, and device data, and content under their control, for 180 days.

Disclosure requires a reasoned judicial order; a separate obligation requires technical assistance requested by national security bodies.

Collecting less would reduce the information available through these channels, but would not abolish them.

The 2020 Personal Data Protection Law contains a more fundamental exception. It exempts information held by national security authorities and other data they designate.

At their request, the Data Protection Center must direct data handlers to modify, conceal, disclose, or circulate information without needing prior judicial authorization.

Representatives of Defense, Interior, the GIS, and the Administrative Control Authority—defined as a national security body—also sit on the center’s board, meaning that the bodies granted exceptional access help govern the institution responsible for protecting personal information.

Subscribe now

Under the 2003 Telecommunications Regulation Law, NTRA’s board includes a representative of the Defense Ministry and representatives of designated national security bodies. Telecommunications operators and providers must also, at their own expense, supply the equipment, systems, software, and communications facilities that enable the Armed Forces and national security entities to exercise their legal powers. Encryption equipment, in turn, requires approval from NTRA, the Armed Forces, and national-security bodies.

The electronic-signature system developed under Law 15 of 2004 follows a similar institutional form.

The Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) regulates the certificates that connect an electronic act to a legally identified person. Its governance also includes representatives of the Defense and Interior ministries, the Presidency, and the GIS.

A promise of privacy under such laws leaves a substantial part of state power beyond ordinary privacy protections.

The danger extends beyond a stolen database.

Information can acquire a security use through powers written into the law. Even a technically secure system can protect records against hackers while making them available to the state. For Egyptians subject to these checks, limits on official access matter as much as the software’s security.

Egypt is one of the most surveilled places on earth, with 47 surveillance entities operating within its borders—most of which, if not all, have been contracted by the state.

A recent case shows what control over communications can accomplish.

In 2023, Citizen Lab investigated attempts to infect Ahmed Eltantawy’s phone with Predator spyware after the former MP announced plans to challenge Sisi for the presidency. Researchers found that Sandvine network equipment was used to redirect his browsing to malicious sites through his Vodafone Egypt connection. They attributed the operation to the Egyptian government.

Sandvine’s successor, AppLogic Networks, said it ended all Egyptian customer relationships by the end of 2025.

Still, the case remains relevant because it shows authorities using communications infrastructure against a political opponent. Any new collection of information must be judged against that record, including when its stated purpose is protecting children.

The security institutions involved also have a place in the business of digital expansion. Sisi’s 2022 decree reorganizing the Supreme Council for Digital Society assigned its digital operations committee to the GIS and its data centers committee to Defense, which is why Mansour’s presence at the September meeting reflected an established hierarchy.

Sisi explained his approach at the inauguration of the government data and cloud computing center in April 2024. Ministries would connect to “one main center,” with only “a keyboard and a screen” at their end.

On outsourcing digital public services, he asked: “Can the private sector do this and we buy the service from it?” Then-Communications Minister Amr Talaat said yes. Centralization would create contracts and administrative power.

One of the suppliers created by the state is cybersecurity company CyShield.

On August 27, NTRA presented a biometric verification system developed with the Interior Ministry, ITIDA, and the Egyptian cybersecurity company. A pilot involving all four mobile operators supports remote SIM purchases, mobile wallets, and electronic signatures. CyShield chief Mostafa Issa emphasized that the technology was entirely Egyptian, arguing that domestic development strengthened users’ privacy.

The company’s ownership history gives that assurance a particular meaning.

Commercial records examined by Saheeh Masr identify CyShield’s founding chairman in 2016 as Hassan Rashad, now head of the GIS.

He represented the Egyptian Company for Investment Projects (ECIP), which had been publicly identified as an intelligence subsidiary in 2013.

Three industry sources told Saheeh Masr that CyShield remained affiliated with a security body, and a former employee said government entities were directed to contract with it through direct awards.

ECIP’s position, however, is not confined to CyShield’s founding board.

It owns 6.7% of E-Finance Investment Group, the company at the centre of government electronic payments and several state data systems, and the military’s role was not limited to watching this take place from outside.

The Armed Forces Signal Department helped construct its communications infrastructure.

In 2023, Sisi discussed the unified government network with Madbouly, Talaat, Armed Forces Financial Affairs Authority head Lieutenant General Ahmed El-Shazly, and Signal Department director Major General Bakr El-Bayoumi.

Domestic ownership therefore does not answer the question of who protects Egyptians from domestic surveillance. The arrangement gives security interests a position on both sides of digital expansion: public institutions help organize demand, while an affiliated business is positioned to supply it.

Direct awards convert political access into commercial advantage, and the people whose identities are processed have little say in that relationship, even as officials invoke their privacy to defend it.

The emerging relation joins policy, capital, and information.

That helps explain one side of the September meeting’s apparently disparate agenda.

Among many things, the state wants more transactions and services online, creating demand for digital infrastructure.

It also wants authority over Egyptians’ ability to reach an audience independently. Investment in digital participation and restrictions on expression can advance together. The resulting system offers commercial opportunities to approved suppliers while making citizens’ participation increasingly subject to official conditions.

The September announcement was made in a system where security institutions help organize digital administration, security-linked companies supply identification technology, and the law preserves privileged access to the resulting data. Calling the objective “child protection” changes none of those relationships.

Nor does it resolve the central problem facing a child subjected to abuse.

So far, everything the government has decided to pursue does and says considerably more about classifying an account than about securing a remedy.

For adults, the same decision concerns the conditions of participation: what they must reveal to remain online, who may reuse it, and how they challenge an error. For children, the danger is that a successful verification system becomes the government’s evidence of successful protection.

Share

This week’s issue of The Cairo Report covers Red Sea oil workers on hunger strike over wages and benefits while keeping production running, even as subcontracting quietly cuts pay and reclassifies jobs across the sector. Cairo water utility workers have renewed protests and strikes at Tebbin, Rod El-Farag, and Sahel over allowances unpaid since 2016, with five workers briefly detained by state security.

We also look at Egypt’s role as both a major source of migrant labor and a destination for refugees, with record remittances flowing in alongside deportations and deaths in detention, and at the country’s outsourcing boom, where nearly 200,000 tech workers export labor abroad at a fraction of global wages.

New rules for platform work are moving through the Labor Ministry, raising the question of whether platforms will be treated as employers, while in Tanta, 850 textile workers are resisting relocation as their factory’s land is cleared for investment, and workers in Samanoud have ended their strike after a partial wage payment, with an ultimatum for the rest.

Elsewhere, a coalition is pushing the stalled National Wages Council to raise the private-sector minimum wage, and fired Agricultural Bank employees staged a sit-in demanding reinstatement four years after mass contract terminations.

Share

Red Sea oil workers go on hunger strike

Workers at a state-owned petroleum company in Red Sea Governorate launched a hunger strike without stopping production, demanding higher wages, overtime compensation, statutory leave, and the allowances and profit-sharing benefits common elsewhere in Egypt’s petroleum sector.

Workers told Al-Wafd on September 23 that some salaries start at around 15,000 Egyptian pounds (around 290 US dollars) despite years of experience, while shifts can reach 12 hours under a 15-days-on, 15-days-off rotation. But a source familiar with workers’ conditions told The Cairo Report on condition of anonymity that the problem extends beyond one company. Workers employed through subcontracting schemes across petroleum sites in the Red Sea have had salaries cut, been shifted on paper from their original occupations into nominal “security” jobs, and had their social insurance records altered to reflect those new titles, the source said, adding that “newly hired workers can meanwhile enter on substantially better pay.”

The source also said workers who previously slept at remote worksites have lost the associated overnight stay benefit even as some continue working until late hours, increasing the daily burden on both workers and their families. According to the source, the changes form part of a broader effort to reduce direct labor costs and headcount, with contractual relationships increasingly routed through subcontractors rather than the operating company itself. In this role, the intermediary does more than process payroll: it inserts another commercial claim between the company paying for labor and the worker receiving the wage.

The source described these arrangements as “varying between companies, including operations involving public-private partnerships,” but said the common result was “lower pay, changed occupational classifications and an additional margin captured by labor intermediaries.”

The dispute over annual profits is unfolding during a wider delay in petroleum-sector general assemblies. On September 8, the Petroleum Ministry authorized covered public, joint, and holding companies to pay workers 50% of their annual profit entitlement in advance, with the remainder due after accounts are approved, because delayed assemblies were postponing payments.

The demands have a long history in Egypt’s oilfields. In 2014, Egyptian Drilling Company workers struck over 12-hour shifts, annual leave, overtime, profit sharing, risk allowances and compensation for remote work. In February 2025, workers at the Egyptian-Chinese Petroleum Drilling Manufacturing Company struck for wage parity, annual raises, profit-sharing, and specialization allowances while working a 12-hour shift, with workers comparing their conditions with colleagues doing similar work elsewhere, while company structure and contractual status determine who receives what.

What distinguishes the current action is that workers are preserving output while carrying the immediate cost themselves. During the 2014 Egyptian Drilling strike, workers stopped more than 30 rigs and directly exercised leverage over production by shutting down production across several sites. The Red Sea workers, by contrast, continue working while they refuse food, and the petroleum companies continue extracting value while parts of the workforce absorb wage cuts, occupational reclassification, lost allowances and fragmented social-insurance rights through subcontracting.

As the ministry simultaneously seeks to raise South Valley Holding’s crude output from roughly 33,000 to 44,000 barrels a day and attract new Red Sea investment, its own expansion plans sharpen the labor question beneath them: not only how much petroleum Egypt produces, but which company employs the people producing it, which intermediary takes a cut, and how much of the sector’s revenue reaches the workers whose labor keeps extraction running.

A ten-year wage debt that keeps returning to the shop floor

Workers at Cairo’s water utility have renewed coordinated action over allowances and wage differentials left unresolved since 2016, with workers at Tebbin protesting while colleagues at Rod El-Farag and Sahel struck.

The latest escalation follows several days of protests at major Cairo facilities, and according to Al Manassa’s Ahmed Khalifa, five participating workers were summoned and held by state security for around three hours and told them to calm down and refrain from further demonstrations.

At Tebbin, workers said that some colleagues had already won court judgments ordering payment of the arrears, while others had filed new cases; they were also demanding higher current benefits, including a meal allowance of just 150 pounds a month.

The dispute has survived repeated efforts to contain it administratively, as The Cairo Report earlier this year reported that workers had escalated from branch-level actions to coordinated stoppages across seven Cairo facilities, while bill collectors in several districts stopped collections. The holding company responded with another promise: Chairman Mostafa El-Sheemy reportedly offered to pay two outstanding allowances and spread the remainder across three years, while a Housing Ministry committee had already been formed to study the legal and financial questions. By September, however, workers from different branches said that no substantive step had been taken on the historical allowance file.

Management’s own figures show why the conflict has persisted. In May, El-Sheemy told Parliament that incorporating the outstanding allowances “would cost more than 4.5 billion pounds,” while workers said that adding them to the wage structure could raise net pay by roughly 40–60%. The dispute is therefore not simply over a one-off arrears payment. Incorporating the allowances changes the wage base itself and, with it, the level from which subsequent increases and employment benefits are calculated. The company had previously claimed that it implemented a new periodic allowance in July, which it described as “the largest such increase in the sector’s history,” but its own announcement did not settle the 2016–2025 arrears claims.

Cairo’s water and sanitation system cannot defer pumping, maintenance, billing or collection for a decade, yet management has treated part of the compensation attached to that labor as something that can be postponed whenever its balance sheet cannot—ostensibly—absorb the cost. Workers have responded by repeatedly rebuilding collective leverage across branches, while management has answered with court-by-court settlements, committees, installment proposals and, now, security intervention.

Exporting labor, absorbing displacement & policing Europe’s border

Egypt continues its growth trajectory as a major source of migrant labor, a workplace for more than a million refugees and asylum seekers, and an increasingly important outpost of Europe’s migration control regime.

The latest Atlas of Migration by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung describes this contradiction directly, tracing how Sudanese and other refugees have historically found informal work in Cairo and Giza while tighter policing has increasingly exposed undocumented workers to detention and deportation.

At the other end of the movement, 17,451 Egyptian nationals reached Europe by sea or land in 2025, 50% more than in 2024, with almost 52% travelling through the central Mediterranean route, mainly to Italy, and 47% through the eastern route, principally to Greece, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

For the Egyptian economy, however, workers who leave do not simply disappear from the labor market, as part of the value of their labor returns as foreign exchange.

Remittances from Egyptians working abroad reached a record 47.3 billion dollars in FY2025/26, up 29.6% from 36.5 billion dollars the previous year, according to data published last month by the Central Bank. Migration therefore performs two functions at once. Workers leave an economy that cannot provide all of them with wages and employment capable of sustaining their households, then reproduce those same households—and supply Egypt with scarce hard currency—through wages earned abroad. The economy exports labor power and receives part of its price back in dollars.

The movement in the opposite direction is governed by a far harsher reality of labor relations. Formally, Egypt hosted more than 1.098 million registered refugees and asylum seekers as of August, including 851,947 of them Sudanese, with UNHCR reporting in June of this year that many lack stable incomes and face limited livelihood opportunities amid rising living costs, adding that most live in urban areas including Greater Cairo and Alexandria.

The movement in the opposite direction is governed by a far harsher labor relation. A September 15 report by the Refugees Platform in Egypt (RPE) documented 24 forcibly displaced people who died in detention facilities or in connection with arrest, arbitrary transfers, and pre-deportation procedures between December 2025 and July 2026. Eighteen of the 24, or 75%, were registered with UNHCR or held documents connected to international protection procedures, while 16 were Sudanese.

RPE also documented “recurring indications of delayed or inadequate medical care, overcrowding, poor ventilation and unsuitable detention conditions.”

Similarly, Amnesty International had reported earlier in the year that since late 2025, police have detained refugees during identity checks on streets and at workplaces, while documenting refugees restricting or abandoning work to reduce their exposure to arrest and deportation.

Europe has helped construct that asymmetry. The atlas traces years of European support for Egyptian border policing, including police training, patrol boats, thermal imaging and satellite surveillance equipment. The European Union’s 2024 “strategic comprehensive partnership” with Cairo adds 7.4 billion euros for 2024–27—5 billion in concessional loans, 1.8 billion in investment and 600 million in grants, including 200 million specifically for migration management—while formally linking migration and mobility to “economic stability, investment and security.”

The resulting division is material rather than rhetorical: Egyptian labor abroad is encouraged and economically prized when it generates foreign currency, displaced labor inside Egypt remains concentrated in precarious employment under the threat of repression or removal, and the state receives European financing to police movement between the two. The same regional labor market thus integrates workers across borders while states increasingly differentiate their rights according to nationality, legal status, and which direction they are moving.

Share

State policy of cheap labor outsourcing proves successful—for capital

Egypt’s outsourcing boom has grown into a significant export industry built around selling skilled Egyptian labor abroad while workers remain at home. Communications Minister Raafat Hindy said on September 26 that “nearly 200,000 engineers, developers and other specialists now export digital services from Egypt,” broadly matching the June count of 195,300 workers employed by 252 exporting companies across 282 delivery centers, according to the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA).

Outsourcing exports reached 5.2 billion dollars in FY2025/26, around 70% of Egypt’s 7.4 billion dollars in total digital exports, with ITIDA targeting more than $8 billion by FY2027/28. The sector creates formal skilled employment, but its comparative advantage is also unusually explicit: Egypt’s telecom regulator markets the country’s workforce as highly trained and available at “relatively low wages,” while ITIDA advertises potential operating-cost savings of up to 70% against competing locations and that by exploiting Egyptian labor, “business leaders can grow more efficiently without weighing down their budgets.”

The price differential is large enough to be measured directly. An Everest Group study commissioned by ITIDA in 2024 estimated annual compensation for an IT-services worker in Cairo at 8,000–10,000 dollars, compared with 15,000–17,000 dollars in India, 17,000–19,000 in the Philippines, and 38,000–40,000 in Poland, describing Cairo’s advantage as primarily driven by low salaries.

Currency depreciation has widened that arbitrage further. Last year, for example, Sutherland said its Egyptian business grew 25–30% in the first half of 2025, attributing the rise partly to the weaker pound as well as workers’ language skills. For wage earners, devaluation raises the domestic cost of food, rent, and transport; for the foreign client purchasing labor in dollars or euros, it can lower the international price of the same labor time.

The same macroeconomic adjustment therefore appears as declining purchasing power on one side of the employment relation and “improved competitiveness” and “value propositions” on the other.

The state reinforces that wage advantage by absorbing part of the non-wage cost of production. ITIDA offers investors tax reductions, subsidized facilities, training support, and other incentives, while public free zones have been opened to service exporting startups with customs and tax exemptions.

The government signed 55 outsourcing agreements in November 2025, which Sisi attributed to “stability despite regional challenges,” with the state projecting 75,000 additional jobs over three years, while companies continue expanding large Egyptian workforces. As The Cairo Report has argued in a previous dispatch, this is the white-collar side of an economy whose attractiveness to capital increasingly rests on the gap between workers’ productive capacity and the cost of purchasing it: metropolitan, multilingual, and technically trained labor is integrated into global production without receiving wages comparable with the markets in which its output is sold.

That contradiction may sharpen as the industry moves into AI and higher value services. Outsourcing export revenue is currently growing at about 23% annually while employment grows around 12%, according to ITIDA chief Ahmed El-Zaher, who expects automation to replace some routine tasks while creating more specialized ones. The cheap labor model therefore does not necessarily need to disappear as Egypt moves from call centers into software, engineering and artificial intelligence; it can migrate upward into more sophisticated work.

Regardless, under such arrangements, and thanks to official state policy, the sector’s development and present success remain tied to the international inequality it is supposed eventually to overcome, and as Sisi previously told US business figures: “We have labor whose cost is incomparable to any other place.”

Platform work enters formal rule making, but who counts as the employer?

Egypt’s Labor Ministry has moved regulation of work via online platforms and other nontraditional work into direct consultation with companies, opening a new stage in deciding whether digital labor will inherit conventional employment rights or remain organized primarily through individual contracting.

Labor Minister Hassan Raddad met representatives of recruitment and digital-work companies on September 24 to discuss rules covering electronic recruitment, platform work, freelancing, remote work, part-time work, flexible work and job-sharing, saying the government wants to move toward “clear regulatory frameworks.”

The development is already overdue under last year’s labor law, in which Article 100 required the minister, after consulting trade unions and employer organizations, to issue regulations governing new work patterns within six months of the law’s 3 May 2025 issuance.

The stakes lie less in whether platforms are regulated than in what labor relation the regulations recognize. Article 96 defines “new work” as labor performed for an employer, for pay and under that employer’s “management or supervision”; Article 97 then extends to those workers the rights attached to conventional employment, including the minimum wage, social protection, social insurance, and, at least on paper, collective bargaining and trade union freedoms.

Yet the final law does not separately list digital platform work among its enumerated categories, which is notable because parliament’s April 2025 version explicitly included “work through digital platforms” before the law was promulgated weeks later without that category. Still, the disappearance does not itself exclude platform workers, since the final definition is broader and the minister can add further categories through executive decisions, but it pushes the decisive question onto whether algorithmic control is treated as employer supervision.

The ministry now says conventional protections should extend to the new work patterns, while Egyptian Trade Union Federation vice president Khaled Eish separately said on the same day the meeting took place that “platform work requires explicit rights and social protection.”

But as was the case when the new labor law was being drafted, the government’s meeting was with company and platform representatives, not platform workers themselves or their representatives, making the composition of the remaining consultation process worth watching.

The international standard adopted only three months ago sets a clearer test. The ILO’s new Convention No. 193, to which Egypt is a signatory, covers platform workers regardless of whether they are employees or self-employed and requires governments to determine employment status mainly from the actual facts of how work and payment are organized, rather than the contractual label. It also addresses automated monitoring and decisions, human review, occupational safety, social protection, dispute mechanisms, and collective bargaining.

Notably, the convention does not require every platform worker to become an employee; rather, it requires the classification to reflect the real relation of control.

For wage earners, that is the material dividing line in Egypt’s forthcoming rules. The government can formalize the market by licensing platforms, recording transactions, and registering individual freelancers while leaving the costs of social insurance, equipment, idle time, occupational injury, and fluctuating demand with the worker. Or it can formalize the employment relation, requiring platforms that materially control labor to assume the obligations that conventional employers carry, and while the technology is relatively new, the underlying conflict is not.

What the regulations will decide is how a new form of organizing production redistributes—or maintains—an old set of relations.

Textile workers resist transfer as factory land is cleared for investment

Workers at the Delta Spinning and Weaving unit in Tanta have protested plans to move roughly 850 workers to the company’s Zefta unit and clear the 44-feddan Tanta complex for investment, turning a labor dispute over relocation into another test of how Egypt’s state textile restructuring distributes the costs of unlocking industrial land. Workers suspended further escalation while awaiting negotiations with the Cotton, Spinning, Weaving and Garments Holding Company, Safha1 reported. While the immediate issue is job transfer rather than redundancy, that understates what workers stand to lose, as relocating production transfers commuting time, transport costs, and care burdens onto employees while separating them from the workplace around which their lives have been organized.

The decision also marks a sharp turn from the state’s own plans for the site because Delta Spinning ceased to exist as a standalone company after the government merged it into Misr Shebin El-Kom Spinning and Weaving in 2021, alongside Eastern Spinning, Kom Hamada, and Meet Ghamr; the holding company owns effectively all of the enlarged firm.

Yet when Gharbia’s governor inspected Tanta in October 2022, officials described three operating factories across the same 44 feddans and said the now-abolished Public Business Sector Ministry had begun replacing obsolete machinery in one of the factories, with a second phase intended to expand production capacity. In 2023, the government’s wider textile strategy similarly listed a “New Delta” project covering Shebin El-Kom and Tanta among the plants awaiting redevelopment.

What has not been explained by the state, however, is when the Tanta modernization plan became a decision to remove production altogether.

The shift nevertheless follows the financial logic built into the textile restructuring program from the start. Years ago, public business sector officials said that modernization would be financed partly by selling and rezoning state textile land, using the proceeds to pay debts and purchase new machinery, and former minister Hisham Tawfik repeatedly stressed that the assets being sold were surplus or unused and that disposals “would not interfere with existing production.”

Tanta now exposes the boundary of that promise, as the asset being prepared for “investment” is the site of an operating industrial unit whose workers are being moved precisely so the land can be released, and restructuring therefore no longer means only selling property left behind by industrial consolidation; in this case, consolidation is what creates the “surplus” property.

Workers elsewhere in the same group have already forced the holding company to recognize that such transfers carry social costs. In 2023, roughly 1,000 workers at Eastern Spinning in Zagazig, another unit absorbed into Misr Shebin, occupied their workplace after being told they could be transferred to other holding company factories. Management ultimately placed them on open paid leave, preserved their wages and benefits, and agreed that they would remain administratively attached to the company without transfer outside their governorate.

Share

Samanoud workers are back on strike for their wages

Update: Workers at the Samanoud Textile and Weaving Company ended their weeklong strike on September 24 after the company disbursed an additional 1,200 pounds of their delayed August wages, pledging to pay the remaining 1,000 pounds on September 28, Al Manassa’s Ahmed Khalifa reported. Management also promised to regularize pay to the first week of each month going forward — a pledge workers met with an ultimatum: pay September wages in full by October 10, or they will resume a factory-wide strike.

That promise came a day after a delegation from the Arab Investment Bank (aiBank)—a state-owned bank holding a minority stake in the company, which often handles negotiations in coordination with majority stakeholder National Investment Bank (NIB)—met with strikers on September 23 alongside board chairman Saad El-Din Abd Rabbo, according to Khalifa. Bank officials pledged to fix the payroll delays and invest capital in modernizing the plant, but workers dismissed the assurances as empty “painkillers.”

The standoff had already drawn outside pressure by then.

On September 22, the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS) filed a complaint with the prime minister, warning that management was refusing to communicate with workers or negotiate directly, and that the labor ministry’s local office still hadn’t visited the factory to mediate. CTUWS noted that workers had so far received only 900 pounds of wages totaling roughly 3,100 pounds, and urged the cabinet to order the ministry to visit the company, hear out workers’ representatives, and compel both sides into serious talks; covering full wage payment, minimum-wage enforcement, periodic allowances, food stipends, and settlement of all overdue dues.

That 900-pound payment had come a day earlier, on September 21, when the company tried to end the strike by disbursing part of the owed August wages, an offer workers rejected. The same day, a coalition of political parties, unions, and rights groups issued a joint solidarity statement demanding full and timely wage payment, minimum-wage compliance, remittance of withheld insurance deductions, and an end to retaliation against strikers.

New ‘Wage Council’ framework, an old enforcement problem

Update: On September 24, the CTUWS submitted a memo to the Minister of Planning and Economic Development, who chairs the National Wages Council (NWC), calling for an urgent council meeting to raise the minimum wage for private-sector and informal workers, arguing it should match the floor already set for government employees.

The memo was co-signed by dozens of political parties, civil society groups, unions, public figures, and workers.

It notes that Cabinet Decision No. 2170 of 2026 set the public-sector minimum wage at 8,000 Egyptian pounds, while Law No. 75 of 2026 extended that floor to public-business-sector workers and others outside the Civil Service Law, alongside new allowances, incentives, and bonuses for state and public-sector employees. Yet more than two months after those measures took effect, the NWC has neither convened nor issued a corresponding increase for private-sector workers.

The memo also cites the prime minister’s remarks in March, when he attributed the roughly 14% increase in the public-sector minimum wage to rising inflation. Signatories argued that inflation has continued climbing since then, eroding workers’ purchasing power, while the private-sector minimum has not moved.

Private-sector workers, the memo states, are contending with rising prices and living costs, including higher fuel prices that have driven up transport costs and, in turn, the prices of goods and services generally.

The delay in convening the council and the absence of a scheduled date for it to meet perpetuates unequal treatment of workers across sectors, the CTUWS stated.

On the council’s legal standing, the memo argues it may convene even though it has not yet been reconstituted under the new Labor Law No. 14 of 2026, since the council formed under prior cabinet decisions remains in effect, in the signatories’ view, until a new formation decree is issued.

They further invoked Article 103 of the Labor Law, which requires the NWC to meet at least every six months, or whenever necessary. The council’s failure to convene since March 2025 violates that provision.

Fired Agricultural Bank employees stage sit-in inside Dokki branch

On September 25, a group of employees fired from Egypt’s Agricultural Bank staged a 10-hour sit-in inside the bank’s main branch in Dokki, demanding reinstatement and the reversal of their contract terminations, Al Manassa’s Ahmed Khalifa reported.

Police forces detained two of the protesters after the bank filed a complaint against them, releasing both at 3 a.m. the following day, three colleagues told Khalifa.

One of the three said the fired employees had sent telegraphs to the presidency, the Interior Ministry, and the Public Prosecution ahead of the sit-in, notifying them of the action. They also requested a meeting with the bank’s chairman or a deputy, which was denied.

A second source said the employees resorted to the sit-in after more than a year of unsuccessful attempts to be reinstated, including efforts to meet bank officials and a series of protests raising the same demand. The source added that Agricultural Bank CEO Mohamed Abu El-Saud had canceled a meeting scheduled with a number of the dismissed employees in June 2025.

A third source said bank security tried to force the protesters to leave the branch, but they refused to do so before meeting an official and learning the fate of their demands.

The dispute dates back to contract-termination decisions issued between 2020 and 2022, affecting roughly 2,000 employees across various branches and departments, according to previous accounts from dismissed staff given to Al Manassa. Employees have said the terminations came without prior notice or investigation, despite some holding open-ended contracts, including staff with more than 20 years of service.

Some employees have linked the start of the terminations to Alaa Farouk, Egypt’s current agriculture minister, taking over as the bank’s board chairman in February 2020, saying management pursued a workforce-reduction policy at the time.

The decisions also affected employees who had filed lawsuits over a delayed 20% raise and won court rulings in their favor around the same time they were dismissed.

Over the past four years, the fired employees have filed multiple complaints and organized protests demanding reinstatement and the reversal of their arbitrary dismissals.

On April 27, 2025, dozens staged a protest outside the bank’s Dokki headquarters, followed by three more in May of that year.

Share

Prison Watch

Egypt’s pretrial detention machinery churned through several cases this week.

Anthropologist and investigative journalist Ismail El-Eskandarani has completed a full year in pretrial detention on Supreme State Security Case No. 6469 of 2025, facing charges including spreading false news and joining a terrorist group.

He has again been renewed into pretrial detention at Badr 1 Rehabilitation and Correction Center, according to the Khaled Ali Law Firm, which included his case in its “Ages on Hold” campaign documenting 27 defendants held in freedom-of-expression cases, demanding their release.

On September 26, 16 rights organizations issued a joint statement calling for the immediate release of photojournalist Hamdi Ali, known as Hamdi El-Zaeem, ahead of a trial hearing scheduled for September 27.

The statement marks ten full years since El-Zaeem’s initial arrest; a decade spent cycling through pretrial detention, precautionary measures, and ongoing proceedings without a final conviction.

Meanwhile, the First Circuit of Cairo’s Criminal Court adjourned the case of Ultras White Knights Capo, Sayed “Moshagheb” Fahim, and five co-defendants to October 20, in Boulaq El-Dakrour Felonies Case No. 7304 of 2026, registered as Case No. 4375 of 2026 with the Supreme State Security Prosecution, according to the Egyptian Commission for Rights & Freedoms (ECRF).

The adjournment followed testimony from a fourth prosecution witness, with the court seeking to hear remaining witnesses, defense witnesses, and confirmation from the traffic authority on whether a celebration event disrupted traffic.

The State Security Prosecution ordered the release of 10 defendants of five nationalities, four Yemeni, one Saudi, one New Zealander, one Libyan, and one Syrian, in Case No. 5635 of 2026, known publicly as the “Shia case,” which involves charges of joining and financing a terrorist group, per the ECRF.

State security update

State & Barracks

Military Gatekeepers, Presidential Relatives

This week’s issue covers Egyptian–Saudi relations, Red Sea shipping, and the military’s growing role in civilian recruitment and healthcare. It also examines business ties to Sisi’s family, police killings, and restrictions on civil and religious rights…

Read more

10 days ago · 8 likes · Hossam el-Hamalawy

So, what?!

What’s striking this week isn’t just that workers are absorbing costs so production can continue, it’s how many of this week’s disputes turn on reclassification rather than open confrontation. The Red Sea drillers aren’t being fired, they’re being moved onto “security” job titles that erase their actual pay scale.

The Tanta workers aren’t being laid off but “transferred” in a way that lets the company call an eviction a relocation. Even the platform work debate comes down to whether algorithmic control counts as “supervision,” because Egypt’s labor law grants some protections, but only to whoever can be “correctly named” an employee of a legible employer. The mechanism of the week isn’t the absence of rights so much as the redrawing of who legally qualifies for them.

Again, rights that exist mainly as text cost the state nothing to defer, and everything to enforce, which is why enforcement has never come from the text itself.

What this dispatch shows, like every dispatch, is that the only thing that has ever moved the number—the wage, the allowance, the compensation, the reinstatement—is workers making the cost of ignoring them higher than the cost of paying them.

Subscribe now

In the earliest, darkest hours of December 30, 2005, a force of nearly 6,000 Egyptian Central Security Forces (CSF) surrounded a sit-in by Sudanese refugees in Mostafa Mahmoud Square—no one in, no one out.

First, they drenched them and their makeshift homes—made of patchwork cloth and plastic—soaking children, women, and men to the bone.

The refugees screamed chants in protest, planting themselves like trees.

The streetlights went dark.

Then, the CSF closed in with batons. Legs clambered, bodies fell, screams of panic and cries of anguish echoed to jeers by some Egyptian civilians and police forces, carmine welled on scalps and knuckles, rivulets and spatters sluggishly spreading on charcoal asphalt.

At least twenty refugees were announced killed by Egyptian bloggers and activists who witnessed the violent dispersal, but in the following days, they would record up to 156 deaths.

Before that night, the term “massacre” did not really exist in Egypt’s domestic political lexicon. The CSF had a pattern of killing several civilians during protests, sit-ins, and riots, but it had never before killed dozens in the span of 30 minutes with little more than fists, batons, and shields—sadism justified by racial discrimination.

A deep hatred of this “other”; a refugee that day, and a fellow Egyptian in a few years.

To understand why thousands of riot police were mobilized against a crowd of refugees armed with nothing but tents and placards, it’s necessary to rewind to the mid-1950s.

The origins

By 2005, Sudanese people had migrated to Egypt in three major waves since the Free Officers’ July 1952 coup. Each was driven by a different war.

The first was propelled by the country’s first civil war, which ran from 1955 to 1972.

The second, larger wave came during the country’s second civil war, a conflict that broke out in 1983 and ground on for twenty-two years, killing around half a million people and displacing hundreds of thousands from their homes, before finally ending with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political wing of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and the Sudanese government on January 9, 2005.

The third wave came from Darfur, where conflict had erupted in 2003 and was still actively producing displacement two years later.

For decades, Egypt had adopted what was essentially an open-door policy toward Sudanese nationals: no visas, no residency requirements, and little need for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to determine refugee status on a case-by-case basis, since Sudanese arrivals were more or less absorbed into Egyptian life by default.

That changed after the June 1995 assassination attempt on Egypt’s toppled President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, which was widely attributed to actors linked to the Sudanese government.

In its aftermath, Egypt revoked the privileges Sudanese nationals had enjoyed, including free education and healthcare, and imposed visa and residency requirements on new arrivals.

The more immediate rupture came in June 2004, when the UNHCR’s Cairo office stopped conducting individual Refugee Status Determination (RSD) interviews for Sudanese asylum seekers, freezing both new and pending claims.

In their place, the UNHCR introduced a blanket “temporary protection” status, the so-called “yellow card,” reversing nine years of case-by-case practice in a single policy shift. The justification was the CPA, which the UNHCR judged sufficient to make return to southern Sudan viable.

The yellow cards were only ever meant to be a stopgap, valid through the end of 2004 pending a fuller policy review. Except the review was repeatedly postponed, leaving tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees in indefinite limbo.

That same month, Egypt and Sudan signed the Four Freedoms Agreement, granting each country’s nationals freedom of movement, residence, property ownership, and work in the other’s territory. Egyptian officials pointed to the agreement as proof that Sudanese nationals no longer needed refugee protections at all. But for many Sudanese refugees, accepting that framework would mean accepting the authority of the very government they had fled.

An October 2005 report by African open-access newsletter Pambazuka, an anonymous contributor documents a precursor protest against the yellow-card freeze in August 2004, organized by the Egyptian non-governmental organization South Center.

Per the report, Egyptian police responded with tear gas and detained twenty Sudanese demonstrators.

Nine months into this bureaucratic war of attrition, in March 2005, three Sudanese refugees attended a Human Rights and Refugee Law seminar in Cairo and, in its wake, formed a group calling itself Sout al-Laji’een (Refugee Voices), compiling grievances from across the wider Sudanese community in the city.

By the time the sit-in launched weeks later outside the UNHCR’s Cairo office, the scale of who it claimed to represent was already contested. The UNHCR’s own Deputy Protection Officer, Ahmed Mohsen, was quoted by organizers in the demonstration’s first days admitting the agency simply could not keep up, telling them there were 58,000 Sudanese refugees in Cairo and no way the UNHCR could possibly be there for all of them.

However, the Forced Migration Review contested this number, citing only 30,000 Sudanese refugees registered, emphasizing that this number is only a fraction of the far larger, mostly undocumented Sudanese population in Cairo, which was commonly estimated, loosely, at around 3 million people once long-settled economic migrants were counted alongside refugees.

That gap between state convenience and agency bureaucracy on one side, and human reality on the other, is what emptied into Mostafa Mahmoud Square.

Share

The sit-in

On September 29, 2005, 42 Sudanese refugees gathered in the garden facing the Mostafa Mahmoud mosque in Mohandiseen, in front of the UNHCR office, to begin a sit-in protesting the agency’s continued postponements, according to a copy of the memorial booklet, “We Will Not Forget,” issued by the El-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence in February 2006, obtained by The Cairo Report.

Most of the initial group at the sit-in were youths already active in Sudanese mutual-aid networks in Cairo, and they named their site of protest, the garden, “al-Nagila,” Arabic for “the grass”. Over the following weeks, more and more Sudanese sought refuge in al-Nagila, and the sit-in grew with them, reaching an estimated 1,800 to 2,500 participants, per the UN.

The numbers, naturally, fluctuated day to day. Some residents left the encampment for day labor and returned while some families camped continuously. They pitched rudimentary tents, kept their clothing in plastic bags, and organized demos within the boundaries of al-Nagila on occasion.

The refugees formed committees inside the encampment to manage food distribution, informal rules of conduct, and even something resembling an internal curfew, according to El-Nadeem’s report.

Their demands were simple: either third-country resettlement, credible guarantees for voluntary return, or a path to local integration in Egypt with basic rights. Their most repeated chants were “al-Nagila, al-Nagila…We will die on al-Nagila” and “No state for us but al-Nagila, except Sudan.”

The sit-in witnessed multiple rounds of negotiations, starting with one in the very first week.

“We approached the UNHCR office, but they did not care for us. They treated us very rudely, responding sarcastically to us. They always treat us rudely,” one of the Sudanese participants told El-Nadeem Center.

On November 17, the UNHCR and the Egyptian foreign and interior ministries offered emergency assistance and housing to those who have lost their homes during the sit-in, as well as aid to those willing to return to southern Sudan, in exchange for ending the sit-in by noon that Sunday. Protesters didn’t accept it, and numbers instead grew to 3,000, The New Humanitarian reported.

In fact, on November 21, dozens of the camping Sudanese refugees also declared a hunger strike.

“Until our demands are met, we will not relent. We would rather die here than face the conditions the UNHCR is imposing by closing its doors to us,” Sudanese asylum seeker Amir Khaled told The New Humanitarian. “If the UNHCR fails to respond, we will steadily increase our number of hunger strikers.”

Between months of an Egyptian security crackdown and the UNHCR’s blatant, if not criminal, disregard, the refugees held very little trust in any promises made by either party.

Another factor that sowed mistrust was Egyptian civilians. Multiple accounts by Egyptian bloggers and civil society organizers explain that Mohandiseen residents regularly incited violence against them. They threw racist slurs as they passed al-Nagila by, tossed trash at the sit-in, loudly complained about how “dirty” the refugees were, jeered at them, and regularly lodged complaints with law enforcement. This state was only exacerbated by state media, which stoked the flames into an inferno.

Negotiations reached a crisis when five negotiators representing the Voice of the Refugees signed an agreement with UNHCR to end the sit-in by December 22 in exchange for the agency resuming individual case interviews. The broader refugee body rejected the deal, insisting on enforceable resettlement guarantees rather than vague assurances, and the sit-in continued.

However, things were coming to a head.

On the same day, then-foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit called for intensified endeavors and greater effort to bring the sit-in to an end as soon as possible.

The massacre

In the aftermath, many people would say the dispersal came as a surprise.

But Alaa Abdel-Fattah and Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan would later notice a comment left on their famous blog, ManalAlaa, that warned of the dispersal’s imminence mere hours before it took place. The comment, posted anonymously, went so far as to predict that it would be a massacre.

Multiple activists who witnessed the massacre confirmed to The Cairo Report that, at the time, they did not believe the dispersal would be as violent as it was.

But the comment wasn’t the only warning.

Per journalist Nora Younis’s account, she received word just before ten o’clock on the night of Thursday, December 29, that Mohandiseen was being transformed into “a military encampment”.

Small groups of activists and journalists, Younis among them, made for the scene.

By 11 pm, state security trucks and plainclothes police were sealing off Batal Ahmed Abdel Aziz, Ahmed Orabi, and Gamaat al-Duwal streets. Public buses were being staged around the area, some already carrying security personnel inside. Younis recorded several of their plate numbers as they passed—4129, 3696, 4107, 4136, 4335, 3416, 3534—a small, almost bureaucratic act of documentation that would later help corroborate the scale of what was being assembled.

Within minutes, every road leading to the square had been sealed and bystanders forced to disperse.

Younis wrote that the CSF ringed the camp in five or six parallel lines, counting 60 Central Security vehicles, four fire engines, ten armored vehicles, and a fleet of requisitioned public buses waiting to carry people away.

By one o’clock in the morning on Friday, December 30, the operation began in earnest.

Security forces opened fire with water cannons on the refugees in freezing winter temperatures, a first burst lasting roughly six minutes, followed about an hour later by a second, more forceful blast aimed directly at people rather than over them, Younis reported. Some officers taunted refugees as they were soaked, telling them they needed “a shower” after three months of living in the square without one.

Then, for a few hours, an uneasy lull.

It broke just before five a.m.

Security lines began closing in on the camp from all sides. Inside, refugees, Muslim and Christian alike, responded with chants and prayer, the square filling with chants of “Allahu Akbar” and “Hallelujah” rising together against the advancing lines.

Water cannons fired a third time, with some refugees describing an additional tear gas attack.

Then baton-wielding officers charged.

“We were trapped. Three thousand of us in a small square, and we were being brutally beaten from all directions. We were piled on top of each other. Out of nowhere, a man would fall and not speak at all,” a refugee told El-Nadeem. “We would hear these muffled sounds, then suddenly find another man falling. I don’t know what they were hitting with, but it paralyzed us. One hit and you could not move your jaw to speak, let alone your body.”

The CSF did not discriminate; men, women, and children were all beaten, refugees dragged in twos and threes toward the waiting buses, and—in some of the most disturbing testimonies—beatings that continued on victims after they had already stopped moving.

“They [CSF] were pounding any moving body on the ground, including women and children; they did not care. There was no chance to negotiate a final time,” a third refugee told El-Nadeem. “Children were on the ground; we tried to carry them, but they would hit us and the children we carried. Those of us who died stayed dead. But those injured and exhausted? They were physically dragged to the public buses, beaten on the way to the bus, on the bus, and until the bus reached its destination.”

“They punched my eye; blood oozed from my nose,” she added. “Every time I tried to hold onto a child, they hit them, so much so that my own fingers were broken.”

Officers destroyed what little the refugees had left, tearing apart tents and throwing bags and documents aside even as the assault continued around them.

“The Egyptian Central Security Forces did not come to disperse the sit-in; they came to kill,” another refugee told El-Nadeem. “They came to kill as many people as possible”.

For Socialist Papers, journalist Gehan Shaaban reported that an activist with the American African Foundation Against Torture, Zein, who was a member of the delegation negotiating with security forces, smelled betrayal.

Zein told Shaaban that he asked for a one-hour reprieve to persuade the refugees to peacefully disperse. The security representatives agreed. Within minutes of Zein returning to camp, a State Security officer summoned him and told him, “Get in your car and leave.”

When Zein tried to ask for an explanation, the officer stated that he had authorization from “Mr. President” to break up the sit-in “at any cost,” adding, “These people are going to get beaten.”

Zein replied, “Then we’ll get beaten right along with them,” and returned to the camp.

By roughly five-thirty, it was over.

Hundreds of refugees had been shoved into buses that carried them to Central Security camps scattered across Cairo’s outskirts, including Dahshur, 6th of October City, Tora, and Mansheyet Nasser, while smaller numbers were taken to State Security offices at Gaber Ibn Hayyan or to prisons further afield, in Shibin al-Kom in Menoufiya and in Qanater.

Some testimonies published in the El-Nadeem report described bodies, or people no longer conscious, being tossed out of moving buses at intervals and left at the roadside.

That same day, the operation’s commander, Major General Tarek Abdel Razek, filed police report No. 9975 at Dokki police station accusing refugees of assaulting security forces and injuring 75 officers.

It was, from the outset, an official record built to invert the violence rather than account for it.

“When I fell, I was holding a child; I was nearly dead. They dragged me like a dog. When I came to, my hands were tied. They hit me with an electric baton,” a refugee told El-Nadeem. “When I woke up again, I found myself in a morgue surrounded by the dead. I couldn’t raise my head. There were two doctors saying, ‘These are dead people, but what do we do if one isn’t?’ The response was ‘kill him’.”

“I was surrounded by dead men, women, and children. Some children, as young as a year and a half, were between life and death,” he added.

The death toll as of January 2, 2006, documented by Shaaban, stood at 156, distributed as follows: Al-Sanabil Hospital (28 bodies), Zeinhom Morgue (74 bodies), the Ambulance Authority (40 bodies), Imbaba Hospital (one body), and 6th of October Hospital (13 bodies. Additionally, approximately 400 Sudanese refugees were missing.

“One hundred and fifty-six human lives were snuffed out in half an hour, in cold blood,” Shaaban wrote.

That number constitutes confirmed deaths, not all of them. Exactly how many refugees were killed that night and in its aftermath, we still don’t know.

Share

The aftermath

Within hours of the massacre, Egyptian rights groups had issued condemnation statements, among them El-Nadeem Center, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). Political factions, including Kefaya and the Revolutionary Socialists, did so as well.

Twelve Egyptian rights groups, including the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, sent a letter to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour demanding an independent international investigation, the dismissal of Interior Minister Habib al-Adly, and the release of detained refugees.

“There is the issue of indiscriminate mass killing. Collective punishment—that is, punishment not directed at a specific individual for a specific crime proven to have been committed following a fair trial that afforded all guarantees of the right to defense—is precisely what Israel is inflicting upon our Palestinian brethren,” Tamer Wageeh wrote for The Socialist. “Are we, then, to grant the ruling regime in Egypt a license for mass killing? Do we want it to employ against us—or against anyone else—Israel’s despicable policy of mass killing?”

It would not be until the outbreak of the January 25 revolution, but especially the Maspero massacre in October 2011, that this question would be answered.

Some rights groups, political factions, and blogger-activists followed up the statements with a call to protest against the massacre, a notification for which went out via ManalAlaa, alerting people to the date, time, and location: Saturday, December 31, 12 pm, at the Mostafa Mahmoud Square (al-Nagila). There was also a call for a candlelight vigil mourning the refugee martyrs, who were named al-Nagila martyrs, and protesting the repressive practices of Egyptian security forces.

Days later, activists called for organizing an ongoing exhibition and a weekly open discussion on ​​the streets of Cairo to raise public awareness about the massacre, recall past violations by security forces, and draw connections between those violations and the massacre itself.

The first event was scheduled for Thursday, January 5, at 5:00 pm, at al-Nagila.

The organizers’ relentless choosing of al-Nagila as the site for protest was strategic. It allowed them to protest the UNHCR directly; it kept the massacre’s memory vivid in the moment, and it gave cover for Sudanese refugees who lost their family members to join them in protest, “protected” by Egyptian activists.

Others showcased their solidarity with art.

That being said, several Egyptian politicians, including those belonging to so-called “opposition” factions, refused to participate in any of these actions, according to Wageeh’s account.

In parallel, between January 2^nd and 30^th, 2006, 40 Sudanese survivors sought treatment at the El-Nadeem Center, including 30 men (ages 23–48) and 10 women (ages 19–41). Of these, 10 were university students and 9 university graduates, per the El-Nadeem booklet.

Beyond the center’s logging of physical injuries, it also logged psychological ones.

The clinicians documented acute anxiety and severe depressive symptoms in nearly all patients seen, and specifically flagged post-traumatic stress symptoms such as intrusive flashbacks (particularly of children being beaten or trampled), sleep disturbances, and re-traumatization among the subset of survivors who had prior torture or detention histories in Sudan.

Refugees who lost identification papers in the raid (many papers were left floating in the trampled garden or swept into garbage trucks) were sorted into a separate “illegal migrant” administrative category; roughly 275 people were recorded as lacking documents entirely (75 lacking only passports, 200 lacking any documentation) and were transferred to a State Security facility at Lazoghli before being moved to a holding facility at El-Qanater.

Multiple individual testimonies gathered by El-Nadeem describe detention at Shibin al-Kom prison, Qanater prison, and Tora, some for a week or more, before conditional release; several describe Sudanese embassy officials being granted access to detainees inside Egyptian custody to pressure individuals toward “voluntary” repatriation, and at least one testimony states that 100 detainees were deported with Sudan’s foreign minister personally present to receive them.

Many of the Sudanese who escaped the massacre or were released from detention or hospitals sought refuge in churches in the immediate aftermath. But on January 3, Egyptian security forcibly evacuated Sudanese refugees who had taken shelter at a church in Sakakini, and subsequently deported 654 refugees who had lost their identity papers to Wadi Halfa, Sudan, Shaaban reported.

The state took five months to answer the Egyptian rights groups.

In May 2006, the Dokki public prosecution office closed its investigation with a single finding: the deaths were the result of “stampede and overcrowding.” No one was named, no one was held accountable.

A month later, the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies program at the American University in Cairo offered its own accounting, a 68-page report titled “A Tragedy of Failures and False Expectations,” which spread the blame three ways—onto the UNHCR’s mismanagement, onto Egyptian security forces, and onto the refugees’ own protest leaders.

It took two more years for the international pressure to sharpen. On the second anniversary, in December 2007, five organizations—Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, EIPR, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, and El-Nadeem—jointly petitioned Mubarak to authorize a judicial inquiry independent of the one that had already closed.

They pointed out, bluntly, that the original investigation had never interviewed a single eyewitness.

Months earlier, in the spring of 2007, a UN committee on migrant workers’ rights had made a similar demand; Egypt’s Foreign Ministry rejected it within days, arguing the committee had no standing to ask. Rights groups called the rejection out publicly, but nothing moved.

By then, one survivor had stopped waiting for the state to change its mind. George Kajokabi, who had lost his wife and child in the massacre, filed a case against the Egyptian government before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2007, after exhausting every domestic option; case No. 344/2007, argued by the lawyer Ashraf Milad, Al Manassa’s Safaa Sorour wrote in 2016.

It took the Commission six years to formally accept it for review, which it finally did in 2013, on the grounds that Egypt had never offered an effective remedy at home. By the massacre’s eleventh anniversary, in December 2016, the case was still pending; 37 Sudanese who had been in the square that night were still officially unaccounted for, and Kajokabi’s lawyer told Sorour he doubted Egypt would ever honor a ruling against it, that the state would simply invoke sovereignty and wait the case out, the same way it had waited out everything else.

Why now?

As anti-refugee sentiments grow sharper and more dangerous by the day, fuelled by a steady stream of vitriol from state media, the massacre can be, at this moment, a clear lens.

The massacre’s mechanism depended on a population made illegible, in the very literal sense. They were uncounted, undocumented, unbanked, and unhoused. That illegibility made this population disposable to both state violence and market exploitation.

Borders and precarity are not humanitarian questions; they have always been class ones.

Both refugees and precarious workers are being disciplined by the same logic of enforced illegibility.

Solidarity cannot stop at a border that the state itself treats as porous whenever it’s convenient and rigid whenever it isn’t.

Cairo’s refugees are subjected to the same city, the same economy, the same repressive apparatus as the rest of us, except they are, factually, the most precarious group. A Sudanese refugee cannot disappear into Cairo the way a debtor or a tenant behind on rent can. In this country, blackness is treated as evidence of criminality and dirtiness. There is no blending into a crowd for a population the street has already decided to watch.

Historically, this also acted as a rehearsal, though no one alive that night was rehearsing anything.

The techniques tested, refined, and redeployed that night became the opening move in a more organized repertoire of state violence.

Al-Nagila proved to the state that it could kill dozens of people in half an hour, blame a stampede, and pay no cost. It realized that it could weaponize the media and bourgeois sentiment to gain public approval for its violence—that it could manufacture consent in weeks.

Six years later, those lessons were used on Egyptians in Tahrir Square and beyond.

“Dirty refugees” became “immoral youth,” then “Christian scum,” then “idiot Muslims.”

Other, manufacture consent, water the asphalt with blood, repeat.

Yet, it was also a rehearsal for organizers and activists.

They learned to campaign against this violence, realized the limitations of some of their tactics, understood just how important their live documentation was, and built the habits—the vigils, the weekly gatherings, the insistence on naming the dead—that would resurface, sharpened, during the revolution.

When, in 2023, the war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the UAE-backed paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a fourth wave of Sudanese refugees arrived in Egypt. Not only have they been subjected to extreme racism, but also to multiple crackdowns.

In its biannual report on refugee deaths, the Refugee Platform in Egypt (RPE) documented the deaths of 24 forcibly displaced people, all of whom died inside detention facilities or during arrest, transfer, and pre-deportation detention procedures between December 2025 and July 2026. Of those killed, 18 were registered with the UNHCR.

This issue of What We’re Reading covers a Gestapo chief bankrolling the first narco-state, autocrats discovering they need better ideas and not just better prisons, a Red Sea chokepoint splitting BRICS’s multipolar promise, Israel dressing a new prison up as a nature reserve, and an account of Egypt’s sovereignty being mortgaged.

For possibly the first time, this reading list is heavy on theory. It just so happens that the third issue of Socialist Papers, Egypt’s quarterly journal of Marxist theory, is now out, and it’s a strong one. Sameh Naguib is building toward a genuinely Marxist understanding of the Global South, taking dependency theory apart piece by piece. Sayed Siddiq delivers a cutthroat defense of Gramsci against a “Gramscian reading” of the 1919 Egyptian revolution that, in his account, quietly strips Gramsci of everything that made him a revolutionary.

Separately, Tamer Wagih delivers a staunch defense of communist utopia in Sifr against both the lowered ceilings of a “realistic” socialism and the anti-foundationalist thought that gave up on the idea there was ever a ceiling worth reaching for in the first place.

Share

World

The alliance between the ‘king of cocaine’ and a Gestapo chief to create the first narco-state in Bolivia — Caio Ruvenal, El Pais

When Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez watched Brian De Palma’s Scarface in 1983, he joked about suing Universal Pictures for intellectual theft. Pointing at the fictional Bolivian kingpin Alejandro Sosa, Suárez turned to his companion on the couch—a young Pablo Escobar—and laughed that the film had it backwards: Al Pacino’s Tony Montana wasn’t a Miami Cuban, but a boy from the Colombian countryside sitting right beside him.

In this piece, Caio Ruvenal reviews El narco y el nazi, a book-length investigation by Christian Bergmann and David López that unearths the stranger-than-fiction history behind Suárez’s empire: the fusion of Amazonian cattle capital and Nazi intelligence networks that birthed the world’s first bona fide narco-state.

The catalyst for this cartel statehood was Klaus Barbie, the notorious “Butcher of Lyon” who fled postwar Europe via Catholic ratlines and reinvented himself as an honorary colonel in the Bolivian armed forces. Over a 1979 dinner, Barbie solicited 5 million US dollars from Suárez to finance General Luis García Meza’s bloody 1980 “Cocaine Coup,” framing the putsch as an ideological crusade against creeping Andean communism.

In exchange, Barbie supplied the cattle baron with an armed enforcement wing christened Los Novios de la Muerte (The Fiancés of Death)—a paramilitary squad staffed by European neo-fascist mercenaries who eliminated domestic competition and protected distribution corridors with Gestapo tradecraft.

What makes Bergmann and López’s account so compelling is their materialist decoding of the drug lord persona. Suárez succeeded not because of underworld mystique, but because he was an experienced agrarian capitalist who understood bulk supply logistics.

Before his intervention, peasant producers sold unrefined coca paste to Colombian buyers for pocket change; Suárez consolidated the supply, established price floors, and turned the Amazonian basin into a vertically integrated agro-industrial assembly line. Between 1979 and 1985, Bolivian coca leaf output exploded from 17,000 to over 141,000 tonnes, generating more than 1.5 billion dollars annually as the military apparatus became a wholly owned subsidiary of the trade.

Ruvenal allows the narrative to revel in its dark, cinematic absurdity without losing sight of the Cold War machinery that enabled it. As the authors note, the Bolivian experiment served as an early blueprint for the Iran-Contra affair, linking anti-communist dirty wars directly to unregulated shadow finance.

The alliance between a Nazi torturer and an Amazonian rancher was never an ideological accident, but a pragmatic marriage of convenience: fascism provided the repressive state umbrella, and wholesale cocaine paid the bills.

Why Autocrats Care What People Think — Paul Sonne, New York Times

The Federal Protective Service, the guard charged with securing Vladimir Putin’s life, does not just rely on body armor. It also operates an internal sociology division that conducts clandestine opinion polling across Russia. At the public end of this apparatus, the director of a state pollster enjoys such institutional proximity that signs of his lavish lifestyle can be seen online, while presidential administration deputy Sergei Kiriyenko monitors real-time municipal chatter.

Writing as Russia’s parliamentary elections kicked off, Paul Sonne uses these details to puncture the misconception that despotic regimes govern in blind indifference to their subjects.

Drawing on Ronald Wintrobe’s classic “dictator’s dilemma,” Sonne unpacks why tyrannical systems obsess over measurement. When open dissent is criminalized, fear poisons upward communication, leaving rulers unable to distinguish genuine loyalty from pragmatic performance, and managed elections or covert surveys are not designed to risk power, but to calibrate coercion, audit regional governors’ mobilizational capacity, and detect the precise points where passive compliance risks curdling into active resistance. That elaborate theater is essentially an information-gathering machine.

This dynamic directly mirrors what Egypt witnessed late last year, where parliamentary ballots functioned as bureaucratic stress tests rather than democratic exercises. Peeling back the New Republic’s choreographed races revealed how different security agencies use electoral management to arbitrate rivalries between their preferred parties, discipline regional clientelist networks, and test local patronage pipelines.

Sonne captures the Russian variant of this exact institutional neurosis, where the ballot box is an administrative instrument to audit elite compliance and quantify stability, entirely divorced from popular sovereignty.

The author is brilliant in demystifying autocratic statecraft, yet its reliance on mainstream institutional political science leaves critical material levers unexamined. By reducing the dynamic to psychological signaling and game theory, Sonne minimizes how wartime industrial subsidies, welfare transfers, and direct military disbursements materially ground the very public sentiment Kiriyenko measures, and for readers accustomed to the security architectures of the so-called “Global South,” the spectacle of intelligence agencies operating polling shops and engineering parliamentary quotas is neither paradoxical nor uniquely Russian, because power does not poll out of vanity, but out of fear of the quiet ruptures it cannot contain in advance.

Marxism & The Global South — Sameh Naguib, Socialist Papers

Sameh Naguib has been on the warpath. Since the rebirth of Egypt’s Socialist Papers last January, Naguib has contributed three essays, dense in history and theory, in defense of the Marxist tradition.

The declared target this time is dependency theory; Prebisch through Baran, Frank, Wallerstein, and finally Samir Amin. However, running underneath it is a second argument, a defense of Marx himself against the postcolonial reading that treats his early writing on India as proof he was simply another Orientalist dressed in revolutionary clothing.

Naturally, with Naguib, this is the first installment in a two-part series.

His defense of Marxism is genuinely pleasurable. Mostly because his method is airtight.

Rather than simply declaring the postcolonial reading wrong, he tracks the actual movement of Marx’s writing across two decades. From the 1853 India articles that carry the “progressive colonialism” framing, set against the same year’s insistence that colonial rule was a form of barbarism whose end was only a matter of time, to the shift on Ireland from “independence after the British revolution” to “independence before it” on the explicit grounds that a British working class marinated in colonial chauvinism could never free itself while participating in someone else’s unfreedom.

He also points to the passages on Indian weavers’ bones “bleaching the plains” and on primitive accumulation’s dependence on conquest, enslavement, and the genocide of indigenous populations across the Americas and Africa from the Capital, Vol. I.

Then, he pivots back to the main argument.

Dependency theory, in most of its variants, quietly substitutes a theory of exchange for a theory of production. Frank’s definition of capitalism as production-for-market rather than a specific relation of exploitation in production is the clearest case Naguib names, but the same slippage runs through Wallerstein’s world-systems account, where what drives accumulation is the volume of trade and the efficiency of regional specialization rather than Marx’s value theory of surplus extracted in production.

Naguib critiques this. He explains that exchange relations alone have historically reinforced unfree labour (slavery, serfdom) as often as they’ve generated wage relations, and that primitive accumulation is specifically the separation of producers from the means of production, not “the spread of markets”.

The Samir Amin section is fantastic.

Naguib starts by clarifying that Amin is the closest of the dependency theorists to the true Marxist categories. That being said, his strategy was to target the conclusion Amin drew from his own theory: that “delinking” from the world market was itself the content of socialist revolution, with Maoist China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia offered as the applicable models.

But these states, he insists, were never workers’ and peasants’ states in any way that mattered, because the workers and peasants in whose name delinking was carried out had no voice in the plans built in their names. And, in Cambodia’s case, the state exterminated large numbers of the very workers and peasants it claimed to represent.

It’s a classic “socialism from below” reading, but a well-executed one, if dense and intricate (as it should be).

Share

Region

Houthi rebels’ control of Red Sea oil chokepoint exposes deep divisions in Brics — Stefan Wolff, The Conversation

The day after Ansar Allah consolidated its grip on the Yemeni port of Mokha and seized Mayyun Island overlooking the Bab el-Mandab strait, leaders of the newly expanded BRICS bloc convened in New Delhi for their annual summit. On paper, the grouping boasts nearly half the globe's population and over a quarter of international commerce, yet its final communique made zero mention of the Red Sea, maritime navigation, or Yemen.

Writing in The Conversation, international security scholar Stefan Wolff seizes on this conspicuous omission to dissect how the physical capture of global shipping lanes has fractured the diplomatic posture of the non-Western bloc.

Wolff demonstrates that the rapid expansion celebrated by multipolar boosters has institutionalized irreconcilable conflicts within the club. Tehran holds a vicarious veto over maritime chokepoints, while Riyadh finds its strategic bypass—the East–West pipeline terminating on the Red Sea—paralyzed by the very militia Iran arms. Meanwhile, net energy importers like New Delhi and Beijing require open waterways to tame industrial fuel bills, even as Moscow quietly gains leverage whenever maritime transit risks divert energy flows.

In Wolff’s valid reading, a multilateral coalition whose sole unifying consensus is rhetorical opposition to Washington cannot act as a counter-hegemonic pole when its own members occupy antagonistic sides of the same war zone.

This institutional stalemate expands on what we examined last week in our dispatch on the Houthi chokepoint, where Ansar Allah’s tactical offer to guarantee safe passage for non-Saudi vessels was engineered to exploit divergent regional interests. Just as Mohammed bin Salman’s hurried flight to Cairo aimed to prevent Egypt from decoupling Suez Canal revenues from Saudi security guarantees, the silence in New Delhi reflects the same contradiction.

Egypt cannot afford a shuttered canal, Saudi Arabia cannot accept targeted vulnerability, and Iran is unwilling to surrender its regional leverage for the sake of BRICS communiqués.

And while Wolff’s institutional critique effectively deflates the idea of third-worldist solidarity, it remains confined to an elite diplomatic frame in which he treats the bloc’s failure as a crisis of collective decision-making rather than the structural reality of contemporary capitalism, where competing sub-imperial powers join multilateral blocs not to build an alternative world order, but to negotiate better terms of integration within the existing one, and as long as globalized logistics depend on narrow maritime trenches, the rhetoric of multipolarity will continue to founder on the material reality of the coastline.

Israel’s Crocodile Prison Plan Is Part of a Wider Fight Over Nature — Kate McMahon, Wired

When Israeli National Security Minister—and terrorist—Itamar Ben-Gvir allocated 21 million shekels to dig moats around the Ketziot detention facility in the Naqab desert, the initial reaction was to dismiss it as a grotesque parody of Trumpian cruelty and theater.

To bypass wildlife statutes, Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, who regularly calls for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status by inventing an administrative reclassification that designated them “cultivated wild animals” fit for prison service. Yet when the Jerusalem District Court halted the trenching in August, it did not intervene on human rights grounds; it issued an injunction responding to an animal advocacy petition concerned with the “reptilian welfare” of the predators.

In this piece, Palestinian ecologists peel back this medieval spectacle to show that weaponizing the non-human world is foundational to Zionist spatial control, detailing how ecological classification has long functioned as a quiet weapon of territorial dispossession.

By tracing disputes over nature reserves across the occupied West Bank—such as the unilateral redrawing of Wadi Qana—the report illustrates how the Israel Nature and Parks Authority uses environmental preservation to encircle Palestinian villages. Under the cover of conservation statutes, indigenous foraging of za'atar and 'akkoub is criminalized, grazing lands are confiscated, and traditional olive groves are uprooted to clear contiguous buffers for expanding settlements.

Ben-Gvir’s moat is not in any way an eccentric rupture from conservation norms, but the logical culmination of an apparatus where botany, zoology, and carceral architecture enforce partition.

The piece performs an invaluable service by grounding spectacular carceral cruelty in routine colonial ecology, but it also skirts the grotesque legalism at the heart of the Israeli judicial response. The spectacle of a colonial bench agonizing over the dietary comfort and cage dimensions of imported reptiles while Ketziot operates as a torture camp is a textbook case of liberal settler-colonial jurisprudence. Environmental regulations, animal-rights litigation, and green master plans serve as civilizational alibis, converting state violence into a technical debate over ecological stewardship. In the settler-colonial imaginary, the land and its fauna are treated as pristine assets to be safeguarded from the native, who is rendered sub-human precisely by being trapped beneath the welfare of the beasts that encircle them.

Share

Egypt

Communism for an Anti-Foundationalist Age — Tamer Wagih, Sifr

Tamer Wagih does not pull his punches, and this essay is all the better for it.

Decades after the defeats of the 1970s and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, some Leftists argue that communism in the region today survives less as a living horizon than as a set of embarrassed footnotes to be minimized before any “serious” political demand can be made.

Wagih very clearly, and correctly, identifies this as a “lowering of the ceiling”.

But to explain this reflex, he takes us back to the origin: Marx.

He tells us that Marx and Engels’s break with Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier was never a repudiation of utopia as such, but rather a materialist relocation of it. Essentially, communism ceases to be a moral ideal invented by a critical intellectual (the intelligentsia) and offered to society from outside, and becomes a real tradition already incubating within capitalism’s own contradictions, waiting for the active historical agent, the working class, to, well, take action.

And so, holding onto the communist horizon is the furthest thing from wishful thinking. It’s what gives even partial, reformist demands their direction, meaning, and weight.

This argument exposes the logic behind our insistence, and its own, on naming both exploitation and dispossession as systemic. The stories we cover in our labor dispatch can, and should be, read as instances of a single relation of production, and a communist horizon is what makes it possible to see them as such in the first place.

Also, there is no “vanishing working class”.

Wagih is obviously vehemently against both liberal triumphalism about a post-industrial, post-proletarian world and left-wing melancholia about an agent that supposedly no longer exists (an agent that the latter treats as secondary, as foot soldiers, not a vanguard).

Instead, he reaches for data. By the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) own conservative definition, the global working class grew from roughly 1.07 billion in 1991 to 1.91 billion by 2025, rising as a share of both world population and the global labour force. What looks like the working class’s historical inertness, Wagih says, is not its disappearance but a transitional crisis. This is the slow, uneven reconstitution of organization and consciousness appropriate to the neoliberal phase of accumulation.

That is an explanation, not a resigned description. It’s an important distinction to make.

However, the entire point of this essay, its spine, is its anti-foundationalism, and Wagih does not disappoint when targeting the postmodern and post-Marxist traditions.

He explains that their underlying claim—that every truth-claim, every standard of right, ultimately dissolves into an arbitrary act of will with no ground beyond the will that asserts it offers a philosophy that abandons the only thing that makes emancipatory politics distinguishable from domination: a materialist account of why some demands are grounded in the actual, contradictory movement of history and others are not.

A left that gives up on foundations loses the ability to say why its own demands are worth fighting for rather than merely willed.

We would have liked to read a proposed answer to a question this essay raises, however. If the communist horizon has to be actively held rather than passively inherited, held by whom, and how?

Wagih insists that the transitional crisis of working-class agency is temporary, and that the task now is reformist demands linked to a maximum horizon rather than substituted for it.

But he doesn’t specify the organizational form through which that linkage actually gets made. We need parties, rank-and-file organization, and the slow, patient work of relating to workers’ actual struggles as they happen, not just theorizing that those struggles remain latent.

The essay stays, deliberately, at the level of ideas: utopia against anti-foundationalism, horizon against ceiling. That is a necessary argument to win, but it remains theory, not strategy. Which is great, by the way, but a concrete offering would have cinched it.

A part two would definitely make for an interesting read.

Gramsci, Marxism, and Revolution: A Critical Reading of “Saad Zaghloul in Gramsci’s Mirror” — Sayed Siddiq, Socialist Papers

This is a fierce reclamation of Gramsci from a domesticated, academicized, and reformist afterlife.

Gramsci is everywhere: in international relations, sociology, literary theory, and postcolonial studies. The problem is, the more universally applicable his concepts become, the less anyone seems to ask what political project they were built for.

Siddiq’s target is Sherif Imam’s book, Saad Zaghloul in Gramsci’s Mirror, which reads the 1919 revolution through Gramscian categories. Siddiq argues, however, that this reading, whatever its merits as history, repeats three separations that together neutralize Italy’s most revered revolutionary: cutting him off from his own revolutionary biography, cutting him off from Marx and Lenin, and cutting his concepts off from one another.

Undo those three separations, Siddiq argues, and the “fog” that supposedly surrounds Gramsci’s prison writings lifts considerably. What is believed to be ambiguity is merely what remains after the revolutionary content has been extracted.

Siddiq insists that Gramsci cannot be read backward from the categories that later claimed him. Eurocommunism and much of the academic left built their Gramsci from the same raw material, but constructed an alternative to Leninism instead. Some slow, parliamentary, institutional road that never has to confront the state directly.

Siddiq’s rebuttal reaches back to the man before the prison notebooks: the editor of L’Ordine Nuovo, the leader who founded the Italian Communist Party on explicitly Leninist lines, the author of the 1926 “Lyon Theses” insisting that no revolution in Italy could be anything but a socialist one led by the working class, and then shows that nothing in the prison writings retracts this.

The often-quoted line about “war of position” replacing “war of maneuver” is not a renunciation of the seizure of power, but a strategic adjustment to the fact that Western states, with their dense civil societies of parties, unions, churches, and schools, cannot be defeated the way Tsarism was—in days, by a direct assault on a weak state exposed behind a “primitive and jelly-like” civil society. The metaphor from trench warfare was always meant to describe how you get to the direct confrontation, not a reason to abandon the idea that one is eventually necessary.

Gramsci never conceived of the “war of position” as separable from the “war of maneuver” it was meant to prepare. Separating them produces exactly the naive assumption that a ruling class holding a monopoly on coercion will hand over power once it senses it has lost the argument.

The essay’s account of the “historic bloc” is its most theoretically substantial section, most clearly indebted to Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, and the Bolshevik experience behind them.

Siddiq critiques the idea that the historic bloc breaks with “orthodox” Marxist class analysis by returning to cases: the Russian working class, only about 5% of the population, could not have won in 1917 without the peasants who rose alongside it, the peasant-soldiers who mutinied, and the revolts of oppressed nationalities. And yet, it was the workers, organized in soviets, whose leadership the wider mass looked to and modelled itself on.

Against this he sets 1923 Bulgaria, where workers and peasants rose in succession rather than together and were crushed in turn, blaming the Communist Party’s fatal hesitation to bridge them.

So, yes, even a working-class majority needs the historic bloc, both to stop the bourgeoisie recruiting the rest of society against it, and because the dictatorship of the proletariat is the democracy of the working class and its popular allies against the old ruling class alone.

The only drawback of this essay is that you go in expecting a Gramscian re-reading of 1919 itself, but you don’t receive it. Nonetheless, it is a brilliantly argued piece.

Share

Mortgaged Sovereignty — Hesham Gaafar, Sifr

Empirically, this is a great essay with a solid, identifiable spine. Yes, it tells us very little we don’t already know, but the way those things—Ras El-Hikma, fertilizer/gas exposure, the Future of Egypt Authority, API dependency in pharma, port and Suez Canal Economic Zone concessions, among others—are woven together is informative and easy to follow.

And despite the absence of a class category, the distinction between “divestment” and “mortgaging” is a genuinely useful empirical category.

This is a descriptive political economy essay that, rightly, identifies a very real issue: creeping alienation of control over strategic assets to capital. However, it’s not a socialist critique, which should be expected of an anti-capitalist site, but a nationalist-institutionalist one.

The unit of analysis being sovereignty makes little sense. The whole essay is constructed around the argument that “Egypt” is losing something to “outsiders,” as if the Egyptian state were a neutral custodian of a national interest that foreign capital is slowly eroding. The state is a committee of the ruling class. In Egypt’s case, that’s a fusion of a military-bureaucratic bourgeoisie and capital (Gulf and domestic). A socialist would not be asking what the state “recedes;” they would be asking which class the state’s decisions serve, and which class bears the cost, and how.

The problem is also that this framework botches any attempt at a proper analysis of why the Suez Canal was never sold. Gaafar builds his theory entirely on Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal as a sacred moment where Egypt reclaimed itself from empire—a myth. That is the epitome of state-capitalism. Nasser’s nationalizations were bourgeois-nationalist, not socialist, substituting the army and the state bureaucracy for the independent action of the Egyptian working class.

One of the peskier aspects of this essay is that, midway, you start expecting an argument on imperialism, it’s a foundational aspect of the Stalinist tradition. Except, imperialism is only mentioned as context? It treats global and regional disturbances as external ones that hit an otherwise autonomous economy. Capitalism is a global system. Egypt’s economy is integrated into it. The “disturbances” offer a read of Egypt’s structural position within a world system of capital accumulation and great-power rivalry.

The IMF, similarly, shows up only as a source of debt-service statistics. That was alarming, especially given it’s a disciplinary class instrument whose conditionality is precisely what forces the kind of asset liquidation the essay describes.

Thankfully, as is expected, the working class is almost entirely absent from this analysis. They are mentioned passingly as cost-bearers, of course. But that’s about where it ends. As if Egypt has not witnessed a relatively sharp spike, a consistent one, even, in labor resistance: strikes, sit-ins, and demos. As if our labor movement has not been actively contesting the very model this essay describes on the ground.

What’s the point of analysis that diagnoses but doesn’t identify where the contradictions generate struggle?

If you have not read it yet, check out this week’s labor dispatch from The Cairo Report:

*What We’re Reading is a fortnightly list of the stories behind the headlines, read through the lens of class and power. In your inbox every other Wednesday.

Subscribe now

This issue of The Cairo Report covers hundreds of Samanoud workers striking, once again, over delayed wages; Misr Phosphate workers demanding direct negotiations over pay and conditions at desert mining sites; and 1,200 Arab Polvara Spinning and Weaving Company workers protesting over wages, social insurance deductions, and the future of the factory.

It also documents renewed clashes between security forces and Warraq Island residents, which resulted in injuries and arrests, and Tora residents—from Tora El-Balad to Kozzika—preparing legal cases to defend their homes.

Meanwhile, per-class teachers can join Egypt’s teachers’ syndicate but remain barred from its “Fellowship Fund” retirement, death, and disability benefits; thousands of teacher candidates, separately, were excluded from a fifth batch of government teaching appointments after failing to meet a “qualitative weight” scoring threshold set by the Military Academy.

We also explore private-sector wage growth slowing sharply and hiring remaining flat in Q2, even as Egyptian businesses report shortages of qualified labor, and the government’s preparations to shift control of six public holding companies as part of a state-ownership restructuring, while failing to name a buyer or confirm any sale, among other things.

Share

Misr Phosphate workers demand talks over pay & conditions

Workers at state-owned Misr Phosphate are demanding direct negotiations over pay, risk allowances, and conditions at desert mining sites, according to a source who spoke to The Cairo Report on condition of anonymity, adding that workers approached a senator from the state security-backed Nation’s Future party after struggling to get their concerns before senior management.

Their demands include revised incentives, improved healthcare, better accommodation, meals and transport, and changes concerning wages and promotions.

The demands mainly concern how workers benefit from a profitable, expanding public enterprise. The company’s owners are the National Investment Bank (NIB), Egyptian Mineral Resources Authority, Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation, and Ganoub El Wadi Petroleum Holding Company. The company reported 7.9 billion Egyptian pounds (around 153 million US dollars) in sales, and 3.3 billion pounds in after-tax profit for 2024, with profits rising 194% from the previous year.

At its May 2026 general assembly, management announced production of 4.02 million tonnes and a fifth consecutive year of production growth, in which the company leads the phosphate production sector with a 40% market share.

Those gains make allocating resources to compensation and mine site services a central question.

Management is also changing how it deploys the workforce. On August 17, chairman Nasser Shaheen ordered workers redistributed between departments at Abu Tartour, Egypt’s largest phosphate mine, to “meet operational requirements and fill shortages of trained staff.”

His instructions accompanied plans for solar power, ore conveying infrastructure, technical training and expanded exploration, supporting construction of a phosphoric acid plant, which is why workers are now seeking a regular means of negotiating the conditions under which they provide their labor in a changing work environment.

Demands for access to management, however, have surfaced repeatedly at the company. In July 2011, workers conditionally ended a sit-in following “military-mediated negotiations,” securing promises of management meetings, revised leave arrangements and renewed worker transport. Then, in January 2013, about 500 workers protested at Abu Tartour, demanding changes to the financial and administrative structure and worker representation on the board.

Several present demands overlap with explicit duties under the labor law. Article 271 requires employer-funded transport where ordinary services are unavailable, and suitable food and housing in qualifying remote areas. Article 196 requires negotiations when a collective labor dispute arises and provides a route for administrative intervention if either side refuses. Article 197 requires any resulting agreement to be recorded as a collective labor agreement.

Wages cool, hiring stalls, employers say they cannot find workers

Private sector wage growth slowed sharply, and hiring remained essentially flat in the second quarter of the year, even as Egyptian businesses continued to complain about shortages of qualified labor, according to the latest Egyptian Center for Economic Studies (ECES) Business Barometer. The quarterly survey of 120 private companies found that only 14% of large firms and 9% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) reported increasing wages between April and June, while 86% and 91%, respectively, said wages were unchanged.

The wage index for large companies consequently fell to 54 from 92 in the previous quarter, while the SME index dropped to 52. Firms expect even less movement between July and September, with expected wage indices of 50 for large businesses and 51 for SMEs, effectively signalling that almost all respondents expect wages to remain unchanged, according to the survey.

Hiring is showing much of the same pattern.

Large businesses recorded an employment index of 51 during April–June, only marginally above the neutral level, while SMEs remained at 50, as both groups expect employment to sit at 50 in the current quarter. Yet companies continued raising their selling prices much more broadly than their workers’ pay: final product price indices reached 70 among large firms and 69 among SMEs.

ECES also recorded annual headline inflation rising to 14.6% in the second quarter from 13.5% in the first, highlighting a private sector in which price rises remained pervasive while further wage and employment expansion largely stopped.

At the same time, employers continue to identify a lack of “qualified labor” as a constraint. SMEs told ECES that improving training through public schools and universities should be a “government priority” because of what they described as a “mismatch between education and labor market requirements,” while telecommunications firms separately listed qualified labor among their priorities.

The complaint, however, is not new.

ECES has recorded it repeatedly in its Business Barometer series, and its earlier research into manufacturing found recurring difficulty recruiting “suitable technicians, machine operators and assembly workers” alongside high worker turnover.

A 2019 ECES survey of manufacturing labor demand became the basis for proposals to overhaul technical and vocational education, and subsequent ECES analysis continued to describe skills shortages and turnover as central employer concerns.

The latest results complicate an explanation based only on the education system. Employers say they struggle to obtain the labor they need while, collectively, reporting almost no expansion in hiring and expecting wages to remain essentially frozen. The barometer does not ask workers why they leave jobs or reject vacancies, so it cannot establish how much of the reported shortage reflects skills, pay, working conditions, transport costs or other factors.

But its own figures make those questions difficult to separate, since a persistent recruitment and retention problem exists alongside weak wage growth and little anticipated job creation.

That tension also reaches beyond the workplace. ECES says manufacturing sales weakened partly because households’ purchasing power fell, while higher energy, raw material and shipping costs squeezed firms from the other side. For individual employers, holding wages down may reduce one production cost, but across the economy, however, wage earners are also the purchasing power sustaining domestic demand.

The barometer therefore captures both sides of the same problem: businesses report difficulty finding the workers they want, while the labor market they describe is offering little additional employment and, after an earlier adjustment, little further wage growth.

Share

Tax breaks sought to turn property debts into market assets

The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) has asked the government to grant a full income tax exemption to transferable asset funds, prioritizing vehicles that buy mortgage, lease, and other receivables as a way to channel capital market money into stalled real estate projects, according to Enterprise. The proposal, now under Tax Authority review, would extend tax privileges beyond the five investment fund categories already covered by Article 50 of the Income Tax Law; officials reportedly told the outlet the EGX ultimately wants the exempt list expanded to 38 fund types, and because additional categories can be added through executive decisions by the finance minister, the change would not require parliament to amend the law.

The immediate target is real estate, but the instrument is financial rather than physical. Transferable asset funds buy future payment claims—mortgage installments, lease-backed receivables, and similar obligations—allowing the originator to receive cash today while investors collect the future income stream. The Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) created the regulatory basis for such funds in 2020, explicitly allowing non-bank lenders to transfer portfolios of future customer installments to investment funds in return for their present value, but the model only began acquiring scale recently after two companies raised 443 million pounds in October 2025 through the mortgage fund, followed by another 633 million pounds this month, taking the program to about 1.08 billion pounds.

The exemption would therefore extend an existing policy of using the tax system to deepen capital markets. Law No. 30 of 2023 already gave “conditional income tax exemptions” to specified investment funds, including debt instruments, listed equity, venture capital and real estate funds.

Transferable asset funds sit outside those categories, even where the receivables they purchase originate in housing, and bringing them inside would increase investors’ after-tax returns and, in theory, encourage more capital to purchase the debts sitting on mortgage companies’ and other financiers’ balance sheets.

Notably, the request arrives as financing strains have become visible on the other side of those payment claims. According to Al Manassa, a preliminary Housing Ministry inventory found about 450 developers behind schedule on unit deliveries, from roughly 15,000 projects and project phases under review, and a previous report had documented buyers continuing to service installment obligations even where construction slowed or stopped, leaving households financing projects whose promised homes remain undelivered.

Packaging those receivables into investment funds can technically provide fresh liquidity and potentially restart construction, sustaining contractors and construction employment; but the public intervention operates first through improving the economics of the financial claim, rather than securing guarantees from real estate companies, financing unfinished buildings, protecting buyers, or supporting workers.

That is the labor question beneath what otherwise looks like a technical tax change. The proposed exemption would allow the state to surrender future tax revenue so that claims on households’ future income become more attractive to financial investors, with the irrational expectation that this liquidity then travels back through lenders and developers into the property economy.

Polvara’s wage dispute becomes a fight over factory’s survival

An independent auditor has warned that Alexandria’s UNIRAB Polvara Spinning & Weaving Co. may no longer be able to continue operating, days after its roughly 1,200 workers protested over wages, social insurance deductions, and the future of the factory.

The auditor’s review of the June accounts found accumulated and current losses equal to 91.72% of shareholders’ equity and 92.88% of paid-in capital, while management had provided no disclosed plan for addressing the going concern risk. It called for an extraordinary general meeting to consider whether the company should continue or be dissolved.

The warning gives a balance sheet basis to fears workers raised during their latest action. They staged a day-long sit-in followed by stoppages across two shifts, while the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) said some employees receive only 5,500 pounds a month, lack a transparent wage scale and continue to have social insurance contributions deducted without their rights being properly secured.

Management’s immediate concession was reportedly limited to raising the food allowance to 600 pounds, according to ECRF, while workers also called for an independent examination of claims that machinery has gone unrepaired and parts of the productive assets have been scrapped or sold.

The insurance dispute, however, is demonstrably older than the current stoppage. In October 2025, The Cairo Report covered how health insurance services were suspended for 1,200 Polvara workers, including workers with chronic illnesses and cancer, after debts to the National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) surpassed 158 million pounds. Workers and the company union said that the company had stopped remitting contributions in 2018, even while workers said their own shares continued to be deducted from wages. An ensuing November strike ended on promises that the debt would be settled, while ECRF said at the time that the company was also still paying below the state-mandated minimum wage.

That recurring transfer of financial distress onto labor sits within a longer post-privatization decline. Polvara was privatized in 1997, although the state-owned Holding Company for Cotton, Spinning, Weaving and Garments still holds 16.259% of its shares, and as early as 2014, the textile union sought to return the company to state ownership, claiming that asset sales and control over roughly 110,000 square meters of Alexandria land threatened the productive enterprise and thousands of jobs.

The latest audit makes those asset questions newly material: it records fixed assets with an acquisition cost of about 406 million pounds, including land valued at 252 million pounds, while all the company’s current bank accounts are under attachment because of unpaid external liabilities, most owed to government bodies including the tax and social insurance authorities.

For workers, the going concern question is therefore more than whether a listed company survives on paper. Polvara’s losses have already been accompanied by illegal wages, interrupted healthcare, and unpaid social insurance obligations, meaning part of the enterprise’s financial crisis has been absorbed through workers’ present income and future social entitlements.

Share

Government reviews control of six public holding companies

Egypt’s government is preparing to change the institutional control of six public holding companies, advancing a restructuring program tied to “higher asset returns” and private investment as part of the State Ownership Policy and “commitments to international development partners.”

The official account of a government meeting said Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly chaired discussions covering construction, tourism and hotels, metals, pharmaceuticals, textiles and chemicals, without identifying either the proposed destination of the companies or an approved transfer, sale, or workforce reduction.

Most notable among the attendees, alongside the finance and investment ministers and the government's State-Owned Enterprises Unit, was Colonel Bahaa el-Ghannam, chairman of the military-run Future of Egypt Authority, which is materially worth recording because the restructuring is specifically about where ownership of these companies will sit, and these companies possess extensive land portfolios.

Last month, the government had already disclosed that it was considering transferring ownership of holding companies as part of its strategy to “maximize asset returns and use the resulting resources to reduce public debt.” Officials were simultaneously compiling inventories of “unused land” and “preparing individual plots and assets as investment opportunities.”

Moreover, at a June government meeting reviewing the same six groups, Madbouly connected restructuring to selling stakes and legislative changes facilitating offerings, but the latest discussion adds control over the holding companies themselves to that agenda, which would significantly change who decides investment, subsidiary management, and asset disposal, with consequences for employment and the resources available to meet accrued entitlements.

Several subsidiaries of these holding companies have shaped Egypt’s labor movement through struggles over precisely those decisions.

At Ghazl El-Mahalla’s Misr Spinning and Weaving, for example, strikes in 2006, 2007, and labor riots in 2008 secured commitments on bonuses, allowances, and management changes, while workers’ demands in 2024 included the minimum wage, opposition to asset sales, and restoring operations.

In the chemicals group, Tanta Flax workers challenged privatization, in part, through sustained legal action, which won them a judgment annulling the sale in 2011, but a settlement returning the investor’s shares to the state holding company came only in 2021.

Public ownership has also accommodated cuts and insecure employment. At CID Pharmaceuticals, workers struck in October 2021 over reduced profit payments under new rules, prompting management to suspend operations. Workers at the public contractor El Nasr General Contracting, historically known as Hassan Allam, demanded overdue profits, better healthcare and permanent appointments in 2015. At Misr Travel’s Magawish resort in 2018, striking workers said they had spent ten years on temporary contracts.

These disputes demonstrate that corporate restructuring is bound to affect income and security through employment rules and benefit payments, even without an outright sale.

A more severe precedent can be seen in Egyptian Iron and Steel in Helwan, whose workers maintained production during their landmark 1989 sit-in, stopped production in 2021 amid liquidation. Its closure dismantled a workplace that had sustained employment, social services, and generations of collective organization. That outcome explains why workers’ participation and guarantees matter before restructuring becomes binding.

The government has specified objectives for investors and asset returns, but its published account deliberately leaves unanswered how it would preserve jobs, benefits, and workers’ influence over the enterprises they sustain.

New ‘Wage Council’ framework, an old enforcement problem

The cabinet approved a new operating framework for the “National Wage Council” (NWC) on September 16, giving its technical apparatus an explicit role in tracking whether wage decisions are actually implemented as workers continue to face a private sector minimum wage of 7,000 pounds.

The announcement landed the same day the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) called on unions, civil society groups, political parties, and private-sector and informal workers to sign a memorandum demanding the NWC convene immediately and raise the private-sector minimum wage, over two months after a government-set minimum took effect for public employees.

The memorandum, addressed to the Minister of Planning and Economic Development as NWC chair, argues the council’s inaction breaches Labor Law No. 14 of 2025, which requires it to meet at least every six months; it has not met since March 2025.

In comments to Lbraly’s Hassan El-Qabbani on September 16, CTUWS director Kamal Abbas called it “strange” that the council still has not convened to approve a private-sector increase, saying the delay affects all workers amid difficult economic conditions, and warned that if it continues to fail to convene, the group will send the Minister of Planning a formal notarized warning.

Much of the institutional architecture in the cabinet's announcement, however, is older than the announcement suggests.

Under the new decision, the council will “set and periodically review” national minimum wages, determine the minimum annual raise and examine wage structures across occupations and sectors, while a permanent technical secretariat led by the Planning Ministry will track economic, social and labor market indicators, assess the effects of wage decisions and, crucially, follow their implementation with the Labor Ministry and other agencies. The secretariat must meet at least quarterly and report to the council chair every six months.

The NWC dates to 2003, when Prime Ministerial Decision No. 983/2003 already empowered it to set a national wage floor according to living costs and the relationship between wages and prices, study wage structures and productivity, periodically reconsider the minimum wage, and operate through a specialized technical secretariat.

The weakness was implementation and consistency in meetings. A later reconstitution again required regular meetings, yet the council then went six years without meeting between September 2013 and November 2019.

The institution became more consequential after its 2020 revival. In 2021, it set a 2,400 pounds private sector minimum wage, the first generally applied private sector floor under the revived system, although distressed businesses were allowed to “request exemptions,” and expectedly, the council received thousands of such applications.

The floor subsequently rose to 2,700 pounds in January 2023, 3,000 pounds in July 2023, 3,500 pounds in January 2024, 6,000 pounds in May 2024, and 7,000 pounds from March 2025, when the council also set a 250 pounds minimum annual raise and a 28 pounds net hourly floor for part-time work.

The more important legal shift actually preceded this week’s cabinet decision, since labor law already requires the council to meet at least every six months, makes its wage decisions binding on covered establishments, and places responsibility on Labor Ministry inspectors to monitor compliance.

The new framework therefore does not invent regular wage setting or enforcement—it potentially links enforcement data back into a permanent body that is supposed to evaluate how wage decisions work in practice.

For wage earners, then, the question is less whether Egypt has another formal wage setting mechanism than what that mechanism measures and whether its decisions reach the workplace.

The framework instructs the council to consider changing economic and social conditions, but it also embeds the longstanding requirement to balance workers’ claims against employers’ interests and higher productivity.

That tension has run through the council since its creation, with wages treated simultaneously as the income from which workers reproduce everyday life and as a cost to businesses whose profitability the state also seeks to protect.

Share

Pensioners still waiting as MPs demand payment & compensation

Update: Egyptian retirees remain without pensions six months after leaving work, according to MPs pressing the National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) to settle overdue benefits.

In the latest intervention, Manpower Committee deputy chair and Egyptian Social Democratic Party (ESDP) MP Ehab Mansour questioned the government on September 15, saying he had referred cases concerning more than 2,000 citizens to the authority but received only 26 replies.

He added that retirement, survivors’ and disability pensions remained outstanding despite successive promises to make payments between May and August.

Two days earlier, ESDP MP Amir El-Gazzar, a member of Parliament’s Economic Affairs Committee, said people who retired approximately six months ago had received nothing. He acknowledged “improvements in processing newer retirees’ pensions” but described older cases remaining unresolved while households faced rent, medicine, and other bills.

Compensation for those delays also remains contested. On September 1, Justice Party MP Abdel Moneim Emam asked whether NOSI had implemented a parliamentary committee recommendation to pay compensation automatically where the authority was responsible for withholding benefits, but Mansour’s subsequent intervention said clear arrangements were still absent and demanded payment without requiring pensioners to return to insurance offices with fresh applications.

The delays follow the institutional imbalance previously covered in The Cairo Report’s August 30 dispatch, when NOSI reduced the minimum upfront payment for employers rescheduling contribution arrears from 15% to 5%, easing their immediate financial obligations while pensioners continued pursuing unpaid entitlements.

Pensioners are also organizing over the adequacy of that income. Last week’s coverage followed the General Federation of Pensioners’ Unions’ campaign for a 6,400 pounds monthly minimum, equivalent to 80% of the state’s 8,000 pounds minimum wage.

Until overdue benefits and compensation reach recipients, affected households continue bearing the immediate cost of the authority’s delays.

Piece meal teachers gain syndicate services, remain outside insurance fund

Teachers paid by the class can join Egypt’s Educational Professions Syndicate but still remain excluded from its supplementary retirement, death and disability benefits, syndicate head Khalaf El-Zanati said, but clarified that only currently employed per-class teachers could access the syndicate’s health scheme, holiday accommodation, excursions and certain financial services.

However, membership excludes the “Fellowship Fund” and its insurance payment, preserving a divide in protection between teachers within the same professional organization.

The Fellowship Fund is the syndicate’s private supplementary insurance scheme, whose principal benefit is a lump sum payable upon retirement, death or total disability. Its value recently rose from 50,000 pounds to 60,000 pounds, with the fund announcing payment of the additional 10,000 pounds following Financial Regulatory Authority approval.

El-Zanati’s remarks clarify an arrangement already operating a year earlier.

The latest statements confirm that teachers younger than 45 can also enroll, which is particularly important when viewed alongside the seasonal contracts covered in The Cairo Report’s September 6 dispatch. The Education Ministry’s arrangements for per-class teachers older than 45 specify 4,800 pounds monthly remuneration, an eight-hour working day, and employment from September through June, all of which expire automatically unless renewed and require teachers to acknowledge that repeated service creates no entitlement to permanent appointment.

Syndicate membership covers a broader age group, but both arrangements recognize teachers’ continuing work without granting the security attached to a regular teaching position.

The services available through membership can reduce some household expenses, yet the exclusion carries employment insecurity into the institution meant to support teachers collectively. As the Egyptian public education system continues to suffer from shortages, schools rely on per-class hires to fill vacancies, while their temporary status limits both continuity of earnings and access to supplementary protection.

Share

Emergency fund moves from law toward implementation

Egypt’s Labor Ministry has begun the preparatory implementation phase for a new national fund for non-regular workers, but the fund is not yet fully operational and has not replaced the existing benefit system.

Labor Minister Hassan Raddad chaired a meeting on September 16 to begin the executive preparations required to activate the “Emergency Aid and Social and Health Services Fund for Non-Regular Workers,” and officials were instructed to set initial priorities, expand and update worker databases, link records across state agencies, digitize services, and develop performance indicators.

The fund was initially created by last year’s labor law and subsequently given its institutional framework under Prime Ministerial Decision No. 2403/2026. Its mandate goes beyond the existing welfare account: it can provide emergency income during economic crises, epidemics, disasters, and temporary work stoppages, finance health and social services, and contribute toward social insurance payments. The law also requires the government to enumerate non-regular workers and build linked national databases, making registration part of the infrastructure through which those protections will be delivered.

The new institution nevertheless builds on an older Labor Ministry welfare system, in which registered non-regular workers already receive periodic grants, medical assistance and social benefits through a central ministry account assembled from earlier provincial schemes. That account remains the operative mechanism during the transition.

What changes with the new decision is the attempt to turn that narrower, registration-dependent welfare apparatus into a permanent statutory institution capable of absorbing risks attached to insecure work itself.

Emergency support during a work stoppage, assistance with medical costs and possible contributions toward social insurance could shift part of the cost of illness, interrupted employment and workplace insecurity away from individual workers and their households. But those functions remain largely prospective until the fund completes its organizational and administrative setup and begins delivering them in its own name.

Access will therefore be as important as the formal launch. The ministry’s immediate priorities—expanding databases, linking them across government and digitizing services—determine which workers become visible to the system in the first place.

What remains unanswered is whether the new fund ultimately widens protection beyond workers already captured by contractors and ministry records, and whether its broader legal mandate becomes predictable social protection rather than an expanded mechanism for administratively targeted assistance.

Samanoud workers are back on strike for their wages

Workers at the Samanoud Textile and Weaving Company, a textile company majority-owned by the state’s NIB, launched a fresh strike on Thursday, September 17, after management failed to act on demands over delayed wages, a frozen bonus, and unpaid social insurance contributions, a textile worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Cairo Report.

The textile worker told The Cairo Report that clothing-department workers, numbering between 380 and roughly 400, remain on strike demanding their pay, and that their action followed the earlier textile-department strike, whose workers secured their back pay while clothing-department staff did not. The unresolved wage gap prompted female clothing-department workers to hold a sit-in inside the plant, timed to coincide with the start of the school year and the added costs it brings families.

According to the textile worker, management has justified withholding the clothing department’s pay by arguing the department “doesn’t bring in money,” with the company’s executive director reportedly claiming the department’s revenue does not exceed 200,000 pounds.

A striking worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Cairo Report that the revenue stands against wage costs between 1 and 2 million pounds.

The textile worker added that the director blamed the shortfall on the women workers themselves “for driving away customers”.

“We cannot feed our children,” the striking worker told The Cairo Report. “All we want is to know when we will be paid, even if we’re paid in installments. We have financial responsibilities: rent, food, clothing; we cannot remain in limbo.”

“We don’t even know who is responsible for our wages,” she added.

ECRF’s Wednesday and Thursday statements outline a broader set of violations: a periodic bonus that has gone unpaid for three years despite being a legal annual entitlement worth at least 3% of a worker’s insured wage (minimum 250 pounds a month); some temporary-contract workers earning between 3,000 and 5,000 pounds a month, well under the 8,000 pound private-sector minimum wage; and continued deductions of workers’ social insurance contributions that the company has not forwarded to the NOSI.

Those unpaid contributions have left the company more than 15 million pounds in arrears, according to the ECRF; however, a company source who spoke previously to The Cairo Report put the figure at over 85 million pounds.

This prompted the General Authority for Health Insurance (HIO) to stop renewing insurance cards or covering treatment for roughly 500 workers, including some with chronic conditions.

Still, the textile worker said workers are still receiving health insurance services despite their cards not being renewed on instructions from National Security, as a result of the July strike, and that personnel remain stationed around the company alongside the ongoing strike.

“We were told we are going to get paid on Monday, but nothing is concrete,” the striking worker said. “Most of us are already not working. If you walk into the factory on any day, you’ll find about a quarter of the women working, while most of us are sitting ducks.”

“Work is scarce. The company’s clothing department is struggling, unlike the textile department. But we deserve our wages; it is not our fault that there is no work to be done,” she added.

The commission argues the pattern effectively makes wage payment contingent on striking rather than legal entitlement, rewarding departments that escalate while leaving others unpaid, and said continued use of security intervention and threats to suspend striking workers, rather than addressing the underlying wage issues, compounds the pressure on employees.

ECRF drew a pointed contrast with the company’s own public claims.

The NIB announced on the company’s social media page that a restructuring plan had successfully injected more than 74 million pounds to modernize production lines, double wages, and settle insurance debts.

Workers dispute this, telling ECRF that no new machinery has arrived and maintenance has been inadequate. ECRF also cited the bank’s own disclosed figures, total wages of about 1.87 million pounds in October 2024 for 563 workers, averaging roughly 3,300 pounds per worker monthly, as evidence that the restructuring claims warrant independent financial and technical scrutiny, with results made public.

Share

Prison Watch: More renewals, more postponements

The Committee for the Defense of Prisoners of Conscience stated on September 13 that prosecutors ordered a further 15-day detention for lawyer Mohamed Abu al-Diyar pending investigation in case No. 4502 of 2026. Defense lawyers attended the renewal hearing and requested his release under any bail terms the prosecution deemed appropriate. The committee called for his immediate release, saying continued pretrial detention renewals have prolonged his suffering and kept him from his family.

A day later, Supreme State Security Prosecution renewed the pretrial detention of director and screenwriter Omar Salah Marei for an additional 15 days on September 14, on charges of “publishing false news inside the country” via social media posts, his family stated. The family said this marks the tenth and final 15-day renewal available to the prosecution under law, bringing Marei’s pretrial detention to four months. His case will now move to an advisory chamber, which can renew detention in 45-day increments.

Egypt’s Second Terrorism Circuit, meanwhile, renewed the detention of 19 building-materials merchants from Qalyubia for 45 days, on charges including joining a terrorist group, unlawful assembly, and spreading false news. ECRF said the merchants were presented to the Supreme State Security Prosecution in batches between December 23 and 25, 2025, following periods of enforced disappearance, and that the arrests stemmed from allegations they helped Warraq Island residents obtain construction materials.

The ECRF welcomed, on September 15, a September 10 acquittal by a Damietta criminal court in the case of Faraj Mohamed, who had previously been sentenced in absentia to 25 years. Taha was deported to Egypt in February after German authorities rejected his asylum application; ECRF said he was held for 15 days by the Egyptian consulate before deportation and then subjected to enforced disappearance upon arrival at Cairo airport. His family sent a telegram to the Public Prosecutor through an ECRF lawyer and filed a complaint with Mansoura’s appellate prosecution before he reappeared days later and retrial proceedings began, concluding in his acquittal.

The Second Terrorism Circuit at Badr Court postponed a series of unrelated cases to set future dates for evidence consolidation, witness testimony, or document review. Among them is the case of Haitham Ahmed Abdelaziz, known as “Haitham Dabour,” postponed to November 9 for witness testimony, the ECRF stated on Tuesday. Other postponed cases involve defendants facing charges of joining and financing a terrorist group, with hearings rescheduled across late October through mid-December.

It also postponed the case against lawyer Huda Abdel Moneim, recycled into a new case after completing a sentence in a separate case, to November 23, for evidence consolidation, per the ECRF. Most defendants in the broader batch of postponed cases, which spanned dozens of case numbers, face charges of joining and financing a terrorist group; hearings were rescheduled across September through December for defense arguments, witness testimony, or document review.

On the same day, the Cairo Criminal Court’s Second Terrorism Circuit reviewed a detention renewal for Abdullah Amer in the seventh case in which he has been “recycled” into continued detention, despite acquittals in other cases, per the ECRF. Amer is currently held on a 15-year sentence from a separate 2020 emergency state security case. ECRF said he was unexpectedly summoned from prison on August 26, 2024, for interrogation in a new case despite having been held since 2017, and was referred to trial alongside others. He was originally arrested from his home in April 2017 and, ECRF said, subjected to enforced disappearance and torture before first appearing before prosecutors more than a month later.

In tandem, Egypt’s Court of Cassation ruled Tuesday to uphold the Public Prosecution’s decision to place Strong Egypt Party leader Dr. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh permanently on the country’s terrorist lists, rejecting an appeal filed by his defense team, according to Al Manassa’s Mohamed Napoleon.

The listing, published in March in Egypt’s official gazette, also included Muslim Brotherhood deputy supreme guide Mahmoud Ezzat and student leader Moaz El-Sharqawi, based on final criminal convictions.

Warraq islanders reorganize against expropriation

Update: Security forces clashed with residents of Cairo’s Warraq Island on September 14 near the Qallini ferry crossing after a dispute over security checkpoints restricting access to the ferry escalated into violence, a resident who witnessed the events told Al-Manassa’s Beesan Kassab.

The witness said the confrontation began with young residents protesting security personnel narrowing the route to the ferry with barriers, and quickly escalated when police officers used batons, prompting both sides to throw stones.

The clashes left several residents injured, including a confirmed skull fracture suffered by a relative of the source, and led to an unconfirmed number of detentions, the witness estimated seeing three to four people taken.

The source told Kassab that the clashes, which coincided with the end of the school day and heavy foot traffic at the ferry crossing, complicated efforts to establish a precise toll of injuries and detentions, and continued until around 6:30 p.m. Afterward, a limited demonstration moved through the island toward the position of security forces, with participants condemning the renewed use of force against residents.

The Qallini ferry area has long been a flashpoint between security forces and residents, who rely on it as a main access point subject to strict inspections aimed at blocking construction materials from entering the island, and it was an incident in the area that sparked the renewed resistance efforts in early August.

Monday’s clashes came three days after signs of an apparent de-escalation effort by security agencies, covered in last week’s labor dispatch, as the “We Are Staying in Warraq Island” group had announced extracting a series of commitments on compensation and basic services from security services.

On September 18, the movement held a general meeting of island residents, issuing a statement reaffirming their position. According to the statement, attendees reaffirmed their core and non-negotiable demand of “a home in place of a home, with no alternative.”

They also called on officials to station a fire truck on the island and establish an emergency contact number for fires, and asked island residents working with the housing authority, companies, or projects in the Ghafara area or elsewhere to suspend that cooperation until a final resolution guarantees residents’ right to remain on the island.

The group announced it would hold a collective Friday prayer for island residents on September 25 under the slogan “Lift the siege on Warraq Island,” and “Residents’ right to a home in place of a home in a planned, modern area within the island,” with the exact location to be announced later.

It set its next general meeting for October 2 at 5 p.m. at the Warraq Island Youth Center.

Share

More land expropriation, more resistance

Update: Residents of Tora, including the Tora El-Balad and Kozzika areas south of Cairo, are pushing back against a wave of demolition and eviction notices tied to a redevelopment plan, with local lawyers threatening legal challenges and residents appealing directly to President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to intervene.

Jalal Nassef, a lawyer and former head of the Tora local council who also previously served as deputy head of Maadi’s local council, criticized “the heavy security presence along the Tora corniche,” saying in a Facebook post that residents had shown restraint while “the state looked bad in front of everyone.”

He said passersby were left asking what was happening after seeing the scale of security forces deployed, and argued that if the work underway is genuinely development, it should not require force or police involvement in a matter he said concerns landowners’ rights that must be respected.

He questioned how a redevelopment project could begin with a “seizure of land before any plan was made public explaining residents’ fate,” and cited Cairo’s governor as having said compensation would be offered without residents receiving housing in the same area, a position Nassef stressed should not stand in 2026.

He drew a distinction between “genuine development” and “a deliberate reshaping of the area’s demographic makeup,” and laid out an argument under international human rights law: that when a state relocates citizens or replans residential areas within its borders, the move is governed by its human rights obligations rather than by laws applicable to armed conflict or occupation.

He distinguished lawful expropriation for genuine public benefit, carried out through transparent legal procedures, prior consultation, and fair, immediate compensation that does not lower residents’ standard of living, from what international law classifies as forced eviction: displacement carried out without residents’ consent, without adequate compensation or suitable alternative housing, or through pressure and coercion.

He cited the United Nations (UN) Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ (CESCR) definition of forced eviction as the permanent or temporary removal of individuals, families, or communities from their homes or land against their will, without access to legal protection.

Nassef said lawful development requires proof no alternative to relocation exists, genuine negotiation with residents, replacement housing in the same geographic area to preserve the social fabric and residents’ livelihoods, and access to judicial appeal before any eviction is carried out, adding that exceeding these safeguards through pressure or coercion constitutes an abuse of power and a clear violation of citizens’ basic rights.

A day before Kozzika residents’ statement, Tora El-Balad resident and lawyer Sayed Afifi wrote on Facebook that residents needed to move past slogans, saying an appeal challenging “unlawful procedures” was drafted and ready, with numerous Tora lawyers cooperating to support it pro bono.

He said anyone seeking legal recourse should bring identification to grant power of attorney, and cautioned against venting only in comments rather than taking formal action.

Afifi also expressed concern for younger residents, saying he and others were trying to “calm them out of fear for their safety,” and pushed back at suggestions online that the community lacked “men” or “heroes” willing to act, saying the community should show restraint rather than be provoked online.

On Thursday, residents of Kozzika, a neighborhood adjacent to Tora El-Balad, shared an urgent statement and appeal addressed to Sisi, the cabinet, and Nation’s Future MP Wael Saada.

The statement said the Tora area was gripped by grief over field demolition decisions and attempted forced evictions threatening to uproot families from homes they had lived in for decades. It said residents’ homes represent their ancestors’ history, their memories, and their social and economic stability.

Residents stressed that they are not opposed to the public interest but reject “a policy of imposing facts on the ground, fragmenting families, and destroying the area’s social fabric without real alternatives that preserve residents’ constitutionally and legally protected dignity and rights.”

The statement demanded an immediate halt to the procedures, the opening of transparent dialogue with residents, and a search for alternative solutions that allow development without displacement.

Thousands of teachers excluded from hiring wave over Military Academy ‘weight’ scoring

Thousands of teacher candidates were excluded from a fifth batch of government teaching appointments after failing to meet a “qualitative weight” scoring threshold set by the Military Academy, reviving criticism over conditions rights groups say have little bearing on teaching competence.

The controversy resurfaced publicly on September 11, a day before the new school year began, when a Facebook post by math teacher Mona El-Sayed went viral, expressing anger after she was excluded from the fifth phase of the Ministry of Education’s 30,000-teacher competition over her weight, despite saying she had worked to lose it.

El-Sayed’s account echoed complaints raised repeatedly in earlier phases of the competition, drawing criticism from rights advocates and some government job-seekers over the requirement that all civil-service hires first complete a qualifying course at the Military Academy.

In an interview by Sada El-Balad’s Thabet Abdel-Ghaffar, published on September 12, El-Sayed said she applied for the fifth phase of the 30,000-teacher competition hoping for a government appointment, and passed an electronic exam in the New Capital roughly two weeks after giving birth, while still recovering.

She said she then completed pedagogical training while traveling with her six-month-old, before moving to medical exams, for which she paid a newly introduced 1,008-pound fee. She said the medical phase required her to meet a weight threshold stricter than in previous rounds, prompting her to diet while breastfeeding, reducing her weight from around 83 kg post-pregnancy to 58 kg, and later to 55 kg.

She described the physical exam, which included sprinting, jumping, and a basketball throw, as difficult given she had recently had a cesarean delivery, and said an evaluator praised her performance, leading her to expect she would be hired.

She said she was then informed her final result was “not accepted,” without explanation, and said she does not understand the relevance of these tests to her qualifications as a teacher.

According to a September 13 report by fact-checking platform Matsada2sh, El-Sayed’s case surfaced against the backdrop of a widening gap between Egypt’s student population and its teaching workforce: the number of public-school students rose 38.3%, from 16.8 million in the 2013/2014 school year to 23.245 million in 2025/2026, while the number of teachers rose only 20.1% over the same period, from roughly 874,000 to 1.05 million.

That gap has pushed the student-to-teacher ratio from 19.2 students per teacher in 2013/2014 to 22.1 in 2025/2026.

The platform said 29,000 candidates were excluded from the fifth-phase results and 43,000 accepted, despite many excluded applicants having already passed exams administered separately by the Central Agency for Organization and Administration (CAOA).

Two candidates identified by pseudonyms, Samar and Souad, told Matsada2sh they met the “ideal weight” requirement but were excluded anyway for scoring below 71 out of 100 on the “qualitative weight” metric, a composite score covering academic grades, medical exam results, physical test performance, and a board evaluation.

Souad said she lost 25 kg over ten months through a strict diet to meet the requirement; both said they received no explanation for their exclusion, and both noted that some candidates initially asked to repeat medical or physical exams later appeared on accepted lists, while they did not despite receiving no negative feedback during any stage.

Matsada2sh’s investigation traced the qualifying-course requirement to an April 2023 decision by Madbouly restricting government hiring to candidates who completed a Military Academy course, a condition not included among the eleven original criteria announced when the hiring initiative launched in 2022.

Sisi had announced in early 2022 a plan to hire 150,000 teachers over five years, at a rate of 30,000 annually, to address a teacher shortage.

In January 2025, Madbouly said a backlog of 12,000 unfilled teaching positions had accumulated due to candidates failing to clear these requirements, and announced the government would move to hire 72,000 teachers at once, combining the backlog with two years’ worth of targets.

On September 6, 2026, the Military Academy’s director presented fifth-phase results to the president; three days later, the Prime Minister announced only 43,000 of the hoped-for 72,000 would be hired, without explanation for the remaining 29,000 positions, prompting objections from candidates.

The EIPR, which published a February report titled “Screened Out: How Military Academy Requirements Discriminate Against Teachers,” documenting candidates’ experiences in the first phase of the 150,000-teacher initiative, said the recurring complaints raise renewed questions about the value of the Military Academy’s exams, given that candidates have already cleared separate medical, pedagogical, and technical evaluations administered by the CAOA, and that many excluded candidates already work in schools on an hourly basis.

Security sector update

State & Barracks

Sisi’s Political Wasteland

In this issue: Sisi struggles to rebuild the political machinery he destroyed, arms dealers converge on El Alamein, and the military pursues another luxury housing deal. Plus, police killings, deaths in custody, and Egypt’s connections to Sudan’s war…

Read more

17 days ago · 10 likes · Hossam el-Hamalawy

So, what?!

The question running through this dispatch is not whether Egypt’s institutions exist on paper, but whether ordinary people can make those institutions answer to them before the damage is done.

A textile worker needs her insurance card renewed before she gets sick, not after a court rules on 15 million pounds in arrears; a teacher needs to know why she failed before she can appeal it; a family on Warraq or in Tora needs a signed commitment before the bulldozers arrive, not compensation years into litigation.

The answer, meanwhile, keeps turning on who is made to organize, document, and wait.

Rights on paper cost the state nothing to grant and nothing to ignore; it is only organized, collective refusal—a strike, a sit-in, a signed petition, a body of residents that will not disperse—that has ever converted them into something people can actually hold.

What connects a wage floor, an apartment, a teaching post, and a factory paycheck is that all four sit downstream of decisions made without the people affected in the room, if at all considered; decisions made in the interest of capital and the officials who administer it on capital’s behalf.

And all four now depend on those same people organizing, in public, to be let back in.

Subscribe now

Egypt ranked 138^th out of 145 economies in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2026 Global Gender Gap Index, remaining among the bottom 10 worldwide despite recording its strongest year-on-year improvement in economic participation in several years.

The Global Gender Gap Report, published on September 16, found that Egypt had closed 63.2% of its overall gender gap, up 0.7 percentage points from 62.5% in 2025, which raised its ranking by just one place from 139th.

That improvement, however, left Egypt with the eighth-lowest overall score among the 145 economies covered.

Share

Since the index began in 2006, Egypt has narrowed its overall gender gap by 5.3 percentage points, with the WEF attributing most of the long-term improvement to education and political representation.

Notably, the index does not measure women’s absolute living standards or rights. It compares outcomes for women and men in economic participation, education, health, and political empowerment, generally calculating female-to-male ratios and measuring how close they are to parity.

The Forum also warns that some underlying statistics can lag current conditions because of differences in national and international data collection.

In terms of Economic Participation and Opportunity, Egypt recorded its largest improvement, with its score rising from 40.6% in 2025 to 44.8% this year.

According to the report, the change was driven mainly by a 7.4% improvement in labor force participation parity, which reached 33.6%, and a 9.5-point increase in estimated earned-income parity, to 27.9%.

Still, large structural gaps remained, as Egypt ranked 14^th for labor force participation parity, 139^th for estimated earned income, and 129^th for women’s representation among legislators, senior officials, and managers. Women’s representation among professional and technical workers produced a parity score of 54.8%.

Even after this year’s rebound, Egypt has improved its economic parity score by only 3.2 percentage points since 2006, leaving it among the world’s weakest performing economies on the measure over the index’s 20 editions.

The result broadly reflects the central contradiction in Egypt’s gender indicators: women have reached or surpassed parity with men in several stages of education without securing comparable access to paid employment, income, or representation in senior positions.

In terms of Educational Attainment, Egypt saw a negligible improvement, achieving a score of 96.9%, which marks a rise from last year's score of 96.8%, elevating its global rank to 110^th from 111^th.

The country maintained full parity in primary and tertiary enrollment, and secondary school enrollment reached 97.9% parity, while adult literacy stood at 85.9%, up from 68.7% when the index began in 2006.

Health and Survival was virtually unchanged at 96.9%, placing Egypt 78^th.

Political representation, however, moved in the opposite direction, as the Political Empowerment score fell from 15.7% in 2025 to 14.2% this year, while its ranking slipped from 101^st to 105^th.

The report puts parliamentary parity at 36.7%, compared with just 2% in 2006, but ministerial parity at only 11.5%.

The decline continues a recent reversal in cabinet representation, after last year’s report found that women’s share of ministerial positions had already fallen from 18.8% to 13.3%, contributing to a drop in Egypt’s political empowerment score that year from 17.6% to 15.7%.

Subscribe now

Feminist researcher Merhan Fouad of the New Woman Foundation (NWF) told The Cairo Report that “numbers alone are not indicative of women’s empowerment.”

“Political empowerment is largely symbolic,” Fouad said. “Female MPs will not necessarily focus their work on bettering women' s conditions. We have spent years trying to get the anti-violence against women law into parliament to be discussed, and so it’s an ongoing process to negotiate with women in parliament on the off chance they might be willing to pick it up.”

Fouad also explained that this representation is largely tied to class.

“The women who do become ministers or MPs belong to a specific class. They had access to education, including a good university, or their family was well connected, a minister father, for example, which enabled them to reach ‘leadership’ positions,” she said.

She stressed that the parliamentary “quota” for women was supposed to be a starting point, much like the “quota” for women in the judiciary. These women, most of them belonging to a particular class, were supposed to pave the path for and “empower” women from the working class.

A fight for a seat at the table should not have ended with the securing of a single seat.

“Not every woman represents women. Women can be patriarchal or believers of state feminism; she will not seek to defend working class women,” Fouad concluded.

The country’s performance also sits within a region that remains the furthest from overall gender parity.

The Forum gave the Middle East and Northern Africa a parity score of 62.5%, up only 0.2 percentage points from 2025 and last among the eight regions included in the index.

At the current rate of progress, the report estimates that the region would take a staggering 182 years to reach parity.

Economic participation remains particularly weak across the region, where only 44.8% of the gap has been closed, and labor force participation parity has actually declined since 2006, from 38.5% to 32.2%.

Egypt’s 2026 economic score of 44.8% therefore matches the regional average almost exactly, despite its supposed improvement from last year.

The latest figures arrive a week after The Cairo Report had examined the New Republic’s officials’ continuous description of the past decade as a “golden age for women.” That article looked beyond legislative changes and formal representation to women’s declining labor force participation, unpaid and informal work, austerity, access to justice, and the treatment of women who publicly report abuse.

The index’s four pillars—economic participation, education, health, political empowerment—are built on formal-sector and formal-institution metrics. The informal economy, which accounts for roughly 40% to 50% of the country’s GDP, over 90% of the private sector’s output in Egypt, and over 60% of all employment, along with unpaid domestic, care, and reproductive labor, is all unaccounted for. This is not something the WEF seems to be particularly interested in exploring, however, because doing so would mean indicting capital.

Additionally, these four pillars focus on women from backgrounds with means, which makes it more of a measure of whether elite positions are divided “equally” between men and women. Equal representation in a CEO class is still a CEO class; a small stratum of professional class women is “empowered” while the structure that produces inequality for working class women remains not only untouched, but also invisible.

The WEF report ranks 145 countries against each other, naturalizing uneven development as a matter of national policy choices rather than global economic structure. In Egypt’s case, decades of austerity, IMF conditionality, and neoliberal policies, all championed by the WEF, have depressed women’s formal economic participation and political power.

That being said, the WEF report still generates useful data. And while acquiring a “seat at the table” is by no means indicative of women’s empowerment, it remains a laborious and exhaustive action in the right direction—a door where, otherwise, there was a wall.

Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) met Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Cairo on September 15, with maritime security on the agenda, and the easiest way to misunderstand the trip, as many have done, is to ask whether Riyadh wants Cairo to join another offensive in Yemen.

It might be more useful to ask what Saudi Arabia needs Egypt not to do.

The Saudi crown prince arrived in Cairo after Ansar Allah—commonly known as the Houthis—had led a rapid offensive that consolidated control over Mokha, Perim Island, positions overlooking Bab el-Mandab, and later took the country’s entire Red Sea coastline, radically improving the movement’s ability to threaten the southern entrance to the Suez Canal.

After capturing Mayyun Island at Bab el-Mandab, the Houthi movement Ansar Allah declared passage safe for everyone except Saudi Arabia, which is an offer that invites Egypt to separate the interests of the Suez Canal from those of its Saudi ally, and for Riyadh, preventing Cairo from acting on that difference is worth paying for.

After a closed bilateral session between the Egyptian and Saudi rulers, followed by expanded talks, the Egyptian presidency’s account singled out the need to guarantee the “freedom and security” of navigation through Hormuz, Bab el-Mandab, and the Red Sea. Sisi also declared support for “measures taken by the Kingdom to safeguard its security and stability.”

The two countries approach the shipping crisis with different needs: Egypt sits at the canal through which Red Sea traffic reaches the Mediterranean, while Saudi Arabia has become more dependent on Red Sea exports to its west following Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to its east.

An arrangement that brings ships toward Suez while excluding Saudi vessels would offer Cairo something Riyadh cannot accept for itself, and Ansar Allah’s declaration is, among many things, an attempt to exploit that difference.

After the balance of power in Yemen changed, reports emerged that a Houthi offer of official maritime coordination had reached Egyptian institutions through the International Chamber of Shipping in London and the maritime chamber in Alexandria, but the New Arab, citing an unnamed senior Egyptian source, said the Suez Canal Authority refused formal communication because it could amount to “implicit recognition” of the Houthis as the go-to authority in Yemen, and referred the matter to the security agencies.

And while it remains unconfirmed, routing such a proposal through security agencies gives the Egyptian government room to bargain in both directions, leaving officials free to seek practical assurances about passage without committing the canal authority to an agreement, and the official relationship remains something Cairo can grant later or continue to withhold, but its value to Riyadh comes from the fear—and very unlikely possibility—that Egypt might just agree to the Houthi proposal.

For Ansar Allah, an agreement with the Suez Canal Authority would help turn the ability to interrupt trade into an accepted role in organizing it, and Cairo would have to treat the movement as a counterpart with whom the operations of a key international shipping route are arranged.

This would leave the Saudis having to contend with an Egyptian relationship it had not negotiated and is largely excluded from.

Share

Still, there is nothing hypothetical about these governments holding talks with Ansar Allah. Riyadh had previously conducted its own diplomacy with the Yemeni movement, hosting a delegation in 2023 that met defense minister Khalid bin Salman. Separately, Egypt has reportedly maintained direct contacts with the Houthis in January 2024 to reduce attacks that were driving traffic away from Suez.

By September 2024, the New Arab reported that Cairo was preparing to receive a Houthi delegation, and that those arrangements were being made in coordination with Saudi Arabia.

But whether Saudi Arabia wants to make sure the Egyptian government pursues an independent path when dealing with the Houthis is less important, and more disconnected from the reality on the ground today, because once shipowners, insurers, or other governments, such as China, decide that a vessel must be cleared with Ansar Allah before moving through Bab el-Mandab, then the Houthis would have acquired something more useful than a rhetorical declaration of legitimacy. It has become part of the machinery governing an international trade route.

Egypt has a particular reason to contemplate that machinery because it has already paid heavily for insecurity farther south. Between July 2024 and March 2025, Suez Canal transit receipts fell 54.1% to 2.6 billion US dollars, from about 5.8 billion dollars in the same period a year earlier, as Red Sea insecurity diverted shipping away from the route.

The canal had only recently begun to show signs of recovery. According to the Suez Canal Authority’s numbers, the rebound began in the final quarter of 2025, and from the start of 2026 through February 8, 1,315 vessels generated 449 million dollars in canal revenue, compared with 368 million dollars over the same period a year earlier—an increase of about 22%.

The latest Houthi offensive therefore threatens Egypt in a very specific way; they don’t need to touch Suez in order to diminish its value—they only need enough coercive power at the canal’s southern approach to make another route preferable.

Cairo has understood this for some time, and again, while extremely unlikely, Sisi’s ability to authorize such an agreement still gives him something to bargain with when faced with Saudi requests not to engage diplomatically with the movement.

Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for that price to start seeing the light of day. Two days after the MbS touched down in Egypt, Al Manassa cited a senior Ministry of Finance source saying that Saudi Arabia had given preliminary approval to roll over its 5.3 billion dollar deposit at Egypt’s Central Bank, which is due at the beginning of October, while the two governments are said to have reached an agreement for over 10 billion dollars in new Saudi investment.

Under Sisi, Saudi, and more broadly Gulf sponsorship has always been most politically valuable when it buys time. Whether it's time before a foreign currency squeeze, time before debt service exhausts constant maneuvers, or time before domestically unpopular policies must be imposed on Egyptians.

And while grossly asymmetrical, this relationship is not without its own benefits to Saudi Arabia. Be it the benefit of geography, foreign policy and political alignment, or the suffocation of all perceived domestic political openings, lest it become an undesirable example for the Saudi Arabian population.

The latter’s time was during the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, but as of late, it has been mostly a nexus of geography and foreign policy alignment that has moved the needle in Riyadh when it comes to how it approaches Cairo.

MbS touched down in the Egyptian capital while Saudi oil infrastructure was under extraordinary pressure. The Kingdom’s East–West Pipeline, designed to move oil toward Yanbu and bypass Hormuz, was hit during the latest offensive, while the Ansar Allah advance placed growing pressure on Saudi Red Sea exports.

Egypt, meanwhile, has the canal at the northern end of that same route and a government permanently hungry for foreign currency.

With all of this in mind, the obsession with whether Egypt will “join the war” exaggerates what Egyptian military participation would actually solve, or whether it would even be of much value.

Share

When Saudi Arabia launched its attack on Yemen in 2015, Egypt contributed 12 F-16 Block 52 aircraft and deployed at least four naval vessels toward Bab el-Mandab and the Gulf of Aden.

Egyptian political scientist and scholar Hossam el-Hamalawy has argued that Egyptian aircraft in the 2015 Yemen attacks were eventually sent home after problems involving communications, ground control, guided munitions, and aerial refuelling made integration with the Saudi-led coalition’s operations difficult.

Similarly, retired US Army colonel David Witty, citing government officials who served at the US Embassy in Cairo, wrote that Egypt’s lack of access to the coalition’s secure communications resulted in its air force being told to “pack up and go home,” adding that this represented “true humiliation for a country that sees itself as having the most effective Arab military in the region.”

Such humiliation, as Witty put it, led to Egypt finally signing a bilateral communications agreement (CIS MOA) that protects and regulates the use of sensitive American avionics and communications systems in January 2018 after successive regimes had resisted doing so on grounds of “sovereignty.“

But the hardware problem is really a political problem in a khaki uniform.

In his book, Counterrevolution in Egypt, el-Hamalawy traces the armed forces’ chronic over-centralization and compartmentalization to decades of coup-proofing: since becoming a republic, Egyptian rulers wanted an officer corps that could not easily coordinate independently of the president. He traces the same institutional defect as far back as Egypt’s 1962–1967 intervention in Yemen, where Egyptian commanders later described an army attempting conventional operations against mobile guerrillas in difficult terrain and compensating for its inability to adapt with overwhelming firepower.

His more recent work on military fragmentation and interoperability makes the connection even more explicit: a military system built around bureaucratic caution, divided commands, and distrust of autonomous officers is poorly suited to modern warfare, which largely depends on rapid coordination and delegated initiative.

There is a useful paradox here.

The Egyptian military can become more powerful inside Egypt while becoming of little, if any, value past its borders, and there is nothing contradictory about that. A coercive institution optimized to protect a political order does not automatically become an institution optimized to fight wars.

For years, as scholar Yezid Sayigh has repeatedly displayed in his work, Egypt’s officer corps has accumulated political authority, economic privileges, land, businesses, and control over civilian institutions, while at the same time, the command culture that protects the regime from autonomous centers of military power discourages exactly the initiative and horizontal coordination that a serious expeditionary force requires.

Here, el-Hamalawy’s work refuses the generic assumption that more weapons equals more military might or capability.

That is also why Egypt’s gigantic weapons arsenal can be politically rational even when it’s militarily dysfunctional. Buying from Washington, Rome, Istanbul, Paris, Moscow, Berlin, or Beijing creates diplomatic relationships, procurement constituencies, and spectacles of “state sovereignty“ and power.

An army can be extremely successful at preserving its own position in society without being especially good at combined systems warfare.

Saudi Arabia has every reason, and firsthand experience, to understand that difference.

That is why, besides the geographic and economic aspects, the most valuable Egyptian contribution to Riyadh is therefore unlikely to be another dozen aircraft.

It is Cairo’s ability to give Saudi policy regional backing, to deny the Houthi-led government an independent diplomatic breakthrough with another Arab state, and most importantly, to avoid building a separate arrangement for the maritime route on which Suez depends.

That does not mean Egypt has no reason to speak with the Houthis—it means precisely the opposite. Egypt has more reason to do so than almost any other state.

For Saudi Arabia, Bab el-Mandab is a security frontier and increasingly an oil export problem, but for Egypt, it is effectively one of two gates to a revenue-producing asset, and while those interests overlap, they are not in any way identical.

If Cairo were to conclude that the cheapest way to restore predictable Suez traffic is to establish a practical accommodation with the authorities in Sana’a, Egyptian and Saudi interests could very quickly diverge, and every successful voyage under such an arrangement would do something a decade of Saudi strikes have failed to do: turn Ansar Allah’s military control into accepted administrative power.

That is why it would be irrational to read the MbS visit primarily as a prelude to Egypt’s return to the Yemeni battlefield. The more interesting possibility is almost the reverse.

The Saudi de facto ruler came to make sure Cairo does not need to, and has no incentive to, solve its Red Sea problem without Saudi Arabia managing such a solution.

This issue of The Cairo Report covers the liquidation of intelligence-owned El-Fagr, whose journalists are demanding the syndicate step in to protect their unpaid wages and employment rights; arbitrarily dismissed EgyptKE journalists suing their outlet; the General Federation of Pensioners’ Unions’ renewed campaign for a minimum pension of 6,400 Egyptian pounds a month; and the Engineers’ Syndicate head’s challenge to the Prime Minister’s account of engineers’ earnings.

We also explore the third worker death on duty at the state-owned Egyptalum in two months, Wadi al-Qamar residents’ 10-year battle against a multinational corporation polluting their neighborhood finally nearing its verdict in December, and Egyptian lawyers’ challenge to remote litigation fees as unconstitutional.

Elsewhere, veteran labor organizer and founding president of the now-defunct Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress (EDLC) Yousry Maarouf was summoned for an internal investigation at the Alexandria Container and Cargo Handling Company after workers secured an agreement to restore eight-hour shifts.

On the land expropriation and resistance front, Warraq Islanders have extracted a series of commitments on compensation and basic services from state and security representatives, as Tora El-Balad residents have staged three-day protests against threats of expropriation.

Share

Intelligence-owned paper liquidated

Update: El Fagr journalists are demanding intervention by the Journalists Syndicate to protect unpaid wages and employment rights after the intelligence-owned newspaper’s board decided to pursue liquidation. Journalists’ Syndicate head Khaled ElBalshy said on September 6 that management had confirmed an internal decision but told him formal procedures had not begun.

According to a statement from the Egyptian Observatory for Journalism and Media (EOJM), ElBalshy said the media regulator had received no official notification. The website remains operational, while the print edition remains suspended.

According to one of the paper’s journalists, who spoke to The Cairo Report on condition of anonymity, said staff learned of the decision “by chance”, accusing management of failing to notify either journalists or their syndicate, adding that a general assembly had approved liquidation and that employees are now demanding council action to protect workers’ entitlements and hold those responsible accountable.

ElBalshy’s subsequent account, however, distinguishes the owners’ decision from its formal implementation, while leaving the complaint about staff exclusion unanswered. He pledged to “pursue the available syndicate and legal channels to protect journalists and other workers.”

A previous issue of The Cairo Report traced the wage crisis to the expiry of an advertising agreement with POD, a United Media Services (UMS) affiliate, and documented stalled efforts to sell the institution.

At the time, journalists formed a committee to facilitate negotiations with management and the syndicate, supporting a proposed sale that promised restructuring and payment of arrears.

But conflicting accounts of share percentages and complications involving deceased shareholders’ heirs obstructed the process. Staff were still awaiting a general assembly to address disputed shares; they now face an internal decision toward liquidation without an announced settlement of their claims.

The workforce had already absorbed substantial costs to preserve the institution. EOJM previously documented journalists making concessions and continuing to produce the website without pay, including colleagues who had worked for years without formal appointment. In June, the organization announced preparations to represent dozens of journalists seeking their entitlements.

Under Egypt’s labor law, liquidation does not extinguish employment obligations, and workers’ claims receive preferential status against the debtor’s assets. EOJM’s legal unit likewise stresses that an internal liquidation decision does not itself terminate employment or cancel accrued rights.

Pensioners’ union

Update: Egypt’s General Federation of Pensioners’ Unions is renewing its campaign for a minimum pension of 6,400 pounds a month, seeking to tie retirement income to the wage floor as pensioners struggle to secure both adequate benefits and timely payment.

Federation president Ahmed El-Araby said in a letter carried in an Al-Ahram column by Sakina Fouad on September 6 that the organization was preparing parliamentary and public support for legislation setting the minimum at 80% of the 8,000 pounds minimum wage.

The campaign follows previous demands the federation said it submitted to the president’s office in February, and addresses the widening wage–pension gap documented in last week’s Cairo Report dispatch. The 1,755 pounds minimum for pensions beginning in 2026 equals just 21.9% of the state wage benchmark, and while approximately 11.5 million pensioners and beneficiaries received a separate 15% increase in Jul, the federation’s proposal would establish a stronger relationship between income during employment and the minimum available after retirement.

El-Araby also argues that the higher floor is already required by law, but the existing formula does not establish that entitlement. Social Insurance and Pensions Law No. 148 of 2019 sets the relevant minimum at 65% of the minimum insured wage, while using 80% as a ceiling in pension calculation. The minimum insured wage—the earnings threshold used to calculate contributions—is currently 2,700 pounds. Employers nevertheless must insure workers at their actual wages. The campaign therefore would involve both changing an inadequate statutory floor and enforcing contribution rules that determine workers’ future income.

Share

Engineers challenge official claims on pay and job security

Egypt’s Engineers’ Syndicate head Mohamed Abdel Ghani demanded better pay and secure employment on September 10, challenging Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly’s account of engineers’ earnings. Abdel Ghani said tens of thousands of engineers in government and public business enterprises earned 4,000–9,000 pounds, while private sector salaries ranged from 6,000–11,000, many of which are well below the 8,000-pound minimum wage. He described the much higher salaries cited by Madbouly as “exceptional.”

During a September 6 visit to industrial projects in Ain Sokhna, Madbouly said that “newly graduated engineers earned 25,000–30,000 pounds monthly,” using those examples to defend major projects and continued infrastructure investment as sources of employment, alongside his assertion that “national unemployment had reached record lows.”

His salary examples concerned particular workplaces in the Suez Canal Economic Zone, not earnings across the profession, leaving unanswered how widely workers share in the gains from investment.

Notably, Abdel Ghani speaks with an independent electoral mandate. In this year’s Engineers Syndicate elections, he was the independent candidate who defeated former transport minister Hani Dahi, backed by Nation’s Future, which itself is a state security-backed party.

Abdel Ghani had received 10,505 votes against Dahi’s 6,389. He was also a co-founder of Engineers Against Sequestration, which campaigned to restore members’ control of their syndicate. His victory nevertheless left institutional constraints: the state-aligned Unified List won all 11 complementary council seats contested in the election.

The pay demands predate both his election and Madbouly’s remarks. In March 2024, then-syndicate head Tarek El-Nabarawy approached the prime minister and health minister seeking inclusion of health sector engineers in the medical professions incentive framework, and before leaving office, he renewed demands for a higher professional allowance in January 2026, linking inadequate compensation to experienced engineers leaving state institutions.

If anything, these interventions show that the government’s investment narrative has developed alongside repeated demands to improve conditions for the professionals carrying out its work.

Abdel Ghani’s latest demands extend to permanent appointments for engineers working on daily rates in ministries, a dedicated pay and employment framework, and revised professional and risk allowances. The dispute therefore concerns the terms on which engineers supply their labor as well as their salaries, and while unlikely, its practical test is whether ministries provide secure jobs and whether public and private employers deliver pay improvements beyond the better-paid projects highlighted by the prime minister.

Former EDLC head summoned

Alexandria Container and Cargo Handling Company has summoned labor organizer Yousry Maarouf for an internal investigation after workers secured an agreement to restore eight-hour shifts, the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS) said. In its statement, CTUWS said the summons followed his presentation of workers’ demands during talks involving the Ministry of Transportation and holding company officials. It called for an end to what it described as retaliation, saying complaints from the company’s security official and executive managing director prompted the investigation.

According to the workers’ complaint, more than 1,000 of approximately 3,000 workers left through early retirement, including many union committee members. Management had introduced 12-hour shifts in September 2025 and restructured wages in August 2026, reducing most workers’ earnings. Workers subsequently stopped work, securing the shorter shift agreement and promises to reconsider wages. However, Maarouf was later arbitrarily transferred to a lower-income department.

Maarouf was elected founding president of the now-defunct Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress (EDLC) in April 2013, as independent unions expanded after the 2011 uprising. Two months later, an Alexandria court acquitted him and four colleagues of inciting a strike, overturning three-year sentences issued in absentia. Workers had challenged a container berth concession and demanded repairs to company equipment.

Later disputes with the company included five-day wage deductions against him over pay-related Facebook posts in 2017 and December 2023.

His organizing has also challenged the company’s union committee in 2024. Represented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Maarouf sought its dissolution over failures to convene annual general assemblies since 2022, which has prevented the general assembly members from scrutinizing accounts, budgets and audit reports. A court rejected his appeal in November 2025, upholding an earlier dismissal.

Share

Lifeguards’ safety depends on cost-cutting

In a new report by Al-Masry Al-Youm’s Reham El-Eraky, lifeguards working on Egypt’s North Coast have described exhausting shifts, inadequate rescue equipment and an employer’s refusal to cover an injury sustained during a rescue. In one of the testimonies, a 22-year-old student working as a lifeguard during the summer said his foot caught in wood while he ran to help someone drowning, and that the company he worked for declined to pay for treatment.

Other workers described conditions that make sustained vigilance harder. Another lifeguard reported 12 continuous hours under direct sunlight without rest, alongside sunburn and inadequate accommodation, while a third said employment lasted only three months annually and called for practical training between seasons. Their accounts connect visitors’ safety to workers’ physical endurance and seasonal insecurity, as employers obtain rescue coverage during the busy months, while workers must find ways to support themselves between precarious contracts.

The complaints concern protections already recognized in the Egyptian Diving and Lifesaving Federation’s safety code, which calls for formal contracts and insurance documentation, and specifies a one-hour break after four continuous work hours, with another lifeguard covering the post.

Separately, the labor law requires employers to provide appropriate occupational protection without charging workers.

Earlier reporting identifies how spending decisions can undermine those protections. In a September 2025 investigation by Salah Laban for Independent Arabia, a rescue company owner acknowledged reducing staffing and employing cheaper students to accommodate low contract prices, while an instructor said trained lifeguards encountered workplaces without suitable equipment and employers assigning them unrelated service duties, shedding a light on the pressure exerted through contracting: operators’ spending limits become contractors’ staffing and wage decisions, with workers expected to deliver rescue services under the resulting conditions.

Workers have also sought a collective means of challenging that arrangement. In another investigation by Youm7’s Ahmed Gamal El-Din earlier this summer, one lifeguard called for a legal body to defend workers facing unclear contracts and disputes over pay and accommodation, as others demanded better wages and an end to cleaning and beach service duties that diverted attention from rescue work. The same report described official instructions against such distractions, which completely disregard the fact that enforcing those protections requires staffing, equipment, and expenditure decisions that workers currently struggle to influence, despite carrying the immediate risks when provision falls short.

Third worker killed at Egyptalum in two months

The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) called for an urgent, independent investigation into the death of a temporary worker who was pulled into machinery at the state-owned Egypt Aluminium Company (Egyptalum) in Naga Hammadi, on August 4.

Abdel Rahman Omar Gahlan, 30, died after being caught in a conveyor belt while cleaning it, the latest in a string of fatalities at the plant that the ECRF said exposed a “pattern of unsafe, precarious labor conditions.”

The rights group added that the belt lacked basic safety mechanisms, including a safe power cut-off and protection against sudden movement, and that Gahlan suffered severe injuries to his arm and neck that proved fatal.

“A worker who loses his life at a job site is not a number in an accident log, he is a human being who was doing his job in an environment that was supposed to be secured,” the commission stated.

Two other workers reportedly died at the same plant within the past two months alone, according to worker testimonies gathered by the ECRF, one inside the cell-room section and the other from electrocution. The commission said one of those deaths was officially attributed to a “heart attack,” a “falsification with serious legal consequences.”

Reclassifying a workplace fatality as a natural death strips the case of its legal status as a “work injury,” the ECRF said, shielding the company from criminal and civil liability, denying the worker’s family legally mandated compensation, and removing the incident from official statistics.

The case breaches constitutional guarantees under Articles 13, 18, and 59, which require the state to protect workers’ security and health, per the ECRF. It also violates Labor Law No. 14 of 2025, in force since September 2025, which mandates accident prevention across all workplaces regardless of a worker’s contractual chain, “negating any defense based on a worker’s employment through a subcontractor,” as well as Social Insurance and Pensions Law No. 148 of 2019.

The commission argued that “contractual precarity” is the direct root of these deaths rather than an incidental factor. Gahlan and his colleagues worked as temporary labor hired through a contracting company, without a written contract with the actual employer and without insurance coverage. Workers under this system, it said, lose all protections and cannot refuse hazardous tasks for fear of dismissal.

The group also pointed to a recurring practice among contracting firms of avoiding insurance coverage altogether, or resorting to “token and selective” insurance for a small number of workers presented only during inspections.

This arrangement is not at all new for Egyptalum, and the pattern was previously covered by The Cairo Report.

The company stopped directly hiring graduates of its own training institute in 2011, shifting instead to employing them through privately-owned labor-supply intermediaries under agreements the workers themselves are not party to and have never seen.

Workers trained specifically for aluminium production have gone on to spend years inside the plant earning a fraction of the legal minimum wage, without social insurance, health coverage or injury protection.

On February 28, roughly 3,000 “temporary” workers at the plant launched an open-ended strike and sit-in that cut output by an estimated 70 percent, demanding direct employment contracts before any discussion of pay; management’s offer to raise wages was rejected on those grounds.

On the strike’s third day, Central Security Forces (CSF) entered the premises and dispersed the sit-in, and more than 500 workers were later turned away at the gate and told their contracts had ended. It was the company’s third such labor action in under eighteen months.

Subscribe now

Wadi al-Qamar residents’ 10-year battle against multinational nears verdict

An Egyptian administrative court has reserved judgment in a decade-long legal battle brought by residents of Alexandria’s Wadi al-Qamar neighborhood against the Alexandria Portland Cement Company (APCC), the majority shares of which are owned by Belgium’s Titan Group, setting a ruling date of December 26 after more than ten years of litigation over the company’s use of coal, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) stated on September 9.

The current case traces back to 2015, when Prime Ministerial Decree No. 964 of 2015 amended the executive regulations of Egypt’s environment law to permit existing industrial facilities to use coal or petroleum coke as a substitute for natural gas, citing “necessity and the public interest.” The amendment effectively legalized coal use at plants like Titan’s while disregarding the serious environmental and health harm to nearby residential communities.

EIPR filed suit on behalf of Wadi al-Qamar residents before the Alexandria Administrative Court, registered as Case No. 8815 of judicial year 70, seeking to halt the company’s use of coal and to annul the specific clause of the cabinet decision that permitted it.

Repeated complications and procedural delays have marked the case. A committee of environmental experts from Alexandria University was formed to assess the company; after it emerged that no environmental experts affiliated with the Ministry of Justice were available, it later came to light that the committee’s chair had previously worked with the defendant company. TITAN separately brought natural gas supply companies into the case as additional parties, further complicating proceedings, according to EIPR.

By 2022, the Alexandria Administrative Court referred the case to the Cairo Administrative Court, where it was re-registered under its current case number, a transfer that produced further delay as the parties continued procedural manoeuvring.

During hearings, the EIPR lawyer representing Wadi al-Qamar residents submitted documentation establishing that the residential community predated the factory’s establishment. She also presented final, binding criminal rulings showing the company had failed to comply with environmental standards; the EIPR said it had secured four compensation rulings against Titan on residents’ behalf in recent years.

Those four compensation rulings have themselves become a drawn-out fight. In one, an appeals court awarded resident Hanaa Abdel-Latif 750,000 Egyptian pounds in November 2023; in another, resident Said Dawiya was awarded 120,000 pounds in January 2024. Titan contested both, filing procedural challenges to halt enforcement, then appeals against those challenges, then further cassation appeals; in Dawiya’s case even reportedly enlisted an acquaintance to file a separate suit seeking to reclaim seized assets, which was rejected in late December 2024. Egypt’s Court of Cassation finally rejected Titan’s appeal in Dawiya’s case on January 1, 2025, making the compensation ruling final, though the company continued to delay payment.

A further ruling, issued in April 2024, ordered Titan to pay one million pounds to resident Hani Abdel Fattah Abu Aqeel and his son over health and environmental damage from the plant’s emissions. That ruling became final roughly a year and a half later, and—after further delay tactics from the company—the EIPR announced the payment was finally collected at the end of December 2025, more than a decade after Wadi al-Qamar residents first turned to the courts.

Separately from the domestic litigation, residents filed a complaint in 2015 with the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, the independent accountability office of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a World Bank Group institution that has financed the Titan plant since 2010.

After roughly six years, the investigation concluded that the IFC itself had erred from the outset by failing to properly assess environmental and social impacts given the project’s scale and proximity to housing, and confirmed that dust emissions from the plant exceeded internationally accepted levels by a wide margin, alongside elevated noise and vibration and cracking in nearby homes.

The EIPR has said that without a commitment from the IFC to act on the ombudsman’s findings and compensate those harmed, the standards remain “ink on paper.”

It is worth noting that the factory was established in 1948 and was nationalized in 1961, before ownership passed back to the private sector through privatisation in the 1990s. Successive expansions eventually blocked residents’ view of the sea entirely, but it was the 2002 construction of a fifth production kiln approved under what was meant to be a six-month temporary permit, at the same time as the Titan acquisition of a majority stake, that triggered organized protest, as residents began noticing a rise in illness in the area.

The APCC also cut its workforce from roughly 2,503 employees to just 320, most of whom had been Wadi al-Qamar residents.

A ruling is expected at the December 26 session.

Warraq islanders reorganize against expropriation

Update: A delegation representing Warraq Island residents met with officials overseeing the island’s redevelopment file this month, extracting a series of commitments on compensation and basic services, but residents closed the meeting by warning that no demolition or rezoning should proceed inside their community until their central demand is formally answered, according to a September 12 statement by the “We Are Staying on Warraq Island” movement.

The meeting, convened by a fifteen-member residents’ committee formed at a previous session, took place at the New Warraq City Development Authority on September 10 after being postponed.

At the centre of the meeting was a specific request from residents: that the authority approve planning a designated plot within Warraq Island itself so that new development would allow private homes to be built for residents who wish to remain on the island.

Under the proposal, each homeowner would be compensated with a suitable replacement home and would not be required to vacate their existing house until the new one was completed and they held formal ownership documents for the land beneath it, following models used by Egypt’s New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA), under official contracts and fair construction terms.

Officials responded that the request represented a legitimate right that could form part of the development plan, and said they would forward it to the relevant authorities for study, promising a faster process than in the past, when similar discussions dragged on for a full year.

Officials laid out, in more detail, how compensation would work for two categories of residents.

For those whose homes fall within the demolished zone and who wish to move into apartments being prepared for the initial phase, a first batch of 1,000 units, which the contracted company has committed to complete between September 30 and October 15, compensation would be allocated on a like-for-like basis: apartment for apartment, square meter for square meter.

A resident who owned a building with three apartments would receive three apartments in return; anyone requesting more space than they previously had could obtain it at a price set by compensation committees, while anyone receiving less space than before would be paid the difference at the same rate, reflecting their share in the land, all under official contracts.

Officials were explicit that these replacement apartments would go only to original residents and property owners, not to anyone who built or altered structures on the island after the fact, with compensation for such cases to be handled separately, outside the island.

For residents willing to relocate into the planned new development block rather than rebuild on the island, officials said compensation for the structure itself would follow the rates already set, while the resident would receive a plot of land within the block equal in area to what they gave up, on which a specialized company would provide construction materials at official prices under formal contracts. Under this option, residents would not be required to leave their current homes until the block was fully developed and serviced.

Residents used the meeting to press a set of more immediate, practical grievances, receiving the following commitments from officials:

• A hospital, youth centre, post office and other services are currently being planned and will be presented to residents soon, with implementation folded into the urgent phase of the project.

• A park and gardens are being planned near the “Tahya Misr” corniche adjoining the island, with officials currently working to identify the most suitable sites.

• Street-sweeping carts will be deployed from Saturday, along with a dedicated phone line residents can call to request them.

• The authority will contract, through a tendering process, with companies to clear demolition rubble from within the island, with that work due to begin shortly.

• A vaccination specialist will soon be made available to serve island residents.

On residents’ request for a dedicated staff member to issue death certificates after hours, officials said death registration is now automated, and that after 6 p.m. no facility across the wider district, not just the island, can issue such certificates except in two other areas; they added that the director of Warraq Island’s hospital had pledged to ease the process for residents, and said the matter would be reviewed further.

Concluding the meeting, residents’ representatives stressed that no measures should be taken inside any residential cluster on the island, including clearing land or determining street layouts, before officials formally respond to their central demand for in-place, land-based compensation.

In a statement following the meeting, the residents’ committee told the community that the outcome now rests with the authority’s follow-through, urging residents to hold their ground on the island, avoid unilateral dealings with the authority outside the committee, and stay coordinated with one another as the process moves forward.

EgyptKE sacks journalists for refusing sub-minimum-wage pay cut

Update: EgyptKE arbitrarily dismissed 11 journalists after they refused management’s attempt to cut their salaries below the legal minimum wage, according to a September 6 statement by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR), which is now legally representing the journalists.

The center said it would pursue the necessary judicial and administrative procedures to protect the journalists’ financial and employment rights against the outlet’s management.

The move follows a meeting between ECESR lawyers and a group of the affected journalists to discuss legal defense options, after the journalists had already filed a collective official complaint with the labor office in Cairo’s Agouza district.

The complaint documented “administrative intransigence, being barred from work, and the arbitrary dismissals and withheld salaries that followed,” in clear violation of the labor law and constitutional guarantees, the rights group emphasized.

The crisis dates back to July 28, when EgyptKE management began arbitrarily dismissing the journalists after they rejected a decision to cut their salaries below the legal minimum wage of 8,000 pounds.

Egyptian appeals court upholds quarter-million-pound payout to fired tobacco worker

An Egyptian labor appeals court has upheld a ruling ordering Elhennawy Tobacco Company to pay more than 270,000 pounds to a worker dismissed after more than three decades of service, in the latest of a string of court victories for employees of the company, the ECESR stated on September 8.

Circuit 9 of the Damanhour Labor Court of Appeal affirmed the earlier ruling from the Damanhour Labor Court ordering the company to pay worker Zeinab S.A. 180,000 pounds in compensation for unfair dismissal, 7,943 pounds for failure to provide statutory notice, and 82,392 pounds for unused leave balance, a total of 270,335 pounds covering more than 33 years of service, plus four percent interest from the date of the ruling until payment, in Case No. 1809 of 2025.

The Damanhour Labor Court had previously ordered compensation of close to one million pounds, plus statutory interest, for five Elhennawy Company workers, including Zeinab, in separate unfair-dismissal suits brought by ECESR lawyer Mohamed Mamdouh El-Damiati. The latest ruling brings the number of judgments issued in favour of Elhennawy Company workers to 17, out of 29 unfair-dismissal cases still before the courts.

The conflict between Elhennawy Company and its female workers stretches back more than 21 years, to 2003, when workers first demanded special allowances and pushed back against extended working hours, workforce reductions, and the denial of child-care leave, per the ECESR.

After workers rejected a collective agreement signed between the union committee and the company that they considered damaging to their rights, management responded with dismissals and transfers to remote locations intended to pressure them into resigning. That pattern has recurred repeatedly over the years, workers say, following each court ruling ordering their reinstatement.

This included a company decision to relocate workers from Damanhour to Borg El Arab. Workers had previously secured a court ruling that the relocation order was unenforceable, but the company subsequently refused to allow the objecting workers back into the workplace, prompting them to file unfair-dismissal suits seeking compensation and their legal entitlements, chief among them, application of the legal minimum wage and special allowances.

During the proceedings, the court referred the cases to a panel of experts in Damanhour to calculate the workers’ entitlements. The company, for its part, relied on minimum-wage exemption requests it had submitted to the Federation of Egyptian Industries (FEI), along with leave records and rulings issued in other cases, in an attempt to reduce its liability.

The workers’ defense argued these documents should not be considered, on the grounds that they did not apply to the dispute or lacked sufficient legal basis, citing Court of Cassation rulings that resorting to litigation interrupts the statute of limitations under Article 383 of the Civil Code.

The rulings form part of a series of successive legal wins secured by the ECESR on behalf of Elhennawy Company’s women workers, which the center says has established the principle that compensation and entitlements in unfair-dismissal cases must be calculated on the basis of the legally mandated minimum wage, the floor of protection guaranteed under labor legislation, rather than the below-minimum wages some companies impose in violation of the law.

Egyptian lawyers challenge remote litigation fees as unconstitutional

A legal team from the Khaled Ali Law Firm, working alongside attorneys Khaled El-Gamal and Hamdy Abu El-Ela, has filed a lawsuit before Egypt’s State Council challenging newly announced fees for remote court appearances, arguing they violate the constitution and encroach on parliament’s exclusive authority over taxation, Ali stated on September 10.

The suit, filed against the Minister of Justice, targets a fee schedule published on a platform the Ministry of Justice created for remote hearings.

Under the new system, lawyers must pay 500 pounds to attend a felony hearing, 300 for a misdemeanor or misdemeanor-appeal hearing, and 100 for a pre-trial detention renewal hearing. It remains unclear whether these fees cover all hearings in a given case or are charged per session, meaning costs could multiply with each additional hearing.

Lawyers are also charged 10 pounds per page for document copies, and the platform requires users to pre-load credit to pay for attendance, renewal requests, or copying services, as well as purchase a messaging package to receive service notifications.

The legal team argues these amount to new, obligatory fees imposed on anyone practicing law through the remote litigation system, which will become mandatory under Egypt’s new Criminal Procedure Code set to take effect on October 1. Crucially, lawyers say, the platform is the only means available to represent clients during remote investigations, detention-renewal hearings, or trials. This effectively forces lawyers to pay government-set fees that were never approved by legislation.

The petition warns that because no law caps or regulates these fees, the authority that imposed them could raise them at any time without limit, with no legal safeguards protecting defendants’ rights or the right to a defense.

The lawsuit rests its constitutional argument on several provisions. Article 97 of the constitution guarantees litigation as a protected right for all citizens and bars any administrative decision from being shielded from judicial review. Article 98 guarantees the right to a defense, personally or through legal representation, and states that the independence of the legal profession is a guarantee of that right.

The petition also cites past rulings from Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court holding that the right to litigate presumes accessible access to courts unburdened by financial costs or procedural obstacles, and that the rights to litigation and defense are inseparable; neither has practical value without the other.

On the question of legislative authority, the lawsuit invokes Article 38 of the 2014 amended constitution, which states that public taxes and fees may only be created, amended, or abolished by law, and that no one may be compelled to pay taxes or fees beyond what the law specifies. It also cites Article 96, which enshrines the presumption of innocence and guarantees defendants a fair trial with defense safeguards.

The petition further argues that the Justice Ministry’s decision to set these fees by administrative decree, rather than through legislation, amounts to an overreach into parliament’s exclusive lawmaking authority.

Ahmed Fouad Abu Hanish, Secretary-General of the Helwan Lawyers’ Syndicate, announced the syndicate’s solidarity with Ali and El-Gamal.

“The union stresses that imposing new fees related to exercising the right to defense or initiating litigation procedures must be within the limits of the law, and in a way that does not impose burdens or restrictions that affect the citizen’s right to access justice,” he stated.

ECRF calls for full labor inspection into real estate developer over year-long wage violations

The ECRF has called on Egypt’s Ministry of Labor to conduct a comprehensive inspection of Orientals For Urban Development (OUD), an Egyptian joint-stock company, saying wage violations at the company have hardened into a pattern.

The commission said it has continued to receive complaints and distress calls through its hotline from workers at the company, having already issued two statements in April documenting the firm’s refusal to pay wages at multiple sites and its failure to provide workers with insurance coverage. The ECRF had also previously filed complaint No. 46169 of 2026 with the Public Prosecutor’s Office over an assault and intimidation incident against one employee.

According to the commission, the pattern now repeats roughly every four months: wages stop, workers who object are arbitrarily dismissed or forced to resign, partial payments are then issued alongside pressure on workers to withdraw their complaints from labor offices, and the cycle begins again.

The commission said it recently received a new complaint from the company’s Heliopolis site, which employs around 28 workers, including some who resigned without receiving full dues. This is the same site where 26 workers filed a similar complaint with company management and then a labor office in April, which the ECRF documented at the time—confirming, it said, that the same cycle recurs at the same site through the same mechanism, and that partial payments made in earlier waves never addressed the root crisis.

It added that any waiver signed by a worker under the pressure of withheld wages cannot be considered a free expression of will, and that the persistence of this mechanism reflects an absence of inspection and oversight by the Labor Ministry, as well as a failure to examine complaints submitted through official channels, including the unified government complaints system.

The commission linked the worsening conditions to a change in company leadership following the death of the founder and chairman of Oriental Weavers, the parent company, with management passing to an heir. It noted the company has also faced escalating complaints since 2020 from customers who purchased real estate units, as well as problems affecting workers in its carpet manufacturing division.

Beyond a comprehensive labor inspection of all Al-Sharqiyeen for Urban Development sites, the commission called on the Ministry of Labor and relevant oversight bodies to take several further steps.

It urged that the company be compelled to pay all overdue wages to affected workers immediately and retroactively, and that authorities investigate the pressure placed on workers to withdraw their complaints from labor offices, treating any waiver made under such pressure as void due to economic coercion while ensuring that withdrawn complaints continue to be reviewed.

The commission also called for full payment of dues owed to workers who resigned, including overdue wages, leave compensation, and end-of-service benefits, and said resignation must not be used as a pretext to void rights that had already accrued. It further urged that the company be compelled to immediately settle its outstanding debt to the National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) and to retroactively restore workers’ insurance coverage, and called for the investigation into the complaint filed with the Public Prosecutor’s Office over assault and defamation against employees to be expedited, along with the provision of necessary protection for affected workers and their families against pressure to withdraw their claims.

Finally, the commission called for the company to be placed under publicly announced, periodic monitoring by the Ministry of Labor until wage and insurance payments normalize, in order to prevent the cycle from recurring after each crisis.

Prison Watch: Renewals, postponements, and refusing a woman’s right to husband’s sample for ICSI

The Supreme State Security Prosecution renewed the detention of union leader and teacher Mohamed Zahran for 15 days on September 7, pending investigation in case No. 5773 of 2026, according to the Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS).

On the same day, the EIPR called on Public Prosecutor Mohamed Shawqi to use his authority to immediately investigate the fate of Abdallah Ramadan, who remains held without legal basis despite a final judicial decision ordering his release on August 9 in connection with Case No. 12225 of 2024 (Zagazig Misdemeanors).

According to the rights group, Ramadan was held in Port Said for ten days before being transferred to Zagazig Police Station, his local jurisdiction, to process his release, but was then moved to an undisclosed location on August 26.

The following day, the EIPR filed an appeal before the Court of Cassation seeking to halt enforcement of and overturn the ruling that upheld a one-year prison sentence and 200-pound fine against political activist and poet Ahmed Douma, the rights group stated on September 8.

The New Cairo Misdemeanor Appeals Court had upheld the first-instance ruling in July, sentencing Douma to a year in prison with hard labor over allegations that he deliberately broadcast false news domestically and abroad concerning his earlier detention at Badr 1 prison. That case followed his arrest in April, months after he had been released under a presidential pardon that ended a previous decade-long prison term.

On September 9, the EIPR published its monthly capital-punishment tally, which found that Egyptian courts issued death sentences to 39 defendants in 30 cases during the month of August, among them 2 issued final verdicts that could not be appealed.

Meanwhile, the Supreme State Security Prosecution renewed the detention of detainees held in what has become known in the media as the “Shia case,” case No. 5635 of 2026, per the ECRF. The prosecution renewed the detention of 13 defendants in the case, who face charges of joining a terrorist group and financing that group; the prosecution later renewed the detention of another 19 defendants in the case, including al-Dostor journalist Haider Kandil.

Additionally, Egyptian terrorism circuits at the Badr court complex issued a string of postponements.

A Cairo court panel postponed three terrorism cases involving 130 defendants to different sessions to complete trial proceedings, including postponing the trial of 117 defendants in the case known in the media as the “media cell” case to a November 22 session to hear witnesses, the ECRF stated on September 7.

In parallel, Egypt’s Administrative Court has rescheduled a lawsuit filed by the ECESR on behalf of a woman seeking to overturn the Interior Ministry’s refusal to let her obtain samples from her imprisoned husband to undergo ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection) at her own expense. The court’s First Circuit ordered the case returned for pleadings at a session on December 5. The suit names the Interior Minister, the minister’s assistant for human rights affairs, the director of the Minya governorate’s social protection sector, and the Public Prosecutor.

The case follows a landmark and unprecedented report issued by the State Commissioners Authority at the Administrative Court, which recommended in April 2025 that the woman be recognized as entitled to obtain samples from her husband, who is serving a 15-year prison sentence, to complete the procedure at her own expense.

According to the underlying lawsuit, the plaintiff married her husband in 2014. The couple struggled to conceive, and she eventually underwent a successful ICSI procedure that resulted in a triplet pregnancy, but her husband’s arrest in January 2015 and subsequent detention, followed by his 2022 sentencing to 15 years, caused her, under severe psychological strain, to miscarry. The suit states she is now 36, that her health does not permit natural conception, and that she will not be reunited with her husband before his sentence concludes in 2037, making ICSI her only remaining option.

It says she petitioned the Interior Minister and his aides for permission, offering to bear all costs, but received no response, which led her to bring the case through ECESR.

The center stated that Egypt has no explicit legislation permitting conjugal visits for prisoners either, and that a 2017 Al-Azhar fatwa found no religious objection to ICSI procedures.

More land expropriation & more resistance

Residents of Tora El-Balad neighborhood, on the Nile Corniche south of Cairo, staged three days of street protests this month over a newly launched survey of properties and land in the area, which they fear is a precursor to demolitions tied to a broader plan to redevelop the Nile waterfront in Greater Cairo, according to reporting by Saheeh Masr.

Protests over the past three days brought chants of defiance to several of Tora’s main streets, including Ibrahimiya, Makhzan al-Anabib, and Tob al-Faraouny streets, in objection to the start of a property and business survey in the area. The demonstrations followed a negotiating meeting between Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber and a number of residents’ representatives, attended by MP Wael Saada, who represents the district and belongs to the Nation’s Future party.

The Cairo governorate had formed a committee in August, under Decision No. 16043, to survey the area’s assets and properties. The committee includes district heads and officials alongside representatives from the governorate’s expropriation, informal-settlement development and housing research departments, as well as police officers from the Tora station; its stated task is to catalog properties and land and gather the data needed to calculate compensation if expropriation decisions are later issued.

A resident who attended the meeting with the governor told Saheeh Masr that officials told attendees the survey committee would formally begin work on September 15 and continue for about a month, aiming to identify properties and land that might fall within the scope of works serving “the public interest.”

He said residents asked the governor whether the anticipated demolitions were linked to the Corniche development project, and were given no clear answer. He said officials indicated that compensation values would not be set until the survey was complete and the specific properties, sizes, and locations subject to removal had been determined, with a committee then pricing per-square-meter values.

Residents raised the possibility of alternative housing or compensation reflecting current market prices; apartments in the area currently sell for roughly 3.5 to 4 million pounds, per Saheeh Masr, but officials deferred discussion of that proposal until after the survey concludes.

Residents’ concerns date back to September 2025, when Egypt’s official gazette published a redevelopment plan for the Nile waterfront covering southern Greater Cairo, stretching from the Athar al-Nabi area in Old Cairo through Dar al-Salam and Maadi to Tora, though the published decision did not specify final details of the development’s shape or which areas would be demolished, referring only to plans for tourism and recreational zones, hotel and residential towers, and cultural centers.

Based on satellite mapping, the area where the property survey committees are set to begin work, according to locally circulated boundaries, spans roughly 21 feddans, stretching from just past the Tora bridge to the Shorouk police officers’ club on the Nile, in the direction of Helwan. That area borders the site of the former Tora prison along the Corniche, which also falls within the new waterfront development plan.

A source in the Cairo governorate’s southern district, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Saheeh Masr that the start of the survey does not mean the entire area faces demolition, saying no such decision is currently under discussion since the development plan has not reached its final form at the governorate level, but that authorities are preparing all scenarios by cataloging the number of properties and plots involved.

As for the former Tora prison land along the Corniche, the source confirmed it was vacated more than three years ago and is now held by the NUCA in preparation for new projects, even as the fate of the surrounding properties in Tora El-Balad remains undecided.

Tensions escalated further after residents intervened to stop National Security personnel from arresting a resident who had posted a video online declaring she would not leave her home.

In footage of the incident that circulated on social media, one resident is heard asking whether she would be jailed simply for saying she would not leave, and whether everyone who said the same about their ancestral land would likewise face arrest.

In the footsteps of Warraq islanders, the residents chanted “We will not leave our homes, not even in death”.

Security sector update

State & Barracks

The Mukhabarat Reshuffles Its Media Business

This week’s issue covers Xi Jinping’s visit to Cairo, a board reshuffle at the intelligence-owned media conglomerate, and changes in the Military Intelligence leadership. Also: Future of Egypt moves into fertilizer distribution, TAQA Arabia expands into Jordan, restrictions ahead of the El Alamein airshow, and Sudanese deaths in Egyptian custody. First, a personal update: Canada has lifted my entry ban…

Read more

24 days ago · 4 likes · Hossam el-Hamalawy

The Cairo Report’s latest feature

So, what?!

The question is not simply whether the country’s laws recognize a wage, a pension, a safe workplace, a home, or a defense. It is who can turn those formal rights into something usable before a worker is dismissed, a pensioner falls deeper into poverty, a resident is displaced, or a case is delayed into irrelevance.

Across this week’s dispatch, collective organization is the only force capable of making institutions respond: journalists going to their syndicate, pensioners organizing around a floor, workers acting together over shifts and wages, lawyers challenging new barriers to defense, and residents negotiating through representatives they chose themselves.

But each advance remains provisional when the other side retains control over a workplace, a file, a timetable, and ultimately the terms of implementation.

The New Republic’s promise of development therefore rests not only on low labor costs or private investment, but on a deeper transfer of responsibility—people harmed by public and corporate decisions are expected to organize, litigate, and wait for the protections that should have been guaranteed from the start.

Egypt’s austerity is a feature as old as Mohamed Anwar Sadat’s economic Open Door Policy, known as al-Infitah, but it has deepened over the past decade with four International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans since 2016. Each loan demanded the same package in exchange for disbursement: float the currency, cut the subsidies that kept bread, fuel and electricity affordable, and extend the tax base.

The pound’s devaluation in 2016 and again in 2024 roughly doubled the cost of food and fuel without doubling anyone’s wage; the subsidy cuts that came with it removed the floor under both.

The public sector shrank as its wage bill was cut, and it was the largest formal employer of Egyptian women, one with maternity leave, insurance, and a wage a court could enforce.

When it contracted, women did not move into equivalent private jobs. Instead, they fell into informal work, stripped of what meagre protections they had, and left to carry a second weight: an economy on its last legs, propped up as much by their unpaid work in the home as by their informal labor in sweatshops and grape fields.

And yet, marking the National Day of Egyptian Women in 2022, Maya Morsi, then president of the National Council for Women (NCW) and current Minister of Social Solidarity, described the period as a “golden age for women in Egypt,” crediting the leadership of President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and his efforts to “empower women across every sector.”

The NCW is a state body; its members are appointed by El-Sisi and its leadership reports to him directly, a fact Morsi stated often, describing a “political will” that comes straight from the president.

Morsi’s claim rested on an inventory of legislation: Article 11 of the 2014 constitution, binding the state to equality and to protecting women from violence; Law 50 of 2014, writing sexual harassment into the penal code; Law 177 of 2020, shielding complainants’ identities; Laws 141 of 2021 and 185 of 2023, elevating harassment to a felony and raising its fines, with aggravated treatment for workplaces and public transport; the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women 2030; and Labor Law 14 of 2025, replacing a code that had stood since 2003.

But the rights legislation of this period, and the World Bank cash transfers beside it, were built on top of the same contraction rather than in place of it. It was compensation for a wage the same restructuring had already withdrawn.

This is the mechanism the empowerment decade sits on, and it is the reason the legislation cannot outrun what produced the need for it.

In this deep dive, I test Morsi’s claim against that mechanism: who reaches the labor market, what happens to a woman who speaks about violence done to her, and what the state does when its own record of care becomes a liability.

Share

What women earn

On the morning of August 11, two pickup trucks carrying agricultural day laborers collided on a connector road in Ismailia’s Al-Dawawis area, killing at least eighteen, most of them children between ten and seventeen. They were traveling from Sharqiya to a farm in the next governorate, earning under two US dollars for an eight-hour shift. Six of the dead were siblings. A sixteen-year-old survivor told AFP outside Al-Qassasin hospital that she’d been asleep, exhausted because the day starts at five, and that her sister died beside her asking for their mother.

Days earlier, on the Belbeis–Abu Zaabal road, a pickup carrying women agricultural workers overturned, injuring 22. The New Woman Foundation (NWF) stated that the Ismailia deaths would repeat within the week. Transport accidents recur because the protections around agricultural workers are fragile, oversight is weak, and employment arrangements are fragmented. Formal rights to occupational safety, health and social protection exist on paper; without enforcement mechanisms, they mean nothing in practice.

Both crashes are routine.

Informal labor accounts for close to 67% of employment in Egypt and nearly the whole of the agricultural sector, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), and between eight and thirteen million people work as irregular day laborers. The vehicle, the hour, the wage, and the age of the passengers are the standing conditions of the work.

This is the population the empowerment decade addresses at its base, and the place to begin reading its ledger.

Start with who reaches the labor market at all.

The ILO put women’s labor force participation in Egypt at 16.5% in 2024 against 71.3% for men; the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) puts it slightly higher, at 16.9% against 70.3%. The gap of almost 55% exceeds the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) average and dwarfs the 15% across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Close to 18% of the women who did enter the market were unemployed in 2024, against just under 5% of men.

Across the fifteen years to 2024, women’s share of the labor force fell by around 8%, from 23% in 2010—the shape of the golden age at the level of the aggregate, a decade of women being pushed out of the formal labor force and into precarious work.

For the minority who stayed, agriculture is one of only three sectors where women form a majority of those employed, at 57.9%, with an hourly wage of 10.93 Egyptian pounds against a national average of 13.9. The figures come from the ILO’s 2018 study of the gender pay gap in Egypt; now two devaluations old, but the only figures available, and there’s no reason to think the gap it measured has closed.

That study put the monthly wage gap at 20% and the hourly gap at 4.1%; inside the private sector the gap ran to 75% at the bottom of the skill scale and 25% at the top, while the public-sector range ran from 10 to 25%.

The ILO’s own reading was that discrimination drives the outcome rather than qualification, since 41% of employed women held university degrees against 15% of men. Of all farm laborers, 94% work without insurance or a contract, 45% of whom are women.

Beneath the wage gap sits a category of work priced at zero. Two thirds of the 2.3 million people whom the CAPMAS Labor Force Survey counted as employed while earning nothing are women, most of them, per the survey’s own category, unpaid family workers: a woman on her father’s or her husband’s land, counted by the state as employed, holding no wage, no contract, and no claim on the household income her labor produces.

The labor law’s machinery

Labor Law 14 of 2025 took effect on September 1 of that year.

It lifted paid maternity leave from three months to four and removed the restriction tied to length of service, protected women against dismissal during pregnancy and maternity leave, wrote definitions of workplace bullying and harassment into the code, recognized digital platform workers, and struck out the clause that had kept women in agriculture outside the law’s recognition. That clause dated to the 1981 code and was carried forward by Article 4 of the 2003 one, which excluded domestic workers and similar categories, therefore swallowing most women doing agricultural work.

Development and environment researcher Abdelmawla Ismail, writing for the Network for Development, noted that the new recognition did not actually specify rights for these women agricultural laborers in its place. Agricultural workers hold a theoretical right to form their own union organizations under the law, for example, but administrative restrictions continue to obstruct its exercise, though women and men in the sector have won union committees in several governorates regardless.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) read the same text before ratification and asked the president to withhold his signature: alongside the improved definitions and new protections, it warned the law opens a door to arbitrary dismissal and still excludes domestic workers after years of promised inclusion. Two days after the text left parliament, the General Authority for Health Insurance issued a directive placing women on part-time and daily contracts outside the breastfeeding hour granted to new mothers.

None of this happened in an economy standing still.

Since 2016, Egypt has entered four loan programs with the IMF and is now among its largest borrowers; across the ten years to 2024, eight of them under an IMF program, external debt rose from around 46 billion dollars to roughly 168 billion. Not a single loan was paid down, but the same conditions were met four times over.

Food prices rose by 103% between 2015 and 2019, and cumulative inflation for the poorest ran to 81%. Women’s labor force participation, over the same period, fell to among the lowest levels recorded anywhere.

Against that, the state offers Takaful and Karama, the conditional cash transfer program built with the World Bank in 2015, expanded at every tranche since, and never independently evaluated. Even so, since launch, the maximum Takaful allowance has risen by only 15.2%.

EIPR argues that the recent European Union (EU) loan follows the same method: quantitative targets for beneficiaries and microloans, with no scrutiny of whether either works, or of the interest rates trapping borrowers, mostly women, in debt. The substitution is the point. The wage the public sector once paid a woman is withdrawn, and in its place arrives a conditional transfer, alongside a loan she must repay.

Article 11’s own text shows why the guarantee doesn’t hold.

Alongside “equality,” which was celebrated as a “victory” by some Egyptian women’s rights activists, the law commits the state only to helping a woman reconcile her duties towards her family with the requirements of her work, assigning the household to her in the same paragraph that declares her equal, and leaving the mechanism of reconciliation undefined and therefore unenforceable.

A guarantee written this way survives as a statement of intent, and the courts have treated it as one.

Who does the law protect?

Four years after Article 11, parliament passed the anti-cybercrime law of 2018, Law 175, which criminalizes content that undermines “Egyptian family values” without defining them.

The prosecutions that followed selected their defendants by class.

In April 2020, authorities arrested Haneen Hossam, a Cairo University student with around 900,000 TikTok followers, after she invited her women followers to earn money broadcasting live video on another platform; Mawada al-Adham was arrested in the same wave.

Both were convicted that July of violating “Egyptian family values” and inciting debauchery, acquitted on appeal in January 2021, then re-charged with human trafficking. Hossam was sentenced in absentia to ten years and Al-Adham to six, before Hossam’s sentence was cut to three at retrial.

At least 11 other women with large followings faced comparable charges from 2020 onward; Al-Adham, Egyptian media reported, had refused a virginity test requested during the investigation.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented defense lawyers’ request that the Constitutional Court define the phrase “Egyptian family values,” and its rejection; the prosecutor general framed the campaign as a “defense of national societal security”.

Seventeen-year-old Menna Abdelaziz filmed herself after being brutally beaten in 2020, naming the men who had assaulted her. The state held her simultaneously as a complainant in a sexual assault investigation and as a suspect in morality offences arising from her own videos.

Amnesty International documented an eight-hour interrogation in which prosecutors drew on statements from the men she was accusing to charge her with violating family principles and inciting debauchery. She spent close to four months in custody and was released on September 17, 2020 after a sustained public campaign, and only after that pressure were five of the men she named eventually sentenced.

The pattern reaches victims who never went viral at all: Amal Fathy was sentenced to two years in 2018 for a Facebook video describing being harassed, and witnesses who answered the NCW’s own public call to come forward in the 2020 Fairmont rape case were instead arrested, held for five months, and subjected to forced examinations; punished for having spoken publicly rather than reported privately.

By February 2026, Egypt’s harassment legislation, on paper, exceeded most in the region.

Law 141 of 2021 made verbal harassment a felony carrying two to four years and a fine of 100,000 to 200,000 pounds, rising where the offender stalks the victim; Law 185 of 2023 set a floor of seven years where the offence occurs in a workplace or on public transport, or where two or more offenders act together. Harassment on a bus is, in Egyptian law, the aggravated form.

On February 8, Mariam Shawky was harassed by a man on her usual bus route from Suez to Maadi. A man who, she said, had been following and harassing her, and who threw rocks and metal at her for not responding to his catcalling. She confronted him and called for help on the street and on the bus; passengers formed a human shield around him instead.

Officers at a police station declined to intervene immediately, and she eventually filed her report that day at the Khalifa and Mokattam partial prosecution office, with EIPR joining her legal team.

The Interior Ministry announced his arrest, while the bus company denied the incident had occurred on one of its vehicles, a denial the Ministry of Transport later reissued.

On February 10, the prosecution released him on bail of 1,000 pounds, roughly twenty dollars; his family announced a defamation suit, and his lawyer requested a psychiatric evaluation of Shawky.

Then the public trial opened.

Hassan Shakoush, a Mahraganat singer with millions of followers, went live on TikTok to observe her lip and ear piercings and conclude that “a respectable girl would wear nothing in her mouth,” the start of a wave of moral accusation.

Outlets published fragments of the investigation stripped of context; one asked in a headline whether Shawky suffers from mental illness, then changed it after backlash.

The transport company’s denial circulated under headlines implying the assault had been invented, and coverage of the bail release omitted its condition, leaving readers with an impression of acquittal.

Eleven feminist institutions issued a joint statement criticizing “parallel media trials of survivors”. Eman Ouf, who heads the women’s committee at the Journalists Syndicate, told The New Arab that some of the coverage was systematic and misleading, presenting the survivor as a liar.

Shawky lost her job. Journalists followed her home once she stopped answering her phone. Her lawyer expects future employment to be difficult, since her name now returns those headlines in a search. She received death threats, including messages promising to kill her and telling her she would be mourned by nobody.

On March 24, the Mokattam misdemeanours court acquitted the accused for insufficient evidence and rejected the related civil suit; a finding that, in Egyptian law, means the charge went unproven rather than that the incident failed to occur, and one open to appeal by either side.

EIPR and the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) called on the public prosecution to appeal. The acquitted man told the press afterwards that he had trusted the Egyptian judiciary and had been anxious only because of public opinion.

He is able to trust it for a reason.

Seven Fairmont suspects left the country while the prosecution waited weeks to order arrests; the two who remained were released for insufficient evidence, while the witnesses stayed under a travel ban and in detention for five months.

Ahmed Adel, the only officer charged over the virginity tests inflicted on seven women detained in March 2011, was acquitted on every count by a military court, in a verdict holding the examinations never occurred and carrying no right of appeal; the same institutional reflex that let Raslan Fadl continue practising for a year after his conviction for the manslaughter of thirteen-year-old Sohair al-Bata’a, and serve three months once he surrendered.

In the rare cases where an aggressor does face consequences, it is because of public pressure rather than institutional will: Ahmed Bassam Zaki was sentenced to eight years after more than fifty women accused him publicly, the largest online campaign of its kind in Egypt.

The numbers behind these individual outcomes are stark.

A 2015 survey by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) with the NCW and CAPMAS, the most recent of its kind, found that close to eight million women in Egypt experience some form of violence each year at the hands of family or strangers, and that only 75,000 of them reported it to the police.

For violence on public transport specifically, just 0.2% of women who experienced it sought any intervention at all, including a police report; 5.6% instead took longer routes or arranged company to avoid it.

On April 30, the EIPR released a report titled “The golden age for women?” The Rights of Egyptian Women between the Vision and Reality Since 2014. It found that 10% of women subjected to online blackmail reported it, 10% of those reports led to arrests, and 35% of the arrests produced a first-instance conviction, roughly one conviction for every 300 cases.

Earlier this year, Omnia Sweidan, a physician and filmmaker, wrote a Facebook post on the violence and harassment she witnessed as a resident in Al-Shatby University Hospital in Alexandria in 2020.

She named four incidents: the sexual assault of a nineteen-year-old delivering her first child; a rape survivor who arrived accompanied by a police officer to be examined and receive contraception and HIV medication, and was refused treatment over what she was wearing and the fact that she smoked; a woman in labor slapped by a doctor for crying while nurses shamed her; and a woman six months pregnant, with a bruise around her eye and an account of a fall, whose umbilical cord hung outside her body with the fetus wrapped in cloth. She also described a critically ill pregnant woman who was refused care because she could not prove she was married.

The post went viral within hours, and thousands of women, doctors, and health workers across Egypt came forward with their own accounts of humiliation, coercion, neglect, and abuse in maternity and gynaecology wards; among them a woman whose sister died after a surgical error during childbirth was mishandled.

Journalist Rasha Maher told The New Arab she waited three days in a delivery room after a uterine rupture in late 2024, was insulted by staff, asked repeatedly for tips, and found the bathrooms flooded with blood and insects.

The next day, security forces raided Sweidan’s home in Damanhour and took her to an undisclosed location; she was questioned in Alexandria on charges of spreading false news and misusing social media, and released on 20,000 pounds bail (roughly 400 dollars). The Egyptian Medical Syndicate stated it had received no official complaints about the incidents she described, and urged anyone with claims to file them through official channels.

She was convicted by the Alexandria Economic Misdemeanour Court of spreading false information liable to disturb public order, spread fear and cause harm, and of using a social media account to commit the offence; a sentence of six months with hard labor, suspended for three years, and a fine of 20,000 pounds.

She was acquitted of a further charge over the reputation of hospital staff; the verdict remains open to appeal. These allegations should have triggered an independent investigation focused on patient safety, HRW stated. Instead, the authorities turned their machinery against the messenger.

None of this is a gap in a system, but the system working precisely as designed.

So, what?!

The state is legislating energetically on behalf of women while tightening their movement and criminalizing their presence in the public sphere. It has transferred grassroots organizing to a council whose members it appoints, giving it full control over the council’s function. This is state feminism occupying the ground where a women’s movement should have stood. That is why a woman in 2026 can have four laws, a national strategy, a hotline, and a council, and still no reliable justice or protection.

The cabinet’s 2021 draft of the personal status law made the pattern explicit: it expanded male guardianship, denied women the capacity to contract their own marriages, and allowed male relatives to annul them, until more than 300 feminist organizations and public figures forced it to be shelved.

A judicial committee’s 2025 revision documented verbal divorce and adjusted custody while leaving guardianship, unequal access to divorce, and protections against domestic violence untouched; in the judgement of feminist organizations, a restructuring in name only.

Referred to parliament on May 25, it has united constituencies that agree on almost nothing in calling for its withdrawal; even Jawaher El-Taher of the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA), who credits it with real gains on polygamy and custody, objects to its reliance on a single school of jurisprudence and its silence on refugees and dual nationals. Marriage, divorce, custody, and guardianship are being redrafted, once again, by a committee no woman had a part in choosing.

Legislation drafted by an apparatus falls to that apparatus to enforce, and one that prosecutes women’s speech, examines their bodies by force, releases the men accused of assaulting them, and withdraws the wage that made their livelihood possible will enforce selectively, in its own interest.

That is where the golden age actually sits: a legislative inventory over unchanged institutions, financed by the programs that emptied women’s pockets, administered by a council appointed from above once the movement that once pushed from below was choked.

Any gain that has come about to better the conditions of women in the past decade is the result of people coming together, organizing, and pushing for change themselves.

This issue of What We’re Reading covers the spectacle of the Premier League’s vast and opaque transfer spending, China’s flashy humanoid-robot propaganda, and Kim Jong-un parlaying North Korea’s shells, troops, and nuclear arsenal into leverage over Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.

In the region, we’re looking at what Bashar Al-Assad’s death sentence in absentia means, the curious case of Yemeni politician Naif al-Qaysi’s terrorism designation, the entertainment industry’s manufacturing of depoliticized Arab artists, and a network linking Mohammed Dahlan, UAE state and quasi-state institutions, and Mahmoud al-Habash that has allegedly established, financed, and sustains the Israeli-backed collaborator militias operating in Gaza.

At home, we’re exploring the parallel punishment of Egyptian political prisoners’ families, a rich witness’s account of a chapter in Egypt’s lost editorial culture, state-ownership policy, and a landmark ruling establishing the paternity—and with it, the legal identity—of a child born of rape.

World

Premier League money has lost all meaning amid chaotic spectacle of excess — Barney Ronay, The Guardian

Barney Ronay has found the appropriate language for this summer’s Premier League transfer market: home renovation television, deranged bathroom fittings, and Jack Grealish undergoing an apparently eternal medical at Everton. Chelsea have bought the “vintage copper-plate statement bidet,” Manchester City’s midfield is too big to fail, and everyone seems to be having a wonderful time inside something they can no longer explain.

As Ronay explains, during a housing boom, an owner can make terrible renovation decisions and still sell for more. The market rewards possession, allowing rising asset prices to masquerade as individual brilliance. He unfortunately applies this to the team I [Saher] support, Chelsea, whose managerial churn and chaotic recruitment have coexisted with opportunities to profit from player sales. You can install something unforgivable in the downstairs bathroom and remain a financial visionary, as the important decision was getting hold of the house.

From there, the column moves into transfer deadline day television, where this circulation of assets becomes a shared emotional emergency. Private jets wait on the tarmac, a reporter solemnly announces that nobody knows what a player is thinking.

Fees become evidence of ambition before the footballer has touched a ball; supporters are invited to experience expenditure itself as an achievement, then spend the season discovering what was actually purchased.

Ronay’s extravagantly specific—and hilarious—jokes reproduce the scale of the absurdity. The fixtures, fittings, medicals, and increasingly improbable transfers accumulate until familiar measures of competence stop working. His bewilderment also has a political direction: the fact that supporters cannot decipher the transactions does not mean nobody benefits from them. Broadcasting income, state spending, investors’ expectations, and accounting requirements continue to shape a game presented as spontaneous sporting excitement.

The pleasure is that Ronay keeps letting football back into the column. He wishes Djed Spence well, weighs Arsenal’s attacking options, and enjoys the possibilities opened by new signings. That affection gives the final turn its bittersweet strength. Understanding how the spectacle works does not cancel the pleasure—it makes the terms harder to ignore.

We can laugh at the private jets, get excited about a winger, and still wonder why loving a football club increasingly requires following the movements of somebody else’s portfolio.

China can build kung fu-fighting robots. But it can’t get them to do factory work — Laurie Chen, Eduardo Baptista & Ju-min Park, Reuters

At a robot training center in Liuzhou, an experienced human trainer might need 50 attempts to produce one usable movement from a robot, while a rookie might need 300. Workers wearing headsets guide humanoids through sorting crates and packaging noodles, painstakingly generating the data intended to make their own capacities reproducible.

The promised replacement of human labor begins with an enormous demand for it.

Reuters’ report exposes how much intelligence supposedly simple work requires. A robot trained at one workstation can fail when the lighting, an object’s position, or the surface changes. Gripping fabric and calibrating force on a screw require continuous adjustment. A choreographed martial arts show demonstrates control under prepared conditions, but factory work demands reliability when those conditions vary.

Humanoids also face competition from machines already doing the job. Geely tells Reuters that conventional robotic arms and automated vehicles handle all key tasks on its active assembly line. The problem is therefore more specific than the headline suggests: manufacturers must establish where an expensive machine shaped as a person improves on both human workers and existing automation.

Public investment is advancing much faster than that demonstration, as Chinese government purchases of humanoids and related equipment reached at least 230 million dollars in the first half of 2026, against 6 million dollars in the corresponding 2024 period. Local authorities provide premises, computing support, and data-purchasing vouchers while public entities buy the resulting machines. The Liuzhou center, supplied through an 18 million dollar government tender, has no clear path to profitability, according to its staff.

However, the authors occasionally treat government-created demand as inherently artificial, but their own reporting supports a more discriminating judgment: failed manufacturers could still leave behind cheaper components and durable supply networks. Yet public orders alone establish neither productive usefulness nor a viable business model for the state. Counting machines shipped can conceal the distance between financing experimentation and solving the technical problem.

A pharmacy robot supplies the clearest statement of what employers ultimately want. Galbot says its machine takes about a minute to retrieve and prepare a product. It has not timed that performance against human workers, yet argues that continuous operation could compensate for slower individual tasks.

Still, beneath the kung fu spectacle sits a familiar calculation: a slower worker might still be cheaper if it never needs the working day to end.

Politicization as conflict, public and formatting — Eeva Luhtakallio, Journal of Political Power

In a neighborhood in Helsinki, Finland, seven residents confront 13 government officials with missing benches, poor lighting, and broken paving. One official explains that repairs must await a development plan, at least two years away, to which a resident finally cries out: “But just look at this! Look at this!”

The officials become visibly uncomfortable, then steer the conversation toward flowers.

Eeva Luhtakallio takes this encounter seriously as a beginning of politics. Drawing on Laurent Thévenot and Judith Butler, she identifies three components of politicization: a conflict, a public, and “formatting”—the work of making a grievance recognizable to others. A gesture, photograph, or emotional outburst can communicate something that the approved vocabulary of a consultation cannot accommodate.

Her other example follows a woman identified as Jessika, who posts photographs of herself crying on Instagram. Initially describing them as a personal diary, she gradually recognizes, through discussion with others, that she wants to challenge the platform’s compulsory cheerfulness. The images become a deliberate claim about whose experiences deserve visibility.

The useful intervention concerns where we start looking for politics. Requiring a developed program, an organization, or confidence in public argument can make marginalized people’s first attempts to contest their circumstances disappear from view. Political understanding can develop through acting with others—it doesn’t need to arrive fully formed before anyone acts.

But the neighborhood story also exposes the limits of recognition. The residents’ complaints eventually produced a workshop and a project to paint curbstones and install flowerbeds. Schoolchildren were required to participate. A demand concerning neglected infrastructure became an exercise in “activating” the community. The response shifted attention toward what residents could contribute themselves.

Luhtakallio explicitly acknowledges that no movement emerged and that politicization doesn’t always produce victory. Even so, her evidence invites closer scrutiny of institutional control over the response. Officials could recognize residents’ distress while retaining the authority to redefine what addressing it would mean. Their discomfort did not place resources or decisions in residents’ hands.

Cairo’s tree protection campaigns make this process concrete. By July, the campaign to save El-Zohriya Garden in Zamalek had gathered more than 11,200 signatures, filed collective complaints, and become the subject of litigation over construction inside the 158-year-old garden. Campaigners demanded disclosure of development plans, an environmental assessment, and civil society representation on an independent oversight committee.

In Luhtakallio’s terms, the politicization lay in turning attachment to familiar trees and shared space into an organized challenge over who could authorize their transformation. Petitions and complaints made that attachment publicly legible, confronting opaque decisions brought authority, commercial interests, and residents’ exclusion into the dispute. Defending a garden became a practical claim to participate in governing the city. That does not establish that every participant acquired a new political identity, but it shows residents acting collectively on a question the authorities had treated as theirs alone to decide.

The framework helps us recognize political beginnings without demanding that they already resemble organized movements. The square shows why the next question concerns organization: how people preserve the substance of a demand once institutions begin translating it into something more convenient.

Kim Jong-un, the leader Trump seeks out, Putin relies on and Xi doesn’t want to lose — Inma Bonet, El Pais

North Korea’s diplomatic opening runs through Russia’s ammunition shortage. The author cites estimates that Pyongyang has supplied Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine between eight million and 11 million shells and rockets since mid-2023, alongside the deployment of thousands of soldiers. What years of nuclear negotiations failed to secure, participation in another state’s war has partly delivered: revenue, oil, military cooperation, and a powerful government willing to protect the relationship.

Russia’s 2024 veto of the UN sanctions-monitoring panel’s renewal is the decisive detail. Instead of repealing the sanctions on the isolated nation, Russia helped disable its independent scrutiny while buying the weapons it restricted, and in the process, Kim acquired a customer with both battlefield needs and institutional power over the rules governing his exports.

That arrangement also puts pressure on China. Beijing remains North Korea’s indispensable economic partner, but Moscow’s support makes Chinese displeasure less constraining. Inma Bonet notes that the official accounts of Xi Jinping’s June visit to Pyongyang omitted denuclearization. China has not formally abandoned that objective; it has become less willing to foreground it when doing so might push Kim closer to Russia. The supposed anti-Western bloc contains a competition over who gets to influence whom.

Trump supplies another opening. The US president recently curtailed American participation in joint exercises with South Korea while the North Korean supreme leader’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, was still denying that negotiations were underway. Pyongyang received a concession without committing to talks. Bonet’s account suggests that Trump’s desire for a conspicuous diplomatic achievement has itself become something Kim can bargain over.

The article’s most revealing formulation comes from an analyst who says North Korea can now present itself as contributing to another major power’s security, which captures a successful diplomatic rebranding. The service being rewarded is support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Kim’s greater freedom from outside pressure is being strengthened through participation in a war against another country’s independence.

Bonet also lists “combat experience” among Pyongyang’s returns. Soldiers’ exposure to war—and death—therefore produces a double dividend for the state: their deployment secures Russian support, while surviving personnel return with skills that strengthen its military apparatus. All of this gives the language of national advancement a precise content. North Korea gains resources, trained forces, and bargaining options by committing people to battle.

Calling that increased autonomy is accurate—as long as we specify whose autonomy has increased, and through what transaction.

Region

Sentence Him to Unremarkable Living — Hiba Monzer, Daraj

On August 11, a Damascus court sentenced Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia. He remained in Moscow. Hiba Monzer begins with the distance between the severity of that verdict and its practical reach, then imagines a punishment stripped of spectacle: keeping Assad alive, in custody, and subject to the law he placed himself above.

The piece’s force comes from Monzer’s refusal to pretend she is free of vengeance. She wants him diminished and understands why survivors might want him dead. Yet no suffering inflicted on one body can repay what happened inside Syria’s prisons. A trial has another purpose: survivors give public testimony, evidence establishes responsibility, and a defendant who once dictated what everyone else could say must sit through accounts he cannot order erased.

Monzer tests that principle against the proceedings involving Assad’s cousin Atef Najib. Court monitors documented rushed hearings, testimony that failed to connect him adequately to the charges, and an ineffective defense. These deficiencies matter to victims as well as defendants because a verdict delivered without reconstructing responsibility leaves survivors with a punishment and an incomplete explanation of the crimes.

Her comparison with Saddam Hussein, however, needs greater precision. She recalls initially mistaking his humiliation in court for justice, before recognizing the political interference and procedural failures surrounding his prosecution. But his execution did not terminate the entire Anfal genocide trial, as she suggests. Proceedings continued against six co-defendants, but the charges against Saddam himself were dropped, effectively foreclosing his accountability for those crimes without ending the prosecution of others who organized them.

Life on the List — Caitlin L. Chandler, The New York Review of Books

Al-Qaeda had threatened to kill former Al Bayda governor Naif al-Qaysi for discouraging young Yemenis from joining it. Then, in 2016, the US Treasury designated the politician as an al-Qaeda financier. The UN followed in 2017, giving the accusation international reach. His salary became inaccessible, his children faced harassment, and he eventually resigned. Caitlin L. Chandler reconstructs how a designation issued far from Yemen could dismantle a whole career and reorganize an entire family’s life.

The evidence uncovered by his lawyers makes this considerably more than a story about bureaucratic indifference. Money described as terrorist financing came from Saudi Arabia for provincial military operations, an alleged al-Qaeda training camp belonged to the Yemeni army’s 117th Brigade, and lawyer Gavin Sullivan’s team submitted payment records, photographs, and the threatening messages al-Qaeda had sent the man supposedly working for it.

The UN review also could not establish whether intelligence supplied by different countries had been independently collected or merely circulated from one source. That uncertainty exposes a mechanism through which an allegation can acquire the appearance of corroboration as it moves between governments. Chandler reviewed a confidential report that considered at least some false accusations likely intentional, although their precise origins remained unresolved, as secrecy protected the allegations from the person best placed to contest them.

The UN removed al-Qaysi in March 2022, but later that year, Turkish authorities detained him for twelve hours and sent him to Oman. The American designation remained, continuing to obstruct banking and, eventually, tuition payments for his eldest child.

Winning one appeal did not oblige every institution enforcing a separate restriction to release him, and the accusation traveled internationally with greater efficiency than its correction.

Meanwhile, al-Qaysi tells Chandler, American officials continued soliciting his advice on countering al-Qaeda and promised to help remove the designation.

Years passed. His knowledge remained useful to officials of the government whose sanctions prevented him from financing his child’s education, and the reporting makes that contradiction painfully concrete.

A Small Part of Paradise — Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books

The helicopters in Apocalypse Now came from the Philippines’ former dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s military, borrowed when they were not fighting communist insurgents. Jeremy Harding places that arrangement alongside David Lean’s filming in Franco’s Spain and Hassan II’s Morocco.

Christopher Nolan’s decision to shoot parts of The Odyssey in occupied Western Sahara belongs to an established history: Western filmmakers have repeatedly found authoritarian governments exceptionally accommodating production partners.

Harding’s most telling detail concerns the Sahrawi activists and artists who tried to approach Nolan’s production team. Moroccan security kept them away. Around Dakhla, the coast supplied the setting for Calypso and the Lotus Eaters, while the people contesting Morocco’s occupation could not reach the filmmakers using their homeland.

The financial arrangements make this exclusion more than an unfortunate encounter. Morocco offers foreign productions a 30% rebate on eligible expenses, tax concessions, streamlined customs procedures, and airline discounts. Its military has also supplied equipment to film productions. Public resources reduce private filmmaking costs while the monarchy gains international exposure for locations it wants treated as unquestionably Moroccan.

Harding connects the film industry’s arrival to the extraction of Western Sahara’s fish and phosphates and the marketing of its beaches as “southern Moroccan” holiday destinations. Cinema adds another commercial use for territory whose people remain denied self-determination. The political transaction takes place before audiences see a frame, and the production accepts Rabat as the authority capable of making the location available.

Occupation becomes the administrative basis for doing business.

Mohammed Dahlan, Mahmoud al-Habash, and the UAE: The Network that Established, Finances, and Sustains Gaza’s Collaborator Militias — Mujamma Haraket

Mujamma Haraket, an anonymous academic of growing popularity, published a 9,000-word investigation alleging that a network linking Palestinian politician Mohammed Dahlan, UAE state and quasi-state institutions, and senior Palestinian Authority (PA) figures, chiefly Mahmoud al-Habash, Chief Justice of Palestine and Abbas’s religious-affairs adviser, has established, financed, and sustains the Israeli-backed collaborator militias operating in Gaza, namely Yasser Abu Shabab’s “Popular Forces” and successors.

It builds on an earlier paper of his which traced how the Center for Peace Communications (CPC), “a US-registered organization established in 2019 to cultivate Arab societal normalization with ‘Israel’ through media, education, religious institutions, and civil-society networks,” and the Jusoor News media ecosystem rehabilitated collaborator figures in Western outlets.

Jusoor News, he explains, was born in March 2024 with the renaming of the Arab Council for Regional Integration social media. The council is a London-based “normalization initiative” established in 2019.

“Its inaugural conference on 19–20 November 2019 brought together approximately 30 journalists, politicians, diplomats, artists, and religious figures from 15 Arab countries to oppose the boycott of ‘Israel’ and promote direct Arab–‘Israeli’ civil relations,” Mujamma Haraket writes.

He then adds a detailed chronology tying al-Habash to militia funding, medical evacuations to Ramallah, and relocating militia commanders’ family members, plus al-Habash’s roughly two-decade documented relationship with UAE aid institutions and an alleged 2008 letter linking him directly to Dahlan.

The piece is extensively footnoted with a real bibliography; still, Mujamma Haraket is occasionally careful to flag the limits of the evidence, such as noting a UAE-plated vehicle photographed with a militia commander doesn’t prove state supply.

It is extremely dense and, at times, confusing, but entirely worth the read.

Elissa and Arab Emotional Capitalism: The Broken Heart Industry — Fouad Ghorbali, Sifr

This essay is a genuinely materialist account of how Arab pop culture manufactured depoliticized subjects.

At a Carthage concert in August, an audience member tossed a Palestinian keffiyeh at Lebanese star Elissa, who was singing on stage, only for her to toss it back. And while the internet raged about whether Elissa is “with or against Palestine”, Tunisian sociologist Fouad Ghorbali asks a different question: what kind of cultural industry produced an artist who can occupy such enormous emotional real estate in millions of lives without her presence resting on any collective narrative?

Ghorbali tells us that this moment exposed a gap between an old political expectation of the “Arab artist” and a new star-system built on an entirely different logic.

He traces this back to the 1990s, arguing that the decline of pan-Arab and socialist projects, Gulf capital’s entry into media (Rotana as the paradigm case), Beirut’s re-emergence as an image/advertising/fashion laboratory after its civil war, and satellite television’s dismantling of state monopoly over cultural space as instrumental in the current star economy.

Song shortened, became clip-friendly, tied to body/fashion/individual stardom, with Elissa’s career being one of the fullest expressions of this shift.

He draws on Eva Illouz’s “emotional capitalism,” the idea that the market does not merely “sell love” but reorganizes how intimacy itself is imagined: the self as a project to manage, heartbreak as material to process into self-improvement, breakups as sites of “recovery” and self-worth calculus.

Ghorbali compares this, of course, to the older romantic sentiment of Umm Kulthum, Warda, and Abdel Halim, which focused on waiting, fidelity, and endurance as moral nobility, versus the newer “did I deserve better?”

This shift is, of course, a product of neoliberalism’s redistribution of responsibility for suffering onto the individual. Ghorbali adds that there’s also an element of gendered labor, with women doing the emotional labor to sustain relationships in addition to this new post-breakup “work on the self”.

He concludes by saying that political pain is not censored from Arab pop so much as it has simply been made “unmarketable” next to a heartbreak that can be repackaged endlessly and sold back to millions.

“The issue is not that a broken heart is any less real than a broken homeland; both are real. The question is: how did we arrive at a time when Arab mass culture is so adept at giving the broken heart a language, an image, an industry, stardom, and a market, while the broken homeland sometimes seems to be crashing onto the stage from the outside?” Ghorbali wrote.

“At this juncture, the keffiyeh becomes a question addressed to us all—not just to Elissa: what has become of societies that long knew how to sing of their collective wounds, to the point where politics must now be hurled by the audience onto the stage just to reclaim a place among the songs?”

Egypt

Grieving alone, the parallel punishment for political prisoners’ families — Mai El Mahdy, Mada Masr

There has always been, among most of the populace, a belief that the prison system swallows the lives of its occupants alone. But the prison is an institution, not a building. It is the state’s primary punishment mechanism, and its shadow extends beyond the brick walls and barbed fences to engulf the families of those imprisoned in its abyss. A parallel punishment.

While not technically part of a series, this is Mai El-Mahdy’s third consecutive essay exploring the psychology around political detainees, grief, and punishment, having previously written Frozen Grief: On the Wounds Borne by Former Detainees in Egypt and Exile Does Not Mean Salvation: On the Double Wound of the Egyptian Detainee Upon Leaving the Country.

Families of political detainees, particularly women, carry the brunt of the responsibilities left behind when their fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons are thrown behind bars. Dual-income households become single-income households. Single-income households have no income at all. Prison visits alone are a heavy financial burden, costing anywhere between 4,000–8,000 Egyptian pounds in a country where the national minimum wage is 8,000 pounds.

The ambiguous loss of a loved one, a family member, is punishment. The additional general and financial responsibilities are an additional punishment.

But the psychological punishment is the worst.

El-Mahdy explains that the political detainee is absent but not dead, so the ordinary rituals of mourning are unavailable; yet the family is expected to continue living as though nothing decisive has happened. Their grief has no recognized social form. Worse, it may be dangerous to express it. A complaint, a public statement, even an account of what has happened can carry consequences for the person inside. Silence therefore becomes part of the punishment.

Which El-Mahdy names as disenfranchised grief and suffocated grief.

And while the state attempts to make every family’s suffering appear singular and therefore powerless, the families answer by discovering its commonality/“universality”. They built support networks where they can not only share their grief, but understand it as each other’s.

“It must be stated clearly that these families’ grief is legitimate, and that the fault lies with the detention itself, not with them. As for whether they will bear this sorrow alone—that is not determined by repression alone, but also by those reading these lines.”

‘No regulation exists:’ Suez Canal becomes gateway for invasive species in the Mediterranean — Samuel Forey, Le Monde

At dawn in Port Said, Samuel Forey watches fishers haul in their nets while ships approach the Suez Canal. Among the mackerel is a silver-cheeked toadfish, a Red Sea species that reached the Mediterranean through the waterway. This toxic predator also damages fishing nets. The infrastructure carrying global commerce has delivered another expense to people working nearby.

Forey reconstructs the interaction between the canal and a sea increasingly hospitable to species arriving through it. Overfishing depleted native populations, coastal construction damaged habitats, the Aswan High Dam reduced freshwater and sediment reaching the Mediterranean, and warming made winters less of an obstacle to tropical species.

Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s Suez Canal expansion operates within this accumulated transformation. The ecological damage cannot be explained by the presence of unfamiliar fish alone.

The author’s chronology becomes too abrupt, however, when he attributes the disappearance of the Bitter Lakes’ salinity barrier to the 2015 expansion. Research published before that project already described the barrier’s erosion through dilution and successive enlargements, and while El-Sisi’s expansion intensified a process built into decades of infrastructure development, treating 2015 as a sudden rupture obscures that longer history of lackluster decisions and its consequences.

That tension should govern the proposed remedies. Forey discusses protected marine areas, canal locks, and using desalination brine to restore a salinity barrier. These proposals raise questions about financing, effectiveness, and the distribution of restrictions that the piece leaves largely unanswered. Fishers asked to reduce their catch would face an immediate livelihood cost. Meanwhile, the Canal Authority, shipping companies, and coastal developers possess different resources and powers to shape the conditions producing the damage.

Conservation that concentrates enforcement on the people easiest to police, without addressing those larger decisions or supporting lost incomes, would reproduce the inequality already visible from the Port Said beach.

The Story of Two Newspapers: Al-Badeel & Midan Masr — Alaa Khaled, Al Manassa

Novelist and critic Alaa Khaled provides a short but rich witness’s account of a chapter in Egypt’s lost editorial culture, focusing on two short-lived Egyptian newspapers: al-Badil (2007–2009, briefly revived 2014–2015) and the two-issue Midan Masr (2012).

Khaled, who wrote a weekly culture column for al-Badil, builds his argument from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities—the idea that a newspaper resembles a novel whose author has abandoned the plot, and readers must trust an “absent author” to hold things together.

Al-Badil’s founder, Mohamed El-Sayed Said, a leftist journalist and editor, shaped the paper’s voice; that voice was later diffused among contributors like Wael Abdel Fattah and Khaled El-Balshi.

When the paper went digital in 2010, Khaled says authorial coherence dissolved into what he calls a “many-headed narrator.” This shift, he argues, was completed in Midan Masr, a self-funded, unpaid, deliberately plural “opinion journalism” project born of Tahrir Square’s own polyphony.

Egyptians’ forays into independent journalism, particularly in the last three decades, are rich and deeply interesting. Al-Badil was one of the most important—if not the most important—of the 2000s, becoming a star-studded paper in a very short time and covering an impressive range of stories with a level of diligence that is obviously missed today.

Khaled’s eulogy was published in one of the few independent Egyptian outlets running today, which begs some thinking about what could be said about our current independent media.

State-ownership policy: Sweet talking the IMF into privatization mirage — Bessan Kassab, Al Manassa

In April 2022, El-Sisi promised to raise 40 billion US Dollars over four years through asset sales, including stakes in military-owned companies. Beesan Kassab follows that promise through successive IMF reviews and finds an increasingly elaborate apparatus for postponing the confrontation it implied. Selling military businesses would redistribute power within the regime, and announcing their sale helped secure financing without immediately disturbing that power.

The composition of the proceeds matters as much as the shortfall. Kassab puts projected privatization receipts under the current IMF program at roughly 7.2 billion dollars, around half attributable to the Alam El Roum land deal. Selling land can supply foreign currency while leaving the institutions controlling production substantially intact. At the same time, an asset sale total tells us little about which centers of economic power have actually surrendered anything.

Her strongest evidence concerns the government’s machinery for monitoring state businesses. The new ownership unit’s database covered only companies governed by the Public Business Sector Law. Reporting on a wider group of 230 enterprises, including military companies and firms transferred to the sovereign fund, remained a promise for November 2026, and the unit presented as an advance toward comprehensive oversight still lacked information on precisely the businesses whose opacity made oversight necessary.

Kassab makes bureaucracy politically intelligible: new procedures can demonstrate activity to creditors while deferring decisions that threaten powerful owners. But her portrayal of an exhausted IMF risks understating the lender’s agency. The Fund completed another review despite acknowledging slow divestment, which more or less suggests an accommodation with the regime’s priorities; bureaucratic obstruction alone cannot explain the creditor’s continued consent.

Essentially, the article exposes how military ownership survives the government’s promises to creditors.

But its findings also invite a further question: what would it take to make these enterprises answerable to the people whose labor and resources sustain them?

Proving the Paternity of a Child Born of Rape: A Legal Precedent in Egypt Raises Questions — Merehan Fouad, Daraj

In 2018, Amal Abdel Hamid, 18, was kidnapped and raped by a man whose marriage proposal she’d rejected. Nine months later, she gave birth to a daughter with no legal identity, not even a birth certificate, because Egyptian courts historically rejected paternity claims for children born of rape, citing the hadith-based principle “al-walad lil-firash” (the child belongs to the marital bed).

Amal, a barely legal child, was kidnapped and raped, then beaten by her uncles, then forced into a marriage to conceal the “scandal,” and, for years, punished by the state’s laws, which allowed neither an abortion nor a paternity claim for her child.

Perhaps, to add insult to injury, her rapist was sentenced to only one year in prison.

However, in a landmark ruling in May 2026, Mansoura’s appeals court ruled (case No. 9829/75), establishing the child’s paternity to her biological father via DNA evidence, and had the child registered in birth records.

What feminist researcher Merehan Fouad does exceptionally here is emphasize how law is a tool of both patriarchal and class discipline. A poor rural woman with no institutional leverage had to become a media spectacle with a viral confession video and months of on-screen interrogation before the state would reopen her closed case.

Justice was, is, rationed by her capacity to generate public pressure.

The state denying reproductive choice and then denying legal identity to the resulting child, Fouad explains, are two faces of the same logic: using survivors’ bodies to enforce religious-nationalist norms about family structure regardless of the material cost to women.

The question here, however, should not be about this “legal precedent”. We should be asking: What material conditions make cases like Amal’s so punishing to litigate in the first place?

If you have not read it yet, check out this week’s labor dispatch from The Cairo Report:

*What We’re Reading is a fortnightly list of the stories behind the headlines, read through the lens of class and power. In your inbox every other Wednesday.

Subscribe now

As the sun rises over the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, a group of middle-aged men, all of them former shop owners, get ready to leave their homes, trekking to a qahwa [coffeeshop] in Bahary, within walking distance of Midan El-Masajid, home to the historical mosque, mausoleum, and shrine of Sufi mystic, Abu al-Abbas al-Mursi, colloquially referred to as al-Mursi Abu al-Abbas.

It has been at least several years since most of them had shops of their own to open, ones they’d been occupying since at least the 1980s—until the governorate shuttered them.

On January 27, 2025, the Alexandria governor ordered the demolition of their shops in Midan El-Masajid, locally known as the “al-Mursi Abu al-Abbas shops,” without a court order or compensation.

Stripped of their only stream of income, the men now spend their days at the qahwa, sipping tea and chatting, in a routine that has hardened into habit.

The story of the square begins over a century earlier.

Share

In 1919, the Municipality of Alexandria entrusted the remaking of the city to William MacLean, the prominent Scottish architect, Dr. Mohamed Adel Desouki, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport (AASTMT), told Matsada2sh.

Two years later, in 1921, he presented what became known as the MacLean Report. Among its proposals were two new urban spaces: the Saad Zaghloul Square and what would come to be known as the al-Masajid Square.

For the area around the Sufi shrines, MacLean envisioned a broad square that would embrace the shrines within it. From this proposal came the distinctive name al-Masajid Square. Before that, the place had been known as Bab al-Bahr—the Gate of the Sea.

King Fuad I ordered the rebuilding of the Mosque of al-Mursi Abu al-Abbas and the surrounding square, entrusting the work to Italian architect Mario Rossi, who spent some sixteen years completing it before it opened to the public in 1943.

Over 30 years later, during the reign of assassinated president, Mohamed Anwar Sadat, the Alexandria governorate launched a “development project” in the al-Masajid square, demolishing several homes, including the house where prominent political activist and writer Abdullah El-Nadim hid during the Urabi Revolt, to reconfigure the space, according to Desouki.

During that period, the Alexandria Governorate decided to develop the al-Masajid Square and contracted the El-Maamoura Company for Construction and Touristic Development, established by Presidential Decree No. 2909 of 1964, to handle the project.

A state-owned joint-stock company affiliated with the Holding Company for Tourism and Hotels (HOTAC), which currently reports to the cabinet following the abolition of the Ministry of Public Business Sector, started offering ownership contracts for commercial shops to citizens in 1981.

While the land itself is historically owned by the governorate, granting and collecting payment for land use rights, El-Maamoura Company held a usufruct.

As part of the development, the company constructed at least 160 commercial shops as a planned and modern retail market, which were subsequently offered for sale to citizens, rights lawyer Mohamed Ramadan stated on Facebook.

At the time, purchasers were granted ownership contracts under which they were required to pay the purchase price of the shop structure itself, in addition to an annual fee representing the usufruct value of the underlying land paid to the governorate, he added.

For more than four decades, the 160 or so men and women who bought these shops made a life around them. They traded here, raised their children here, and, in the process, built a community that came to feed hundreds of people—their families, their workers, and the families of those workers. They occupied one of Alexandria’s oldest and most historically layered districts, a place of 26 mausoleums, each the resting place of a Sufi mystic. Over the years, their relationship with the place—and that of their children, many of whom had already inherited or taken over the shops—grew into something more intimate than commerce.

They began to call it, simply, “our place of barakah”—our blessed place.

Until March 1, 2023.

Share

Then-Governor of Alexandria, Major General Mohamed El-Sherif, announced a 271-million-Egyptian-pound development project for the al-Masajid Square, including the shops, with a 24-month implementation period. It also terminated its contract with El-Maamoura Company for Construction and Touristic Development, according to affected shop owner Ahmed Khalifa.

El-Sherif stated that the development project for the al-Masajid Square “aligns with Alexandria Governorate’s comprehensive development strategy and the state’s general policy of prioritizing historically significant sites,” adding that the area had not been developed since 1943, and while that is true for the mosque, it is not true for the square.

Per the statement, the project was taking place in coordination with the Ministry of Religious Endowments (Awqaf) and “other relevant authorities,” which remain unnamed.

“We spent a full year conducting comprehensive studies before starting the square’s development project, while being mindful of the square’s religious, cultural, and social value, and highlighting all its existing features,” then-deputy governor and current Beheira governor, Jacqueline Azer, said.

She said that “the consulting firm” worked on several concepts and visions until a unified vision was reached that reflects the religious, social, and cultural spirit of the square “for the benefit of all citizens,” and the consulting firm also remained unnamed.

The announcement was made in the presence of Sheikh Salama Abdel Razek, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Endowments in Alexandria, Engineer Noha Khalifa, then-Head of Al-Gomrok District, “the project consultant, and all concerned parties,” according to the statement.

The “concerned parties” did not, however, include any representatives from the shop owners, according to a shop owner, Mahmoud* (pseudonym), who spoke to The Cairo Report on condition of anonymity.

The development project would increase the number of shops and, consequently, generate more revenue for the government, Ramadan said. Although the project would reduce the space available to existing shop owners, they did not object.

However, the shop owners’ dispute with the governorate concerned not only the development but also their contractual rights to the shops and the land, per a source who spoke to journalist Beesan Kassab.

One shop owner told Kassab that, in the years preceding the launch of the development project, the governorate had created obstacles to the owners’ payment of their annual usufruct fees. As a result, most owners paid the fees into court rather than at the governorate’s offices, out of concern that accumulating unpaid installments could expose them to eviction. The source characterized the obstruction of payments as an indirect means of seeking to strip the owners of their rights to the shops and the land.

In November 2023, El-Sherif invited several representatives of the shop owners to discuss the project, and a consensus was reached. According to the meeting minutes, published by Ramadan, the shop owners would vacate their premises, while the governorate would provide temporary alternative shops in the Masr Station Square with reduced rent between 1,000–2,600 pounds until construction of the new shops was completed in six months.

The new shops would then be handed over to the original owners while a valuation expert would determine the usufruct fees for the new premises.

The shop owners’ understanding, according to their representatives, was therefore that the development constituted a temporary relocation rather than a termination of their existing rights.

However, in July 2024, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi appointed former commander of the Egyptian Navy, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Khaled, as the governor of Alexandria, replacing El-Sherif.

Approximately two months into Khaled’s tenure, the governorate sent formal notices to the shop owners stating that the contracts between them and El-Maamoura had been terminated, Kassab reported.

The notices instructed owners to settle any outstanding usufruct fees and to submit applications to continue occupying the shops while completing the necessary procedures with the governorate. Failure to do so would result in their “immediate eviction,” Ramadan told Kassab.

Under Khaled, the governorate also offered the 160 shop owners relinquishment deeds, and, initially, all 160 shop owners refused to sign, Mahmoud* told The Cairo Report. Dozens of shop owners demanded a meeting with governorate officials, and several were selected to represent the group.

Yet, Mahmoud* said that rather than engaging in a discussion, a governorate official, whom he did not name, threatened the representatives with the demolition of their shops if they “make a fuss.”

“The governor later informed us that our contracts would be terminated and that we owed outstanding dues for use of the premises,” Mahmoud* told The Cairo Report. “The amounts ranged from 900,000 pounds to 2 million pounds. We did not have that kind of money, and we certainly did not have any outstanding dues.” Owners were being asked to pay a retroactive difference in valuation, in what Mahmoud* described as “an attempt to force the owners out.”

“Khaled issued notices to the residents requiring them to vacate the shops and demanded a rental payment exceeding one million pounds as a condition for obtaining new premises,” Ramadan, a member of the shop owners’ legal defense team, wrote on Facebook. “When the residents objected and insisted on the implementation of the written agreement concluded between them and El-Sherif, he threatened to evict them by force.”

Some people had already vacated their shops, and a couple of shop owners started signing relinquishment deeds to the governorate, Mahmoud* said. Nevertheless, the majority held onto their shops and their rights, some of them going so far as to sue the governorate and the El-Maamoura Company, though efforts remained scattered.

Share

On January 27, 2025, Khaled greenlit the first phase of the shop demolitions and bulldozed 12 of the 160.

The demolitions had no legal grounds, Ramadan told Kassab.

“The governorate demolished the shops that had been closed, their businesses having been suspended for years because of the supposed development project and because construction work carried out by the governorate had effectively shut down the market,” activist and shop owner Ahmed Khalifa wrote on Facebook at the time, adding that “all of the market’s entrances were also closed to the shop owners.”

“My family and I have a shop under a valid contract, and we have paid the governorate the annual usufruct fee for the land through 2025, as confirmed in court,” he said. “I was shocked today to discover that the governor had ordered the demolition of my shop and the rest of what they described as the ‘burned-out’ group of shops.”

“I tried to keep my composure and speak calmly amid the shouting, while shop owners were directly threatened—along with anyone trying to stand up for their rights or object to what was happening, which was being carried out without any legal justification,” Khalifa wrote.

During that time, Al-Gomrok district head, the newly appointed Mohamed Salah, informed the shop owners’ representatives that they needed to sign documents acknowledging they had received official letters to vacate their shops by February 6. Kassab reported that he promised to allow the shop owners to set up a tent to display their products until the shops were rebuilt and to establish a new contract with them, requiring payment of the reassessment value before receiving the new shops.

“However, there were no details about the new contract or any official guarantees regarding our rights to the new shops,” one of the shop owners’ representatives told Kassab.

Per the same report, two sources who attended the meeting with the district head stated that he threatened to demolish more shops during the meeting.

This came after another meeting between the representatives and then-deputy governor, Amira Salah, during which she denied them any rights, stating that the governorate was seeking to reach an agreement with them on solutions “taking into account the social dimension only.”

The deadline came and went, and the 160 shop owners did not sign the document.

Instead, they proceeded to file several police reports and lawsuits, the documents for some of which were obtained by The Cairo Report.

On Saturday, February 12, 2025, one of the shop owners filed a lawsuit with the State Council’s Court of Administrative Justice, Case No. 9138 for the 79th Judicial Year, against the Governor of Alexandria and the Al-Gomrok district head, seeking the issuance of a contract for a replacement shop to substitute for the one demolished, according to the lawsuit filing receipt obtained by The Cairo Report.

The lawsuit also demands that the contracts specify the replacement shop’s number, area, specifications, location, and handover date following the development’s completion.

Several shop owners filed two other lawsuits, Case No. 8895 for the 79th Judicial Year and Case No. 3753 for the 80th Judicial Year, before the Administrative Court against the Governor of Alexandria, the Al-Gomrok district head, and the El-Maamoura Company.

“We also filed a complaint for intentional property damage, but it was shelved,” Mahmoud* said.

The shop owners’ pressure worked, temporarily. While the cases were pending before the court, the retroactive difference in valuation demanded by the governorate was dropped, according to Mahmoud*.

But it was not enough to halt the demolitions. Nor did it force the governorate to adhere to its 2023 consensus with the shop owners, as they were provided with no alternative shops and no clear plan with a timeline for the project.

“Since January, we have failed to secure any legal protection for the commercial market shop owners against the thuggery of the company executing the so-called Abu al-Abbas Square Development Project,” Khalifa wrote on Facebook on July 29, 2025, which was simply signed “the Mursi Abu al-Abbas shop owners.”

“Lawsuits have been filed with the State Council challenging their actions, and police reports have been filed accusing the district head of willful destruction of property,” he added. “We tried to arrange for people to guard our shops at night, as the remaining open shops are at risk of theft and vandalism.”

“Their policy is to impose a fait accompli on people who are neither street vendors nor thugs—just ordinary, struggling individuals trying to protect their livelihoods, to which they have a legal right and the documentation to prove it,” Khalifa wrote.

Over the course of those eight months, the development company contracted to the governorate continued to demolish shops and often prevented owners of the open shops from conducting their business, Mahmoud* confirmed.

He added that, as a result, plenty of the open shops’ goods were vandalized or stolen, costing the owners tens of thousands of pounds, on top of the demolition.

The aforementioned development company has so far been largely unnamed by shop owners, the governorate, and local media reports.

Share

However, a January 2024 report by Al-Ahram’s Shaimaa Abdel-Hady revealed that a committee comprised of the Ministry of Endowments’ General Administration of Engineering Affairs and the Alexandria Endowments Directorate, following complaints about damage done to the mosque’s dome, was investigating and preparing legal action against the contractor responsible for the mosque’s initial emergency restoration work, while terminating that work and moving to appoint a “new specialized company” for the mosque’s full restoration. The new contractor will restore the mosque, including its damaged historic ornamentation, to its original condition, per the report.

Two months later, Al-Masry Al-Youm’s Ragab Ramadan reported that Sheikh Salama Abdel-Razek stated that four companies officially submitted bids to execute the project, and the contract was awarded to “a sovereign-owned company,” which is a commonly used term for companies affiliated with the security apparatus.

Yet, Contrade Egypt for Construction and Trading, a private engineering and construction contracting firm founded in 2007, identifies itself as the contractor for the al-Mursi Abu al-Abbas Mosque and Square development project, naming the Alexandria governorate as its client.

The company lists its scope of work on the project as: “Civil and structural works; architectural finishing; hardscape and landscape; public plaza and pedestrian walkway construction; utility and infrastructure upgrades; urban enhancement elements and site furnishing.”

The Cairo Report could not independently verify if Contrade Egypt is “sovereign-owned” or backed, but the company has been contracted for at least one large project with a sovereign-backed company as a client.

Per the company’s public portfolio, it delivered “full civil, architectural, and MEP works; sports and recreational facility construction; utility networks; landscape and external works; community social and commercial spaces” across 18 City Club locations nationwide.

The client listed is City Club’s owner and operator, Estadat Holding, which frames itself as providing “advanced management systems … and professional design and operation of stadiums,” and which “owns the rights to manage the largest number of stadiums and sports bodies” in the country, and is owned by the General Intelligence Service’s (GIS) United Media Services (UMS) and Post for Investment (PFI), the investment arm of Egypt Post.

Between May and June 2025, the courts ruled in several of the cases that engineering experts, appointed by the Ministry of Justice Experts Department, must investigate the shop owners’ claims and aid the court’s investigations, Ramadan told The Cairo Report.

Experts have not yet been appointed at the time of publishing.

By December 2025, the rest of the 160 shops had been largely reduced to rubble, and beneath them lay not only the shop owners’ livelihoods, but the modest dreams they had carried for their children and the flicker of hope that their life might be easier than their own.

“The demolition violates the rights of hardworking citizens who purchased their units through official auctions—held in the presence of representatives from the local district and the Ministry of Endowments—after spending ten years of their lives paying off the installments,” Ranyah El-Anany, an affected shop owner who purchased one of the shops in the 2010s, wrote on Facebook on December 21, 2025.

“It was demolished under the guise of ‘development’ to pave the way for multimillionaire investors. The authorities unjustly targeted these struggling people, using legal pretexts and acting without a lawful demolition order. They explicitly told us: ‘By the time the court rules in your favor, we will have already demolished the place, rebuilt it, and installed someone else there.’ In other words: ‘Drop dead,’” she added.

In February 2026, El-Sisi appointed Engineer Ayman Attia as Governor of Alexandria, replacing Khaled, who was appointed Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA).

Share

Meanwhile, a charter amendment published on June 8 in the supplement to issue 112 of the Official Gazette expanded the El-Maamoura Company’s permitted activities, including operating hotels, marinas, commercial premises, cafes, and beaches.

Weeks later, on June 28, the Egyptian Exchange (EGX) approved El-Maamoura Company’s temporary listing, with an offering and additional regulatory requirements to be completed within six months, while restricting transactions before trading begins, subject to the Financial Regulatory Authority’s (FRA) approval.

All of this begs a single question: What has happened to the shop owners since?

“Some of them were able to start working again, others scraped together money to rent a shop in another area, few owned one or two other shops and were able to cut their losses, relatively speaking,” Mahmoud* said. “The majority are poor.”

The police complaints remained shelved, the court cases stalled, all while newer shops have been built on the ruins of the old.

As you are reading this, a group of tired men whose livelihoods were ripped away are sitting at a qahwa in Bahary, wondering what the future holds for them.

But they have not lost hope.

“Despite everything, they [the shop owners] still have hope in the justice system,” Ramadan told The Cairo Report.

This issue of The Cairo Report examines how Egypt’s industrial policy continues to subsidize and de-risk private investment while workers carry the costs of low wages, insecure contracts, unsafe workplaces and an eroding pension system. T&C Garments, one of the country’s largest apparel exporters, is lobbying for lower social-insurance contributions and labor costs even as its workforce has repeatedly reported below-minimum pay, retaliation, and dismissals after collective action

We also cover seasonal contracts paying older per-class teachers 40% below the public sector minimum wage, a Labor Ministry inspection regime that grants unsafe workplaces more correction time than penalties, and an ammonia leak that hospitalized 15 women workers, including five children, at an Ismailia export factory.

Elsewhere, a new study shows the minimum pension has fallen to roughly one-quarter of official wage benchmarks, while steel tariffs concentrate production among integrated firms and leave rolling mill workers exposed to stoppages and wage insecurity.

The dispatch also follows Warraq Island residents as they enter talks over a proposed redevelopment scheme, documents the repeated dismissal of a blind Jumia employee amid quota evasion allegations, and records the continuing toll of workplace and commuting deaths.

Share

T&C seeks lower social costs alongside state industrial finance

The chair of one of Egypt’s largest garment exporters, Magdy Tolba, said on August 30 that “wage increases were welcome but must be accompanied by a reassessment of social-insurance contributions, taxes and other labor costs,” particularly for labor-intensive industries.

He argued that many manufacturers “lack sufficient profit margins” to expand, and that the new state-backed industrial investment fund would fail unless the government also reduced production costs and ensured investors a reasonable return.

The Sovereign Fund of Egypt-led vehicle is expected to invest directly in industrial companies and support privately managed funds. In his statements, Tolba asked whether it would finance new or existing companies, provide direct funding or acquire equity, and what advantages investors would receive.

These suggestions come from the head of a company whose competitive strategy explicitly rests on low labor costs. On their website, T&C describes Egypt’s population as a source of “productive and inexpensive labor” and identifies duty-free access to the United States and European Union as another advantage. The company was established in 2010 as a joint venture between the Egyptian Tolba Group and Turkey’s Tay Group.

T&C exports all its production, with approximately 70% going to the United States and 30% to Europe. Its Obour facility operates under the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) system, which gives eligible Egyptian goods containing the required Israeli input duty-free access to the US.

The United States government figures say textiles and garments have benefited most from the QIZ arrangement. T&C also received a 20 million US Dollar loan from French public development financier Proparco in 2020 to double production capacity, with the lender projecting that the expansion would create 1,700 jobs and preserve another 4,000.

The company’s expansion has been accompanied by repeated labor conflict. Workers reportedly struck in 2015 over unpaid entitlements and again in 2020 after management proposed dismissing 40% of the workforce during the pandemic, according to Fakar Tany.

A January 2024 stoppage followed worker reports of wages between 2,500 and 4,000 Egyptian pounds, delayed annual increases, extensive deductions, and renewable one-year contracts. Workers sought a 50% increase and later obtained raises of approximately 30–35%.

In January 2025, approximately 6,000–7,000 workers mounted a 12-day strike demanding the legal minimum wage, higher meal and transport allowances, annual increases, profit sharing and changes to the disciplinary system. One worker alleged that T&C included transport in its headline wage and made workers bear the entire social insurance cost.

Security forces arrested workers after the company filed a complaint. Nine were detained for four days on allegations including obstructing production and inciting a strike before a court released them on 2,000 pounds bail. T&C suspended them and then dismissed all nine after they returned to work.

Sameh Tawfik Ali, an organizer whose contract was not renewed after 14 years, still had a dismissal case before the courts in January 2026.

The conflict continued this year when workers staged a five-hour partial stoppage in January after receiving annual increases of 400–700 pounds, saying many still earned less than 7,000 pounds despite more than 15 years of service.

In February and March, workers accused management of forcing resignations and threatening referrals to National Security against workers who attempted to renew collective action. No substantive public company response to those allegations was located.

Tolba’s current demand also continues a policy campaign stretching back at least 13 years. In 2013, he sought installment plans for manufacturers’ social-insurance arrears, removal of insurance-payment requirements from industrial licensing, and lower contribution rates. In 2017, he again called for reductions in insurance and taxes, arguing that high payments encouraged employer evasion. In the same interview, he said that “workers who obstruct production should face criminal accountability” and urged the government to treat investors as partners whose problems should be resolved to increase exports.

In July, Tolba described labor shortages as a greater industrial constraint than interest or exchange rates, arguing that young people preferred informal work such as driving tuk-tuks to supposedly stable factory employment. He said Egypt could multiply exports by raising productivity inside existing factories without major new capital investment.

At T&C, however, workers have repeatedly described annual contracts, below-minimum wages and retaliation for organizing.

The government has already reduced some employer liabilities in last year’s labor law when it replaced the training fund payment of 1% of net profit with a contribution capped at 30 pounds per worker, while last week, the National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) lowered the upfront payment required to reschedule employer arrears from 15% to 5%, while the government prepares another vehicle to place investment capital in industry.

Tolba is asking it to go further: support industrial expansion while reducing the share of labor costs paid by employers in an approach that treats wages as acceptable only when capital receives compensation elsewhere.

Older piece-meal teachers given contracts below minimum wage floor

Egypt’s Education Ministry has ordered governorates to place per-class teachers older than 45 on seasonal contracts that impose an eight-hour working day while paying 4,800 pounds monthly, running from September 1 to June 30, 2027, and expiring automatically unless both parties agree to extend them.

The pay is 3,200 pounds, or 40% below the 8,000 pounds minimum for state workers. Finance Ministry rules extend the minimum wage supplement to Treasury-funded workers contracted for monthly remuneration, while the ministry recently said the minimum covered its different employee categories, and unless the teachers receive the 3,200 pounds difference separately, the contract underpays them in breach of the government’s own wage floor.

The model calculates 4,800 pounds from 24 weekly classes at 50 pounds each, before deductions, but requires full-day attendance and allows deployment after official hours or to other schools. It also bars outside employment. Teachers receive 15 ordinary, 15 sick, and seven casual leave days, but a governorate may terminate the contract without compensation whenever it declares that their services are no longer required.

A “weak performance rating” also ends the contract, while penalties can deduct 10 days’ pay per incident and 30 days overall. Teachers must acknowledge that repeated service creates no claim to appointment, giving the state the control and disciplinary authority of a permanent employer while denying the teacher an equivalent wage, grade or continuity guarantee.

Many affected teachers reached the age ceiling while covering vacancies through successive temporary schemes. Some worked under the 36,000 short-term contracts scheme that ended after just two months in 2019, before returning through per-class work that initially paid 20 pounds.

The ministry later raised the maximum age for appointment to 45 but excluded teachers already above it despite years of school service. This is not, in any sense, a marginal workforce, as in December 2025, the education minister said that the country relied on approximately 160,000 per-class teachers after claiming to have covered its shortage through hourly labor, permanent recruitment, and heavier or reorganized workloads. The new contracts convert that continuing public need into annually revocable individual employment, allowing the government to retain experienced labor while using administrative classifications to avoid the cost and security attached to a regular public position.

Share

Unsafe workplaces given more time than sanctions

The Ministry of Labor granted 897 establishments more time to correct occupational safety deficiencies during 1,414 inspections and reinspections conducted from 23 to 27 August, compared with 296 violation reports, 41 referrals for legal action, and 27 closure recommendations. Inspectors recorded just 183 compliant establishments, making up a mere 12.9% of the total inspected workplaces.

Across all the inspections, allowing time for correction remained the ministry’s dominant response, while referrals and proposed closures covered only a small share of cases requiring intervention.

The campaign comprised 770 initial visits and 644 follow-ups at establishments previously given legal deadlines. Since the ministry reported 897 compliance periods, more than the number of initial inspections, some establishments may have received further time after reinspection, although the statement provided no case-level breakdown.

This was not, by any means, an isolated result. The ministry had reported 1,026 compliance periods against 569 violations and 47 closure recommendations during January, 745 compliance periods against 203 violations and 45 closure recommendations in March, and 1,000 compliance periods against 355 violations and 42 closure recommendations in April.

Granting time to remedy workplace defects is not inherently inconsistent with the labor law. Where inspectors identify an imminent danger, however, the law requires the responsible authority to close the workplace or, at the very least, stop the dangerous equipment until the risk disappears, while preserving workers’ wages. The latest release recorded recommendations rather than completed closures and did not identify the establishments, hazards, deadlines, repeat offenders, or resulting penalties.

The cost of that discretion was explicitly visible during the same month. In August, workplaces produced at least 23 workplace deaths: four in falls from high places, four in excavation or structural collapses, six in sewer chambers or drains, two beneath workplace machinery or vehicles, one drowning at a fish farm, one killed by a rock fall inside Sukari mine, two who died after a chemical tank explosion at a Fayoum salt factory, and three killed by oxygen depletion and hydrogen-sulfide exposure while cleaning a pickle-factory pit, while inspectors continued to give employers more time.

Ammonia leak hospitalizes 15 women workers, five of them children

Speaking of unsafe workplaces, 15 women suffered breathing difficulties after ammonia leaked from the refrigeration system of a vegetable freezing and export factory in Ismailia’s industrial zone on September 2. All were taken to Suez Canal University Hospital, where their conditions were said to be “stable.”

Casualty lists show that one worker was 16 and four were 17, making five of those injured legally children.

Unnamed sources told Veto’s Ayat Sameer that a production line technician forced the workers to continue after the leak was detected and that management did not immediately halt production, increasing the total number of workers exposed to inhaling ammonia, which would directly conflict with the labor law, which allows workers to leave without permission when an imminent danger threatens their health and requires employers to keep them out until the danger is removed.

Ammonia exposure can damage the eyes, throat, and lungs and can be fatal at very high concentrations.

Employing workers aged 16 and 17 is not automatically unlawful, but Egyptian law prohibits assigning anyone under 18 work that endangers their health or safety because of either its nature or the conditions in which it is performed. Ministerial Decision No. 50 of 2026 also limits children to six hours of daily work, and requires employers to register their ages, tasks, medical examinations, and supervisors with the Labor Directorate they report to.

The accident follows another mass gas exposure in the same industrial zone in December 2025, when a chlorine leak at a garment factory injured 18 workers, including workers aged 15 and 17.

Pension floor’s fall to one-quarter of wage benchmarks

Update: A new Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR) study says the government has allowed the minimum pension to fall to about one-quarter of official wage benchmarks, leaving retired workers to absorb much of the inflation imposed after decades of contributions. The 1,755-pound minimum for a worker retiring in 2026 equals 21.9% of the 8,000-pound statutory minimum wage. ECESR’s longer series shows the pension floor briefly reaching 46% of its selected wage benchmark in 2020 before falling to 21–22% during 2024–26.

The comparison, however, requires two qualifications, as the 1,755 pounds are the minimum for pensions beginning during 2026, not the amount received by every low-income pensioner, while about 11.5 million existing beneficiaries received a separate 15% increase in July, and the report’s finding that 51% received less than 3,000 pounds, 85% less than 5,000 pounds, and 95% less than 7,000 pounds comes from FY2022/23 data covering former government workers and their heirs, rather than all current recipients.

Even so, the statutory 15% ceiling on annual increases prevented pensions from matching price growth when urban inflation reached 38% in September 2023, leaving subsequent increases to operate from an already diminished real income base.

ECESR estimates that the uninsured share of workers rose from 54.8% in 2019 to 60.8% in 2024, reaching 90.5% among private sector workers, which makes the wage–pension divide a product of the labor system before retirement as well as pension policy afterward: informal employment, missing contributions, and understated insured wages suppress workers’ present income and their future entitlements, and while the July increase provided a material benefit, it did not restore the purchasing power already lost.

The government has made repayment manageable for the treasury and delinquent employers while retaining low pension floors and a fixed adjustment ceiling for workers, placing the long-term cost of fiscal management on those with the least remaining power to replace lost income.

Share

Cairo Chamber says billet tariffs have halted some rolling mills

Update: Cairo Chamber president and Ashry Steel chair Ayman El-Ashry said the billet tariffs had affected 22 rolling mills, stopped some from producing, and harmed their workers.

El-Ashry added that the mills had formally asked the Industry Ministry to regulate raw material flows between producers but received no response.

He didn’t, however, provide a factory list, employment figures, or evidence showing whether idle workers retained their wages. His own group’s Estar factory remains the only currently identifiable stoppage, with workers previously found standing idle across three production lines because the plant had no billet to process.

Interestingly enough, the figure of 22 is not a new count of affected factories. Rolling mill owners used the same number in 2019 after Egypt imposed an earlier billet tariff, before claiming in January 2020 that 20 of the 22 had stopped completely.

Nonetheless, Egypt’s total rebar production rose by 13.4% to 4.4 million tonnes during the first half of 2026, which points to an uneven redistribution of production toward integrated companies rather than a collapse across the entire industry.

A government investigation last year documented falling sales and profits among billet producers, yet their employment increased 4% in 2024. Decision 121/2026 requires a quarterly review of the tariff’s effects on related industries, but, so far, no review has been made public.

The state has thus protected one section of industrial capital and offered new licenses to another, while leaving workers’ income and employment contingent on a supply dispute in which they have no representation or enforceable wage guarantee.

Medical school admissions cut amid residency bottleneck

Egypt deliberately reduced public medical school admissions by about 10% while budget constraints delayed the appointment of three consecutive graduate cohorts, according to new reporting by Enterprise, revealing more details about the shift from near-universal public employment toward recruitment limited by government-defined need.

An unnamed government official told the outlet that raising the public university medicine cutoff from 93.12% to 94.06% produced the reduction. The decision followed recommendations from the Medical Syndicate and the committee coordinating health sector faculties, which warned that “universities were accepting more students than hospitals could train.”

Thresholds rose across those fields too: dentistry to 93.28%, physical therapy to 92.34%, and pharmacy to 92.03%.

The syndicate’s position on the underlying rationale is on the record in a September 2 statement responding to Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly’s directive on medical college teaching hospitals.

It welcomed Madbouly’s move to accelerate teaching-hospital construction at private universities and to act against universities ignoring regulatory standards, framing it as consistent with a position it says it has pressed for years: that a college shouldn’t open or admit students without a functioning teaching hospital, since that’s where students actually learn to examine patients, diagnose disease, and handle emergencies, which are skills, the syndicate argues, no lecture hall can substitute for.

It backed the idea of a temporary fix—letting universities build their own hospitals and train students at Health Ministry facilities under strict protocols—but only as a bridge, not a permanent substitute, and renewed its call to freeze new admissions at any college that hasn’t met the teaching-hospital requirement.

Where the statement gets pointed is in what it says Madbouly’s directive left out: branches of international universities running medical programs in Egypt that admit students with scores as low as 50%. The syndicate wants these branches held to the same bar as Egyptian private and national medical colleges, arguing that the standard for producing a qualified doctor should be identical “in every medical college operating inside Egypt, whatever its affiliation.”

The squeeze isn’t only theoretical for future applicants; it’s already landed on doctors who cleared every hurdle years ago. The syndicate has been in active, repeated negotiations through 2026 over delays and grievances tied to doctors’ mandatory assignment and residency-placement postings, as covered by The Cairo Report, including a third meeting in mid-August between syndicate leadership and representatives of the May 2026 residency cohort specifically to hear grievances after an appeals window opened.

Independent MP Mohamed Abdallah Zein El-Din, Deputy Chair of the House of Representatives’ Suggestions and Complaints Committee, submitted a parliamentary question to the Prime Minister and Minister of Health on August 30 regarding the assignment of graduates to remote areas, urging a reassessment of placement practices for fields like physiotherapy, medicine, and nursing, and called for transparency in allocation criteria, requesting suitable housing and transportation allowances for affected graduates.

The cabinet has yet to respond.

Prison Watch: EIPR warns EU of rights crises, ECRF launches campaign for forcibly disappeared & more renewals

The Supreme State Security Prosecution renewed the detention of filmmaker Omar Salah Marei for another 15 days, marking the ninth such renewal, in connection with State Security Case No. 3383 of 2026, his wife, Nora El-Sayed, stated on August 31.

A day earlier, marking the United Nations (UN) International Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearance, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) launched the “Stolen Time” campaign, demanding Egyptian authorities disclose the fate of more than 410 people the commission says remain forcibly disappeared.

The campaign, run under the banner #StopForcedDisappearance, focuses specifically on cases that have lasted longer than six months, up through cases exceeding ten years.

Since it began its work in 2015, the rights group says it has documented 5,150 people subjected to enforced disappearance in Egypt. It has confirmed the reappearance of 4,414 of them, leaving at least 410 whose fate remains unknown.

Of the 403 confirmed ongoing cases lasting more than six months, the campaign’s breakdown shows the scale skewing heavily toward the long term: 4 people disappeared between six months and a year, 4 more between one and two years, 22 between two and five years, 222 between five and ten years, and 151 for more than ten years. By the campaign’s own accounting, roughly 93% of documented ongoing cases have lasted more than five years.

This year’s campaign centers the stories of the long-term disappeared specifically and gives families a platform to share messages to missing relatives. It runs through the end of September, inviting participation through a petition addressed to the Egyptian government, submitted messages and stories, and campaign videos from activists and family members.

Meanwhile, Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), told the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights on September 2 that international economic and financial support for Egypt, along with recent diplomatic initiatives, has not improved the country’s human rights record, but deepened the crisis amid a rise in systematic violations.

Bahgat was speaking at a session convened to present findings from an official European Union (EU) parliamentary delegation’s visit to Egypt in July, led by subcommittee chair Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann’s counterpart, MEP Mounir Satouri.

EIPR’s presentation to the subcommittee outlined seven areas it says show Egypt’s human rights situation worsening over the past year, including political detentions and expanding indefinite pretrial detention continued, with thousands still held and new political arrests made, pretrial detention used as a tool against critical and opposition voices, and not a single presidential pardon issued for political prisoners over the past year.

It also mentioned the persistence of arbitrary measures against human rights defenders, including travel bans and asset freezes, imposed on three EIPR directors for close to six years, terrorism-list designations, and funding restrictions aimed at limiting independent civil society activity.

The rights group added that independent media sites remained blocked, alongside security prosecutions that keep Egypt near the bottom of international press freedom rankings.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Egypt 169th of 180 countries this past year, while the Committee to Protect Journalists has consistently listed Egypt among the world’s six worst jailers of journalists. Egypt ranked 135th of 142 countries on the rule of law index, 130th globally on Transparency International’s corruption index, and among the worst 10 countries on the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index.

Bahgat stated that as economic rights deteriorate, citizens continue to bear a heavy burden from rising inflation and the removal of subsidies on fuel and basic goods, while the state budget prioritizes debt repayment over spending on health, education, and wages. This, he said, has driven escalating labor protests.

Bahgat directly criticized a recent European Commission report which, he said, concluded, despite all of these neutral international indicators, that Egypt had made “tangible and credible steps” on human rights, steps the Commission said satisfied the precondition for releasing a new 1.5 billion euro tranche of a 5 billion euro loan this past July.

“Egypt is on a dangerous path. The systemic closure of legal and peaceful channels for dissent, organizing, expression, or political participation—compounded by acute poverty and stark inequality—is turning the country into a ticking time bomb,” Bahgat said. “This risk is particularly acute given that 60% of Egyptians are under the age of 30. This demographic majority has grown up under a ‘republic of fear,’ where life is defined by a constant struggle for survival and a total lack of future prospects.”

He concluded: “History teaches us that such conditions are the primary recipe for instability.”

Share

Warraq islanders reorganize against expropriation

Update: Warraq Island residents have agreed to enter a new round of talks with Egyptian authorities over the future of their homes on the Nile island, after officials presented a new proposal that could, in principle, allow all residents to remain on the island, the “We Are Staying on Warraq Island” movement stated on September 5, following a meeting the previous day.

The group said residents voted by a majority of those attending to select representatives to meet officials and discuss the new proposal.

The group reiterated that its primary demand remained “a house for a house,” meaning residents should be able to build replacement homes on the island when their existing houses are removed, rather than being required to relocate to apartments or housing outside the island.

The group’s statement said two residents, Sabry Shoukry Mansour and Ayman Abdel Sattar Rashed, had been tasked with selecting the representatives who would take part in the talks.

It said the meeting with officials should take place on the island and should be limited to those agreed upon by the residents. The group also said its representatives should discuss only issues previously agreed upon by the residents.

The next general meeting was scheduled for Friday, September 11, at 5:30 pm in the island’s coastal area, near al-Fath Mosque, according to the statement.

The decision to negotiate follows contact between Egyptian officials and several islanders, per a group statement on August 31.

The statement said an official responsible for the Warraq Island file had informed some residents that the state was preparing a new proposal concerning the island’s residents and that the proposal would need to be discussed with representatives chosen by the residents themselves.

According to three founding members of the “We Are Staying on Warraq Island” group cited by Al Manassa’s Beesan Kassab, officials from Egypt’s National Security had recently presented a proposal that would theoretically allow all residents of the island to remain there.

Under the proposal, residents of the island’s densely populated “residential block” could remain in their homes, while residents of the more dispersed “scattered” areas would reportedly have three options: alternative housing outside the island, apartments in government-built residential towers, or land on which they could build homes in areas within the residential block that have come under government ownership.

The proposal would is a departure from an earlier plan discussed by former New Warraq City Development Authority head Osama Shawky, Kassab reported. That plan envisaged retaining residents of the residential block on about 300 feddans while offering residents of the scattered areas apartments in government housing projects.

Residents rejected the previous proposal, according to the report.

The newer proposal would potentially allow residents of the scattered areas who want to stay on the island to obtain plots of land for construction within government-controlled areas of the residential block, or either leave the island or move into government-built apartments.

Such an arrangement could, in theory, allow the islanders to remain on their land. But two of the three sources cited by Al Manassa said implementation could face difficulties given the residential block’s limited size relative to the number of residents, particularly if large numbers of people from the scattered areas chose to remain.

Kassab reported that the proposal details were not debated at Friday’s residents’ meeting. Instead, the meeting focused on whether to enter negotiations with the state, with residents ultimately agreeing to talks and to the formation of a negotiating committee.

A date for the committee’s meeting with National Security officials had not been determined, according to Al Manassa, and the residents had not yet reached a final position on the proposal.

At an earlier mass meeting, residents had rejected negotiations with state officials unless the government first accepted their central demand of “a house for a house”, according to Kassab, who added that it also resolved that any negotiations accepted by residents should be conducted with representatives of the presidency, the cabinet, or the National Security. Residents rejected negotiations with the New Warraq City Development Authority.

Jumia turned the disability quota into a revolving door

Egypt’s disability rights law promises that companies of a certain size must keep at least 5% of their workforce disabled, and that workforce must be allowed to stay employed, not just be hired once for the paperwork. What happened to one blind employee at Jumia shows how easily that promise collapses when a company’s only real obligation is to shareholders.

According to a case documented by the ECRF, she was dismissed from Jumia three separate times since 2024, each time without written notice and through the same mechanism: her contract was simply allowed to lapse.

The ECRF says this isn’t an isolated grievance but a tactic it has tracked “in more than one establishment”. The company hires enough disabled workers to satisfy the quota at a single moment, often timed to a government hiring initiative and the good press that comes with it, then quietly lets the contracts run out one by one. Non-renewal requires no justification and no advance notice. The entire burden of proving discrimination, and the entire cost of litigating it, falls on the worker.

Per the law’s diction, a quota met once looks the same on paper as a quota maintained for years, and so only the worker on the other end of the “non-renewal” can tell the difference.

The timing here is not incidental either. Her 2025 dismissal landed the same year Jumia cut roughly 7% of its workforce. Her third dismissal, this year, followed a May 2026 announcement that Jumia would cut an initial 10% of its roughly 2,000-person workforce as it rolled out AI across operations, logistics, finance, and marketing, Asharq Business with Bloomberg reported at the time. CEO Francis Dufay told Bloomberg TV the cuts were mainly “driven by AI,” with automation replacing work that used to require people.

“Artificial intelligence” is fast-becoming the term management reaches for when it wants a headcount reduction to sound like technological inevitability rather than a choice. It is a useful term because it forecloses the question a labor reporter should always ask: cut for whose benefit, and at whose expense?

She joined Jumia in 2019 through a referral from the Nasr City labor office, part of a wave of disability hires the company made following joint events with government agencies, the kind of hiring campaign that generates a press cycle and an image of compliance.

In 2024, she and several disabled colleagues were told, while collecting their pay and with no prior warning, that their contracts had expired and would not be renewed. One colleague, the ECRF states, had a resignation attributed to her that she denies ever submitting. The group was reinstitated following a labor office complaint.

The same thing happened again in 2025, forcing several affected workers to travel to the New Capital just to pursue their complaints.

This year, she was dismissed a third time. She was told by phone that her pay was only a partial installment, then informed shortly after that her contract was over.

When the employee’s family made the case public, Jumia’s first move was not to explain itself but to threaten legal action against the family for what they had posted. Only afterward did the company offer to help her “find work” elsewhere, a move the ECRF says badly misreads the company’s own legal position. Jumia is not a staffing agency, but the employer, bound directly by Article 22 of Law No. 10 of 2018, and the quota is not satisfied by pointing a worker toward the door and another employer beyond it, the ECRF emphasized.

Egypt’s 2018 disability rights law requires employers of 20 or more staff to keep at least 5% of their workforce disabled, with violations fined under Article 54 and personal liability for company leadership under Article 57. The 2025 labor law’s Article 88 converts a repeatedly renewed fixed-term contract into a permanent one, which is directly relevant here, given a relationship stretching back to 2019 and reinstated more than once. Internationally, the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 159 (ratified by Egypt in 1988) frames the right at stake as retaining work, not merely obtaining it, and the UN disability rights convention bars discrimination in “continuance of employment” by name.

None of this enforces itself.

The ECRF is demanding that Jumia reinstate the dismissed worker with full back pay, and that the Ministry of Labor inspect the company’s actual disability employment levels and contract records. It is also demanding an investigation into the disputed resignation, protection for the worker and her family against retaliation, and a review by the National Council for Persons with Disabilities of every company that expanded disability hiring after a government campaign to check whether that hiring lasted longer than the photo op.

Even more bread martyrs

Update: A worker was killed and a companion injured in a collision on the international coastal road in Kafr El-Sheikh on September 3, per Masrawy—the latest in a run of workplace and commuting deaths that opened the month exactly as the one before it had closed.

The same day, a woman was killed, and four female farm workers were injured in a tuk-tuk accident in Menoufiya, and four workers were injured when a small truck carrying laborers collided with the sidewalk in ​​Gamasa city, Dakahliya. A day earlier, on September 2, a worker died after falling from scaffolding while on the job, also in Menoufiya, and a separate incident in Ismailia reportedly left a worker dead following an altercation over a transport vehicle, according to Youm7. Three days earlier, on August 29, a 16-year-old student and his father were assaulted at their shared workplace, with the student killed.

Egypt keeps no official monthly count of workers who die at work or while getting to it. The closest thing that exists is civil-society monitoring like the ECRF’s tally, and its August count makes clear the September opening week was a continuation of at least 51 worker deaths across 30 separate documented incidents in a single month. A tally that matches what The Cairo Report has been documenting for the past month.

The workers dying, in August and in the first days of September alike, are overwhelmingly in the informal and semi-formal economy—day laborers, farm hands, sanitation crews, construction workers—where enforcement of transport safety and workplace protection is thinnest. And the vehicles involved are overwhelmingly the same stopgap for the same unsolved problem. Workers ride in agricultural pickups, microbuses, and three-wheelers because no safer, subsidized transport exists to get them to work and back.

Meanwhile, all these workers have is a complaint hotline with the ECRF and a nascent campaign launched by the Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS).

Security Sector update:

State & Barracks

The Army’s Privileges on Land, Sea, and Air

This week’s issue includes reports on the army’s coastal land privileges, agribusiness, and luxurious air taxi venture, as well as land grabs and destruction of greenery in Giza, overseen by the military, joint drills with the Chinese air force, arms imports, prison deaths, and police extrajudicial killings…

Read more

a month ago · 3 likes · Hossam el-Hamalawy

So, what?!

The issue remains the absence of consequences strong enough to make employers and state agencies comply before workers lose income, health, housing, or their lives.

Across wages, pensions, safety, and job security, workers are left to enforce rights individually — through complaints, strikes, litigation, or public pressure — while companies and public bodies retain far greater room to delay, evade, or negotiate their obligations.

That imbalance is also the economic policy that keeps The New Republic’s export and investment model competitive by making insecurity cheap and by treating workers’ ability to survive as a cost to be managed rather than a right to be guaranteed.

Subscribe now

The argument over China’s export economy has hardened into three familiar positions. One, advanced in Foreign Affairs, warns that Chinese “overcapacity” could transmit deflation and industrial dislocation throughout the world. A second, expressed in Beijing’s official rebuttal, maintains that Western governments are relabeling Chinese productivity as unfair competition. A third sees an increasingly dangerous contest between American and Chinese mercantilism.

A recent breakthrough at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, USA, was in many ways more revealing than its participants intended. China prevented the adoption of a consensus communiqué, but every other member present endorsed a US-authored statement calling on countries with persistent surpluses to reduce their reliance on—mostly Chinese—exports.

In turn, China objected to the relevant sections, leaving Washington to issue a nonbinding chair’s statement. The result was the widest international alignment against China’s trade model that the United States has yet assembled.

One conventional reading is that Washington has begun turning its bilateral trade war into a multilateral one, which is correct, but incomplete. However, the most recent G20 matters for another reason, as the nations in the meeting seem to have publicly acknowledged a crisis of underconsumption while refusing to identify the social relation producing it.

Its proposed solution is to redistribute demand among states without redistributing power within them.

The G20 statement calls on surplus economies to remove policies that constrain domestic consumption. In the next sentence, it instructs deficit economies to increase savings and pursue fiscal consolidation. Elsewhere, it identifies regulation, labor market “frictions” and insufficient labor mobility as obstacles to growth, while repeatedly affirming the “leading role of private investment.”

Essentially, Chinese households are expected to consume more so that China becomes less reliant on foreign markets, while wage earners in deficit- and debt-ridden economies are expected to consume less so their governments can balance their budgets and service their debts. Everywhere, meanwhile, labor is expected to become more mobile and markets more accommodating to capital.

This strategy is incoherent in every sense. It is also the class logic of the proposed adjustment.

The G20 has recognized underconsumption only where it threatens the profitability and industrial position of other national capitals. It does not object to suppressed consumption as such, but it objects to the geopolitical distribution of its consequences.

China’s imbalance is nevertheless real. Its productive capacity has grown faster than domestic demand, while its goods surplus approached 1.2 trillion US dollars in 2025. When US tariffs restrict access to the American market, Chinese production is redirected toward Europe, South America, and the developing world. Governments facing stagnant growth understandably fear the loss of industries that cannot withstand the combination of Chinese scale, infrastructure, state credit, and technological advance.

But “overcapacity” is also too treacherous a term to use in this specific instance. There can be too many electric vehicles for profitable sale while there remain far too few affordable vehicles, batteries, and solar panels for a global ecological transition. Capitalism, of course, measures excess against effective demand rather than human need. The shortage may lie not in society’s use for the goods but in people’s purchasing power and in the absence of public systems capable of allocating production outside the market.

Beijing is also right that export success cannot be reduced to “low wages” or “subsidies,” as the US and the European Union (EU) suggest. Chinese industry has achieved genuine gains in productivity, logistics, engineering, and scale. Foreign capital has shared in much of those spoils.

According to China’s formal position paper, foreign-invested companies accounted for 27% of Chinese exports, 16% of its goods surplus in 2025, and the labor-intensive share of exports fell from 20.7% in 2012 to 15.1% in 2025.

The image of an economy competing solely through cheap labor is obsolete.

Nor should the preservation of Western manufacturers’ profit margins be confused with the defense of society, as low-cost Chinese capital goods can accelerate electrification and industrial development, particularly in countries that Western finance has supplied mainly with debt, austerity, and a program that simply makes clean technology scarcer and more expensive; protecting certain capitals at the expense of global development.

Yet Beijing’s defense avoids a central question: if Chinese productivity is so high, why must so much of its output find purchasers abroad?

Weak Chinese consumption is most commonly attributed to “consumer caution,” as if households had developed an unfortunate cultural preference for saving, but the more realistic explanation would obviously be material. Households receive too small a share of the output they produce, while inadequate pensions, healthcare, unemployment protection, and housing security compel precautionary saving.

Even the IMF’s recommended reforms implicitly concede the point. It proposes stronger social benefits, more progressive taxation, greater taxation of capital, and full urban status for migrant workers. The fund estimates that granting urban status to 200 million rural migrants could by itself raise consumption by 0.6% of GDP, and a 2024 Rhodium Group study similarly concluded that low household income and its unequal distribution—not merely high saving—constrain spending.

In other words, China’s external surplus is partly the international expression of an internal class settlement.

That settlement has produced achievements that any serious discussion cannot dismiss. China’s transformation brought modern infrastructure, technological capability and an enormous rise in living standards.

In 2022, the World Bank estimated that nearly 800 million people escaped its historical extreme poverty threshold over four decades, and these outcomes distinguish China from the neoliberal stagnation imposed on much of the developing world.

But development has not, in any way, given workers democratic authority over accumulation. The Chinese state bureaucracy directs credit and protects strategic industries, yet wage earners do not collectively determine investment, wages, or the disposition of the surplus.

The hukou system, for instance, still divides the labor force by access to social provision. In the first half of 2026, China had 192.3 million rural migrant workers, while enterprise employees averaged 48.2 hours of work a week, which is about five hours above the global average.

Labor representation remains institutionally confined to the official union structure—the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU)—rather than independent organizations.

The brutality of this model is bureaucratically organized: long hours, migrant inequality, and workplace discipline are inputs into national development, all of which contribute to real accomplishments, without ever converting state direction into workers’ power.

A genuine rebalancing would therefore require a transfer of income and authority toward labor in the form of higher wages, shorter hours without lost pay, universal services, equal rights for migrant workers, and organizations capable of contesting managerial and state decisions.

Beijing hesitates because such reforms would not merely change the composition of GDP, but they would alter the balance of class power on which the accumulation model rests.

However, recognizing China as capitalist does not make it equivalent to the United States.

The US still commands the financial architecture of the world economy, maintains an unparalleled alliance system, and possesses coercive capacities far beyond China’s. In 2025, the US accounted for roughly one-third of global military expenditure, compared with China’s 12%, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and its arbitrary sanctions, export controls, and control of strategic technologies can impose costs far beyond its territory.

Also, Washington’s campaign is not the self-defense of an innocent free market economy against an intrusive state that unfairly subsidizes its industry. The US finances research, subsidizes semiconductors, uses military procurement to sustain industry, and closes markets when its technological leadership is threatened. Its objection is not to state intervention but to the success of a rival state’s intervention.

American capitalism administers its own form of brutality and violence. Communities have been exposed to deindustrialization as corporations moved production in search of lower costs, while labor law and employer resistance helped reduce US union membership to 10 percent of workers in 2025, with private sector membership at 5.9%.

The same state now invokes those abandoned communities to legitimize tariffs without restoring the organizations through which workers could control the protected industries.

China, by contrast, is a later-rising capitalist power whose industrial strength emerged from a revolution that destroyed the old landed order, created substantial public capacity, and was followed decades later by capitalist restoration under continued party-state rule. It does not possess the global privileges accumulated by the United States, but in much of the so-called “Global South,” it can provide investment, machinery, and diplomatic room unavailable under Western dominance.

Yet subordinate origins do not make every subsequent expansion emancipatory. Chinese firms pursue markets, profit, and strategic advantage; the state secures access to resources and trade routes—often at a brutal cost—while workers remain excluded from sovereign authority over production. China is neither an equal replica of the American empire nor is it a socialist alternative to it. It is a rising state-organized capitalism confronting a still-dominant imperial one.

The rivalry is obviously unequal, but its costs can still be mutual—and they will be pushed downward.

Tariffs can sometimes preserve a plant, create bargaining space for industrial policy, or prevent the destruction of strategically necessary capacity because “free trade” is not a neutral principle.

The “liberal” order managed to successfully integrate production by allowing capital to search the world for weaker unions and worker representation, lower wages, repressive work environments, and cheaper resources.

But tariffs are also not inherently pro-worker. So the relevant question is not whether trade is restricted, but who controls the protection and receives its benefits.

In 2023, a US International Trade Commission study found that American importers bore nearly the full cost of the tariffs imposed from 2018 to 2021. Steel protection increased domestic production, but higher input prices reduced output in downstream industries, ultimately creating winners and losers within American capital while passing substantial costs to consumers and producers.

The greatest danger may lie outside the countries writing the rules.

If wealthy economies close their markets, Chinese producers will redirect exports and relocate assembly toward states with cheaper labor or preferential access to Western consumers. Developing countries will be courted as industrial partners while simultaneously being used as outlets for displaced production.

Egypt offers a preview.

During the first half of 2026, it imported 10.4 billion dollars in goods from China while exporting 840.8 million dollars. Machinery and electrical equipment made up 4.1 billion dollars of the imports, but vehicles, steel, plastics, and chemicals also entered in large quantities, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) figures.

Cheap machinery can expand Egyptian productive capacity; finished imports can eliminate Egyptian jobs. Chinese investment can transfer technology—or become an enclave based on subsidized land, weak labor protections, and assembly for re-export.

Yet the G20 simultaneously advises deficit countries to consolidate their budgets. The implied division of labor is perverse: China should raise demand to reduce its surplus, while indebted peripheral economies should suppress demand to satisfy creditors.

This is a classical imperial hierarchy of consumption where the strongest states debate how global demand should be distributed, while weaker ones are instructed to make themselves cheaper.

Wage earners are not missing from production so much as they are from power.

Most G20 states have correctly perceived that the world economy cannot indefinitely absorb production through one country’s exports and another’s debt. But it remains incapable of proposing the obvious solution: give the people who produce the world’s wealth a larger claim on it and authority over how it is used.

Share

The Egyptian Football Association’s (EFA) support for Gianni Infantino during FIFA’s current governance crisis defends an institutional order Egypt helped construct.

After opposition from European, Asian, and South American confederations forced FIFA to abandon its plan to place major commercial rights in a new company and sell a 20% stake to private investors, the EFA praised Infantino’s retreat as evidence of “true leadership” and renewed its confidence in him.

EFA president Hany Abo Rida then joined five other Arab federation heads in an August 13 statement backing Infantino. The Confederation of African Football’s (CAF) executive committee had already announced its “unanimous” support, although a source familiar with the meeting who spoke with The Cairo Report under the condition of anonymity said “only three or four officials spoke explicitly in the FIFA president’s favor,” and that “Egypt is one of his main backers, if not his main backer, in Africa.”

The wider story, however, is that since Infantino became FIFA president in 2016, Egyptian institutions have helped remove one CAF president, dismantled its long-term commercial rights agreement, and embedded FIFA personnel inside its administration.

In return, FIFA invested at least 6.65 million US Dollars in the EFA’s headquarters and technical center, gave Egyptian officials continued access to its governing bodies, and considered Egypt within the Saudi-led effort to secure hosting the World Cup.

A recent Politico investigation placed a little-known Italian lawyer, Mario Gallavotti, at the center of Infantino’s political operations, including FIFA’s intervention in CAF, the organization’s Saudi relationship, and contacts surrounding Egypt’s monopoly case against Qatar’s beIN Sports.

Yet Egypt’s role predates Gallavotti’s arrival in Infantino’s office. Cairo was already helping reshape CAF’s leadership.

Share

In 2017, Infantino and the EFA worked toward the removal of Issa Hayatou, who had controlled CAF for 29 years and had been the subject of multiple corruption scandals.

Hayatou had supported Bahrain’s Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa against Infantino in FIFA’s 2016 presidential election, and his choice weakened his position after Infantino won and contributed to the emergence of Madagascar federation president Ahmad Ahmad as a challenger.

Egypt supplied much of Ahmad’s African campaign machinery. Following the vote, Abo Rida said the EFA had backed Ahmad “with the Egyptian government’s support” and described the result as proof that Egypt had “recovered its power in Africa.”

Ahmad spoke to Egyptian media after the win and said that “Abo Rida had a huge role” in helping him defeat Hayatou.

Infantino publicly denied supporting either candidate before the election. Abo Rida subsequently acknowledged that the FIFA president had “operated behind the scenes” to remove Hayatou.

Ahmad won by 34 votes to 20. The result removed one of Infantino’s most powerful opponents and replaced him with an official whose campaign depended on the FIFA president’s allies.

The FIFA ethics committee later investigated Infantino and secretary general Fatma Samoura for improperly influencing the election. Senior African officials alleged that the duo privately offered to accelerate FIFA development payments if federation presidents supported Ahmad.

Nonetheless, the result strengthened Abo Rida. Less than two months later, he was rewarded with a seat on the FIFA Council, winning 50 votes to his opponents’ four.

Infantino gained a friendlier CAF administration, and Egypt gained a stronger broker inside FIFA.

Ahmad’s administration soon became engulfed in allegations of financial misconduct and sexual harassment.

In March 2019, Amr Fahmy, then-secretary general of CAF and cofounder of Ultras Ahlawy, filed a complaint with FIFA against Ahmad, alleging bribery, misuse of funds, and harassment. Shortly after this complaint, CAF dismissed Fahmy from his position. Later that June, French authorities questioned Ahmad regarding a sportswear contract, but he denied any wrongdoing.

CAF’s executive committee then asked FIFA to intervene, and a joint statement appointed Samoura as FIFA’s general delegate for Africa between August 2019 and January 2020. FIFA also commissioned a forensic audit.

Her authority covered CAF’s operational management, governance, administrative procedures, and competitions.

Gallavotti accompanied Samoura to Cairo and was described as “one of her principal collaborators.” At the time, he administered the secretariats supporting FIFA’s disciplinary, appeal, audit, and ethics committees.

A regional official later told Politico that Gallavotti “appeared to control the confederation between 2018 and 2021,” despite holding no CAF position.

Share

Gallavotti remained visible in Cairo.

In October 2019, he spoke at an International Association of Football Lawyers congress alongside CAF deputy secretary general Anthony Baffoe, CAF’s head of compliance, and former sports minister Ashraf Sobhy.

The promised audit, conducted by PwC, reportedly found missing documentation, “highly suspicious transactions,” and misuse of CAF’s development funds. FIFA declared the mission successful but never published the full report.

FIFA’s ethics committee eventually banned Ahmad for financial misconduct. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) later reduced the sanction from five years to two.

FIFA had entered CAF as Egypt was simultaneously dismantling the confederation’s most important commercial agreement.

CAF had extended French agency Lagardère Sports’ control over its leading media and marketing rights from 2017 through 2028. Lagardère, in turn, gave those rights to Qatar’s beIN Sports, and the guaranteed value was approximately 1 billion dollars.

The Egyptian Competition Authority (ECA) said CAF renewed the agreement without an open tender, bundled competitions and territories, restricted broadcast technologies, and prevented other Egyptian companies from competing. Its submission to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) described the arrangement as an “abuse of CAF’s dominant position.”

As the case was taking place, Egypt had joined the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, and the interests of Egyptian broadcasting companies seeking African rights later fitted the regional confrontation with Qatar.

Egypt’s General Intelligence-owned Sports United, then-named Presentation Sports, initially sought a Middle East and North Africa sublicense from Lagardère. After those rights went to beIN, Sports United offered CAF 1.2–1.25 billion dollars for the global package.

However, that offer came after CAF had already awarded the rights to beIN.

CAF cancelled its Lagardère contract in November 2019, during FIFA’s Cairo mission. It cited the Egyptian regulator, Egyptian judgments, and parallel regional competition proceedings.

At the time, Qatari officials raised concerns with FIFA about Gallavotti’s contacts with Egyptian regulators, according to Politico.

Lagardère later contested the termination, and CAF ultimately paid the company a 50 million dollar settlement.

For a while, Egyptian law had managed to break the old rights system.

African football absorbed the financial liability. Meanwhile, Egypt’s domestic media and sports market was becoming more concentrated around the security state.

The FIFA mission ended on January 31, 2020. Less than two weeks later, Egypt and CAF signed a new headquarters agreement.

The agreement retained CAF in Cairo for 10 years with automatic renewal. Parliament approved it, and President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi ratified it through Presidential Decree 149 of 2020.

CAF received international legal personality, immunity, and privileges similar to those granted to diplomatic missions and international organizations. Egypt undertook to provide services and tax and customs exemptions.

In December 2023, CAF, the Sports Ministry and the Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD) agreed to construct a new headquarters in the New Administrative Capital.

Sisi personally ordered the headquarters built by the military-owned ACUD.

FIFA separately financed the EFA complex in 6^th of October City, which Infantino inaugurated in 2021, and FIFA now presents it as a regional hub for African football administration.

These assets sit within a domestic system that controls nearly every point of contact with Egyptian football.

Tazkarti, the only platform through which supporters can obtain match tickets and biometric Fan IDs, belongs to intelligence-owned United Media Services (UMS), which Sports United, that controls major broadcast, commercial and advertising rights, and Estadat that manages stadiums, are subsidiaries of, while ACUD sponsors the national team.

Share

Gallavotti’s Saudi work adds another layer to Egypt’s value.

According to Politico, he arranged talks between Italian and Saudi football officials in Rome in April 2021 over a joint 2030 World Cup bid, which Egypt was also a part of. Saudi Arabia needed partners from other confederations because Qatar had hosted the 2022 tournament, and FIFA’s rotation rules presented an obstacle to another Asian World Cup eight years later.

Italy ultimately rejected the plan and Italian federation president Gabriele Gravina later said political tensions surrounding the kidnapping, torture and killing of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni in Egypt by state security officers, alongside concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights records, made the proposed coalition untenable.

The rejection is said to have damaged Italy’s relationship with Infantino’s administration. Riyadh then explored a different combination with Egypt and Greece, with the Saudi capital reportedly offering to finance new stadiums in Egypt and Greece in exchange for staging approximately 75% of the tournament in Saudi Arabia.

The plan was later abandoned in 2023, as Saudi Arabia pursued the 2034 tournament alone and received its hosting rights, alongside the unopposed 2030 bid by Morocco, Spain, and Portugal.

Gallavotti also helped develop FIFA’s commercial relationship with the Saudi state. That relationship now includes a four-year Aramco sponsorship covering the 2026 men’s and 2027 women’s World Cups.

Abo Rida, meanwhile, became the vice president of the Saudi-based Union of Arab Football Associations, connecting FIFA’s African voting base to Saudi’s sports diplomacy and soft power projection.

The method used to remove Hayatou reappeared in a rather more direct form when CAF chose Ahmad’s successor.

Abo Rida announced in November 2020 that he would not seek the CAF presidency, despite claiming that he received support from several federation heads. He instead pursued another FIFA Council term, all for the sake of “keeping Egypt’s seat at the table,” according to his statement.

Infantino then brokered an agreement under which Augustin Senghor, Ahmed Yahya, and Jacques Anouma withdrew for South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe. Senghor and Yahya received CAF vice-presidencies, while Anouma was offered an advisory role.

Anouma initially called the arrangement undemocratic, before he was given the position of Motsepe’s “special adviser.”

Motsepe entered office unopposed in 2021 and won another uncontested term in Cairo in March 2025, with FIFA describing his re-election as evidence of CAF’s “unity and strong collaboration with FIFA.”

That unity was constructed in part through negotiated withdrawals, development finance, public assets, and officials moving between FIFA, CAF, and national federations.

It is important to note, however, that CAF’s 54 votes do not belong automatically to Infantino or any one individual official, and neither Egypt nor Motsepe can guarantee every secret ballot. Corruption in African football has been rampant for decades.

But Cairo provides much of the infrastructure through which African football is governed.

The costs are spread more widely, of course. For example, CAF’s associations carried the Lagardère settlement after Egyptian authorities brought forward a lawsuit—one that was, at least in part, politically motivated.

The immediate beneficiaries are clearer: Egypt’s state-linked and intelligence-owned sports companies and the officials positioned between them, FIFA’s leadership, CAF’s administration, and regional football diplomacy.

Egypt is not a passive recipient of FIFA patronage. It supplied electoral alliances and regulatory pressure and also consolidated corporate intermediaries and public property that helped build Infantino’s African order.

Similarly, Infantino’s order required governments willing to finance infrastructure, associations dependent on development funds, commercial rights that could be centralized, and local brokers capable of assembling votes and state support.

Thus, the EFA is now defending the system from which it gained its position, and the material arrangements that made that position possible.

Share

The cost of delivering wheat to Egypt reached a record $301/tonne (15,000 Egyptian pounds) on August 26, as Russian shipments collapsed and a queue of up to 70 vessels formed along Ukraine’s alternative Danube route.

The new benchmark was $16 (800 pounds), or 5.6%, above the $285 delivered cost recorded on August 20 and $55–57, or 22–23%, above the price covered by The Cairo Report last week.

Egyptian buyers were bidding $300/tonne, while sellers wanted $305–306. Most trades that could realistically be executed were being offered through Russia’s Baltic ports, with freight in the low to mid-$40s, rather than through the cheaper but impaired Black Sea route.

Russian wheat itself remained priced at $215/tonne before freight. The resulting $86 gap between the crop’s nominal export value and its delivered Egyptian price measures what buyers must now pay to secure a cargo that can be loaded, insured, and moved.

The previous increase came from a sudden rise in freight, but the latest one reflects a wider problem. A cheap offer at an unavailable terminal is no longer setting the Egyptian market, and wheat that can complete the voyage is.

“For now, we’re just waiting and not buying,” one Egyptian buyer said.

The record price does not immediately threaten the state’s subsidized bread program, however, because its effects are reaching the private wheat market first.

Market participants estimated that privately held wheat stocks covered only one month, or approximately 500,000 tonnes, while state stocks covered about six months following the domestic purchase of 4.72 million tonnes from Egyptian farmers. The government has therefore refrained from buying wheat internationally since the start of the current marketing year in July.

Documents obtained last week by Al Manassa show how that protection was built up. Egypt imported 8.18 million tonnes in the first eight months of 2026, up 1.41 million tonnes, or 21%, from 6.77 million during the same period last year.

But the increase was concentrated before the present disruption. Wheat arrivals in July and August fell to 480,000 tonnes, down 1.47 million tonnes, or 75.4%, from 1.95 million a year earlier, receiving much less once traditional routes were disrupted.

Egyptian importers of Russian wheat faced an estimated replacement loss of 1,100 pounds on each tonne bought at the latest international price.

The broader import price reached 16,250 pounds per tonne, up 2,000 pounds, or 14%, from 14,250 pounds in July. Flour prices rose by the same nominal amount to between 18,000 and 25,000 pounds, depending on quality, according to Al Manassa.

The national reserve and the commercial supply chain are therefore moving on different timetables, as the state continues drawing from wheat procured before the shipping crisis, while private importers must replace what mills use at today’s price.

The Russian side of the disruption has become easier to measure since last week.

Russia shipped just 62,000 tonnes of wheat to Egypt between August 11 and 20, almost eight times less than during the same period last year, and Cairo fell to fourth place among buyers during those 10 days, behind Bangladesh, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

The contraction was broader than the Egyptian route. Russian wheat reached eight countries during the period, compared with 28 a year earlier, and just seven exporters shipped wheat, down from 36, while grain moved through eight ports instead of 29.

The collapse occurred as Russian wheat became cheaper due to a surplus in the country’s domestic markets. Prices at the Port of Novorossiysk fell $4 to $220/tonne, while French wheat rose $3 to $265, and US wheat increased $11 to $281.

Prices paid to Russian producers fell 20% from the beginning of the season.

The wheat was accumulating behind the ports, pushing down what farmers and inland traders could receive, as the price to get the wheat to Egypt moved in the opposite direction.

Share

Restoring the previous route will also take longer than the Russian government initially indicated. The Novorossiysk Grain Processing Plant, or NKHP, estimated that restoring its export loading capacity could take between one and four months.

An August 12 attack on the Russian port damaged specialized structures and equipment used to load customers’ grain.

NKHP, the Novorossiysk Grain Terminal and KSK previously handled about one-third of Russia’s grain exports, and a four-month repair period would extend the disruption beyond the peak post-harvest shipping window and through the end of 2026.

The disruption has also affected inland contracts, as Russia’s National Commodity Exchange extended two wheat deals until October 5 after a seller documented its inability to dispatch the grain by rail, citing restrictions on cargo deliveries to Novorossiysk and damage to port infrastructure.

The Russian government then approved more than 9.5 billion rubles for subsidized rail transport of agricultural products. State grain company OZK said the funding would help redirect cargo through other ports and land crossings amid the “closure of key export routes.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s alternative route has not closed, but it has become crowded, slow, and expensive.

Between 50 and 70 vessels were waiting near Romania’s Sulina Canal on August 25 for access to Ukrainian Danube ports. Only two or three ships could pass towards those ports each day, while delays cost owners as much as $8,000 per vessel per day, Reuters reported.

Ukraine exported 539,000 tonnes of grain between August 1 and 21, down 1.19 million tonnes, or 68.8%, from 1.73 million a year earlier, while rail deliveries to the Danube increased elevenfold from July as traders diverted cargo from the Greater Odesa ports.

The additional trains carried more grain to a maritime exit that could not process ships at the same rate, and each day spent waiting was then added to the eventual freight charge, whether the cargo was sold to Egypt or another buyer.

Ukraine and Romania, attempting to ease the costly delays, agreed on August 28 to establish a “joint coordination center” for vessel traffic, increase Romanian customs and border teams, and continue work on night navigation through Sulina.

Still, the route remains exposed to attacks. On August 29, a Russian strike on the Izmail district in Odesa killed one person, injured three, destroyed five grain trucks, and damaged three more.

Two days earlier, the Progress IV vessel caught fire and sank about 15 nautical miles from Romania’s Sfântu Gheorghe branch of the Danube.

The vessel was sailing towards Turkey, and Romanian President Nicușor Dan said it “appeared to have been struck” but cautioned against attributing the incident before an investigation established the cause.

Its sinking nevertheless moved the security question beyond vessels entering a Russian or Ukrainian port, as the ship went down in Romania’s exclusive economic zone, along the approach used by vessels serving the Danube alternative.

Al Manassa had reported that Egyptian buyers were resorting to French shipments to replace delayed or canceled Russian and Ukrainian cargoes.

Of the two cited shipments, the Nana Leen, at the time of publishing, had reached La Pallice on France’s Atlantic coast and was still at anchor, while the second vessel, the Genoa, was still sailing towards the port and is expected to arrive on the afternoon of August 31.

Each ship was scheduled to load approximately 30,000 tonnes of French wheat for Egypt.

However, the two vessels are Handysize bulk carriers, and Egypt’s French wheat imports are often shipped aboard larger Panamax vessels, typically carrying around 60,000 tonnes or more.

The Nana Leen, built in 1995, can carry 28,754 tonnes, while the 2005-built Genoa has a capacity of 33,745 tonnes and recently called at Damietta in June.

If both cargoes load and arrive, their combined 60,000 tonnes would cover about 12% of the private sector’s estimated monthly wheat requirement, equivalent to roughly 3.6 days of consumption.

As for the clearest commodity data available at Damietta, the port held 30,379 tonnes of wheat on August 30, including 8,021 tonnes in its public-sector silo and 22,358 tonnes in private warehouses.

The balance was down 15,685 tonnes, or 34.1%, from 46,064 tonnes on August 24, falling by 37,841 tonnes, or 55.5%, from 68,220 tonnes on August 20, and by 107,654 tonnes, or 78%, from 138,033 tonnes on July 31.

Most of the latest decrease occurred in the public silo, whose balance fell 62.5% between August 24 and 30, while the privately owned wheat balance declined 9.5%.

At the same time, the shutdown has spread from grain terminals to the container trade connecting Egypt with Russia.

On August 27, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) stopped accepting new bookings to and from Novorossiysk after the MSC Ulsan III was struck while approaching the Russian port.

MSC’s Black Sea String B normally begins in Alexandria and ends in Novorossiysk. It carried 25,352 containers during the past three months, with an average voyage of eight days, but its service profile now lists no deployed vessel.

The direct trade carries Egyptian goods north and Russian goods south mainly through FESCO’s Alexandria–Novorossiysk service, which transports Egyptian fruit and refrigerated produce to Russia, and returns with containerized lumber, fertilizer and pulses.

The government currently holds enough wheat to postpone buying at the record high price, but private mills do not. They encounter the record price as their existing stocks reach the end of their one-month coverage.

Russian producers face the reverse problem as their crop loses value because exporters cannot reach enough ships or terminals.

But as the government continues considering a transition from subsidized bread and food entitlements to a fixed cash value, households will be exposed to changes in wheat and freight prices.

The new record provides a subsequent test of that argument.

Wheat delivered to Egypt became another 5.6% more expensive in six days, and so far, no cash subsidy proposal by the government contains a mechanism requiring the fixed payments to rise with it when the switch eventually happens.

If you have not read it yet, check out this week’s labor dispatch from The Cairo Report:

Subscribe now

This issue of The Cairo Report follows the government’s slashing of corporate social insurance down payments to 5% to preserve factory cash flow, while leaving tens of thousands of pensioners to navigate bureaucratic gridlock for basic subsistence.

We cover the institutional maneuvering behind investors seeking an administrative veto over workers changing jobs, new private sector workplace regulations that preserve management’s unilateral power to write workplace regimes, and a public food holding subsidiary paying workers 41% below the statutory minimum wage.

Meanwhile, Giza’s waste collectors are forced to buy back discarded plastic bottles and aluminum cans from municipal recycling machines to sustain their livelihoods, four teenage and young workers are hospitalized after cooling failures inside an export-oriented packhouse, and the government quietly cuts subsidized fertilizer by another 600,000 tons to safeguard gas-squeezed corporate margins.

We also report on the release of an East Delta unionist after 874 days in pretrial detention, thousands of Warraq islanders defying administrative silence to defend their homes, and another round of arbitrary detentions targeting labor advocates and dissidents.

Share

Investors revive decades-old effort to curb workers’ movement

Egyptian investor associations are preparing proposals for the Ministry of Labor that would restrict workers’ movement between factories, including requiring clearance from a worker’s current employer before another factory can hire them and expanding contractual obligations after going through employer-funded training.

A report by Al Borsa’s Amal Saadawi on August 23 documents a dispute among employers over whether Egypt’s shortage of skilled industrial labor should be addressed by increasing its supply and improving factory jobs, or by limiting workers’ ability to accept better offers.

The restrictive position came most clearly from Magd ElDin Ismail El Manzalawi, who heads the Industry & Scientific Research Committee at the Egyptian Businessmen’s Association and is the chairman of Tiba Manzalawi Group. El Manzalawi called for the Ministry of Labor to establish a system under which a factory would require clearance from the worker’s former employer before hiring them, while also calling for changes to employment contracts to “protect the money factories spend on training.”

Other employer representatives rejected that approach. Alaa El Sakty, deputy head of the Egyptian Federation of Investors Associations and head of its small and medium enterprises (SMEs) investors association, called instead for a national labor database. Mohamed El Morshedy, chair of the Obour Investors Association and owner of El Morshedy Spinning, Weaving, and Textiles, said that “factories should retain workers through fair wages, incentives, and stable conditions.” Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) head Abdel Moneim el Gamal also rejected restrictions and defended workers’ right to choose jobs offering better pay and greater security.

The employers advocating restrictions describe the problem as “labor poaching,” but their own accounts show workers responding to competition in the free markets they preach.

Abdel Ghany El Abasiry, chair of the May 15 Investors Association, said new factories around Ain Sokhna attract trained workers by offering higher salaries, accommodation and weekly transport. Meanwhile, Mohamed Hanno, an adviser to the chairman of the Alexandria Business Association, raised a different point, saying that “the distance between industrial zones and residential areas consumes a significant share of workers’ incomes” through transport costs.

In other words, workers are using a shortage of industrial skills to improve the price at which they sell their labor, which businessmen are irked by, and are now looking to pressure the government to put into law an employer-issued clearance that would weaken that leverage by allowing the factory offering the inferior package to obstruct a worker’s move to a competitor.

The legal argument for additional protection of training investment should, going by the country’s own laws, be void. Article 95 of the labor law already requires a worker trained at an employer’s expense to remain for the agreed period. A worker leaving earlier can, in some cases, be required to repay the training cost, and the provision sets no statutory floor or ceiling on the agreed period or formula for calculating the cost.

But the same law regulates departure in other ways, as workers on open-ended contracts must normally provide three months’ written notice. Yet Article 175 treats clearance as something the former employer must give a departing worker immediately upon request, alongside returning their documents and issuing an employment certificate. It does not make clearance a form of permission to obtain another job, which the investors are keen to apply.

Making that document a hiring condition would reverse its function because a certificate that the former employer is required to provide is at best an administrative veto over the worker’s next employment, and at worst a tool for employer retaliation.

The present campaign revives an employer demand that dates back at least two decades. During the expansion of garment exports under the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) agreement, which gives Egyptian firms duty-free access to US markets under the condition that their products incorporate a mandatory minimum share of Israeli inputs, manufacturers complained that rising demand had produced a “war” over trained workers. In 2006, the late Nagy Abdelaziz reported for Al Masry Al Youm that labor demand in textiles and garments had increased by 20–25%, while a government-backed program had trained only 1,150 of the 8,600 workers initially sought.

Employers then complained that Labor Law No. 12 of 2003 contained no provision limiting a worker’s movement after training, and the deputy chair of the 10^th of Ramadan Investors Association called for a “binding covenant among investors to restrict or restrict movement between factories.” At the time, one garment industry representative accused labor contractors of diverting entire busloads of workers to other plants, including a Turkish factory offering the contractor a higher commission.

Yet the report also stated plainly that workers moved between factories in search of higher wages.

The same structural explanations have also persisted. In 2008, textile industry representatives attributed “labor poaching” to declining wages, limited training and the failure to connect technical education to factory needs, while calling for expanded government-funded training programs. Similar reporting reappeared in 2017; this time, Al-Ahram’s Milad Youssef quoted an investor as saying, “factories poached trained workers from one another by raising salaries.”

At the same time, industrial housing has moved far more slowly. For instance, the 10^th of Ramadan Investors Association was tendering infrastructure for a 25-feddan worker-housing project as early as 2010. Fifteen years later, the association said the project was “more than 95% complete” but still faced “disputes over water charges and other services.”

In reality, an “employer clearance” requirement would solve none of the problems these investors are facing. It would instead strip workers of the little leverage over their labor, as workers can presently use competition between factories to obtain higher wages, housing or transport.

Twenty years after investors first sought a voluntary pact against “labor poaching,” some are now asking the Labor Ministry to provide an administrative mechanism. And with the law already allowing employers to recover training costs in some cases, the new demand is less about protecting an otherwise unprotected investment than about whether a worker should need one employer’s cooperation to accept a better offer from another.

Giza’s bottle machines make collectors buy back their livelihood

Egypt’s traditional waste collection system rests on an implicit bargain. Collectors remove household waste for little or no public payment and derive most of their income from sorting and selling reusable material. Some households pay small collection fees, while licensed contractors may receive limited contractual payments. But sales of plastic, aluminum, cardboard and other dry waste finance workers, vehicles and fuel.

Giza disrupted that arrangement last week when it installed machines in Dokki that accept plastic bottles and aluminum cans in exchange for money or mobile phone credit. Those are among the most valuable components of household waste, and once residents deliver them separately, collectors still remove food, diapers and contaminated material, but lose part of the income that finances the service.

The Giza governorate agreed on August 25 to give the area’s waste contractor a provisional claim over the machines’ contents, after workers warned that the pilot threatened their livelihoods and threatened to strike in the areas where machines were installed.

Shehata El-Moqaddas, who heads the waste collectors’ union, said the negotiations involved Local Development and Environment Minister Manal Awad, the Waste Management Regulatory Authority and Giza officials. Under the mechanism he described, a district representative will record the machines’ counters each day before the contractor buys the collected material for the amount credited to residents. The district would then issue a receipt, and the contractor would resell the bottles and cans to recycling factories.

Giza confirmed that the contractor would empty the machines and supply their contents to recycling factories, adding that the two Dokki machines are a pilot that “must be evaluated before nationwide expansion.”

The machines award one point for a small bottle and two for a large bottle or can, with every 100 points worth 10 Egyptian pounds ($0.20). Giza said “companies, sponsors and civil society institutions” would finance the rewards rather than the government. By comparison, El-Moqaddas estimated that operating one collection vehicle costs about 1,500 pounds a day.

The compromise may leave contractors a margin between the machine price and the recycling-factory price. It also requires them, according to El-Moqaddas’s account, to buy material they previously received through their collection routes, but there is no basis for concluding that the agreement preserves their previous income.

This is, however, an old conflict in a new machine. Cairo’s 2017 waste-buying kiosks paid residents for dry recyclables while leaving collectors responsible for the remaining waste, and at the time, El-Moqaddas said serving an apartment cost around 50 pounds a month, while collectors received 5–10 pounds and recovered the difference through recyclable sales. Two years later, the kiosk network fell from 26 outlets to 12 amid declining scrap prices and rising district fees.

Even the “Can Bank” machine now used in Dokki was initially presented as compatible with collectors’ work, and its Egyptian developer, ZeroPrime Technologies, was described in a 2019 puff piece as building machines that could produce sorted material for collectors to sell to factories. The government launched three similar machines in the New Capital in June 2026 and described them as a precursor to national expansion.

The settlement protects the licensed area contractor more clearly than the wider workforce. The government says that “the initiative is part of the governorate’s efforts to curb the phenomenon of nabashin,” or scavengers, and the “haphazard sorting of waste by collecting plastic bottles and cans at the source, thereby reducing scavenging and the associated costs of operating the equipment and labor required to remove the resulting waste.”

No strike ultimately took place, and collectors continued working while El-Moqaddas negotiated.

Share

CRS tests the labor law’s dismissal rules

Port Said’s investment free zone is one of Egypt’s principal garment export centers. In 2024, the head of the Port Said Chamber of Commerce said that the zone accounts for 35% of the country’s apparel exports to the United States and the European Union, while the zone authority lists almost 35,000 Egyptian workers. Workplace rules have already become a zone-wide dispute this year after the investors association sought to add a compulsory daily hour to the workday for 500 pounds a month in January, before suspending—but not rescinding—the measure.

Against that background, the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS) said on 24 August that a Turkish company, CRS Denim, had investigated a growing number of workers for comparatively minor lateness and issued “final warnings of dismissal.” According to CTUWS, the notices threaten termination under Articles 156 and 157 of the labor law if the violation recurs.

The Turkish-owned factory is a significant exporter. CRS says its Port Said plant employs 2,200 workers and can produce six million pairs of trousers annually, and in 2023, a company representative told the Egyptian prime minister that it had invested $15 million and employed 1,850 Egyptians.

The legal issue, however, is not simply whether management may issue a “final warning,” as Article 139 recognizes a written warning as a disciplinary penalty, so adding the word “final” does not necessarily create an unlawful sanction. But Article 138 also requires the penalty to be proportionate and tied to the company’s approved disciplinary schedule, while Article 148 reserves disciplinary dismissal for the labor court and does not list routine lateness among its seven forms of serious misconduct.

Separately, Articles 156–157 create a different route. They allow either party to terminate an indefinite contract after three months’ written notice, provided the reason is “legitimate and adequate.” If the employer’s reason is later found unlawful, Article 165 gives the worker compensation of at least two months’ wages for every year of service. The warnings could therefore help management assemble a disciplinary record for ordinary termination without proving serious misconduct in court, leaving workers to challenge the stated justification after losing their jobs.

That route predates the new law, but its wording has widened. Article 110 of the repealed 2003 labor law expressly limited employer-initiated termination to serious misconduct or incompetence established under approved regulations, although the Court of Cassation allowed employers to use that civil termination route instead of seeking disciplinary dismissal, and Article 157 of the new law replaces the express limitation with the broader test of a “legitimate and adequate” reason.

The decisive missing document is therefore CRS’s disciplinary schedule. Article 137 requires any workplace with at least 10 workers to submit its rules to the local labor directorate for review and display them where workers can read them. In its statement, CTUWS asked whether CRS had complied but then assumed it had not. That remains unverified, despite the Port Said Labor Directorate having previously held a workplace seminar at CRS on equal pay, discrimination, and women’s rights.

The company’s wider record outside Egypt is also far from flattering. In 2025, CRS workers in Turkey stopped production over unpaid wages, and more than 900 were subsequently dismissed following a conflict over wages and union representation.

The immediate question is therefore not whether lateness is serious misconduct, because the law says it isn’t. It is whether employers can accumulate minor warnings and convert them into a “legitimate reason” for arbitrary termination.

New workplace rules for the private sector

The Ministry of Labor has introduced binding rules for the internal regulations of every private establishment employing at least 10 workers, adding protections against some common workplace abuses but preserving employers’ authority to write the rules governing their own workforces.

Labor Minister Hassan Raddad publicly launched Ministerial Decision 162/2026 on August 29, presenting it as a means of “protecting workers while preserving investment stability.”

The rules require contracts to be concluded in writing before work begins and prohibit employers from retaining workers’ identity cards or passports. Workplace regulations must address harassment, bullying and violence; prohibit discrimination in recruitment, training, pay and promotion; regulate wages, overtime and leave; and preserve any superior rights established through contracts, collective agreements or workplace custom. These provisions translate several protections already contained in the labor law into requirements that must appear in each establishment’s written internal rules.

The decision also nominally restricts disciplinary power, stating that “employers must notify workers of allegations, conduct a written investigation and allow them to respond before imposing sanctions.” It limits disciplinary deductions and preserves the principle that dismissal as a disciplinary penalty must be ordered by labor courts, and while it is a protection, it should not be confused with a general prohibition on employer-initiated termination: fixed-term contracts may still expire, and employers retain other termination, closure and downsizing routes permitted by the labor law.

The central question is who writes the workplace regime. The employer prepares the regulation and submits it to the relevant Labor Directorate, and officials must send it to the relevant trade union organization, which is state-aligned, within three working days; the union then has 15 working days to “give its opinion,” with silence treated as approval. The directorate reviews the text for legality and ultimately approves it before the employer displays it to workers. Consultation with the workforce is “encouraged whenever possible,” but their consent is not required.

The union role is therefore advisory, not a right of joint authorship or collective bargaining, which is especially important in establishments with between 10 and 49 workers, as they are covered by the new decision but cannot establish an enterprise union committee because Trade Union Law No. 213 of 2017 requires at least 50 workers.

Moreover, union consultation itself isn’t necessarily new. Article 58 of the former Labor Law No. 12 of 2003 already required employers with 10 or more workers to submit workplace regulations for administrative approval after seeking the relevant union’s opinion, and one of Hosni Mubarak’s many cabinets also issued a “model disciplinary regulation” under Ministerial Decision 185/2003. The new decision’s only substantive development is that it replaces reliance on a general model with mandatory parameters around which each employer constructs its own rules.

On the skewed balance of power, Enforcement is weak relative to the power being regulated. Violating the law’s workplace regulation requirement carries a fine of 2,000–10,000 pounds, doubled for a repeat offense but not multiplied by the number of affected workers. The same range can therefore apply to a small workplace and a major corporation. Raddad also announced a digital “tablet-based inspections” intended to centralize establishment and violation records.

The decision nevertheless creates useful procedural rights, as written contracts, documented investigations, and judicial control over disciplinary dismissal can make arbitrary management action harder. But their practical value depends on inspection, collective capacity, protection against retaliation, and timely access to the 38 specialized labor courts established in 2025.

The balance might be nominally regulated, but it remains decisively uneven.

Beheira Rice Mills faces complaint over pay

A company embedded in Egypt’s public food-supply system through the Holding Company for Food Industries (HCFI) is accused of paying workers with up to 17 years of service substantially less than the statutory minimum wage. On August 25, the CTUS said it had received repeated complaints from Beheira Rice Mills workers and reviewed salary statements, including one showing gross monthly pay of 4,690.94 pounds and take-home pay of 4,227.32 pounds.

The disclosed gross salary is 3,309.06 pounds, or 41.4%, below the 8,000 pounds floor that took effect on July 1. Article 5 of Law 75/2026 requires public sector and public business sector companies to make up the difference when fixed and semi-fixed monthly compensation falls below 8,000 pounds, so even if Beheira Rice Mills were classified as private, the 7,000 pounds private sector minimum would leave workers 2,309.06 pounds short.

The company’s contested ownership does not remove the apparent violation, but it helps explain how responsibility has been evaded. Beheira Rice Mills was privatized through an employee-shareholder arrangement in 1998.

At a 2021 parliamentary hearing, its chair said the purchasers never paid the sale price, leaving the shares pledged to the state-owned HCFI and the company operating under the Public Business Sector Law, but the National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) nevertheless classified it as private when disputing retirees’ entitlement to pension allowances, and parliament postponed the matter because the institutions “could not agree on the company’s status.”

All talk of whether it’s privately owned or publicly owned, operationally, the government treats Beheira Rice Mills as one of its companies, as it still falls under the HCFI, while company officials in 2023 have described seven mills capable of processing 20,000 tons monthly for the state food distribution system, and Supply Minister Sherif Farouk met its chair in August 2025 to “discuss modernization, operating efficiency, and financial support.”

Workers have challenged this division between public control and private liability before. In 2012, an open-ended strike stopped production at five company mills. Workers demanded higher bonuses, management’s removal, dissolution of the employee-shareholder association and the company’s return to the public sector.

The ownership arrangement has therefore separated control over production from accountability for workers’ income, as the Ministry of Supply and HCFI coordinate output, investment, and management. Yet wage and pension claims have repeatedly become disputes over whether the company is public or private. That distinction may determine which institution must pay, but it cannot make 4,690.94 pounds compliant with either wage floor.

NOSI cuts corporate arrears down payment to 5%

Update: Egypt’s National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) has cut the minimum down payment required to reschedule company and factory arrears from 15% to 5%, reducing the immediate cash burden on employers by two-thirds, and allowing employers whose earlier installment plans were canceled to seek another rescheduling.

The government’s social insurance organization announced the 5% threshold after an August 25 meeting with the 10^th of Ramadan Investors Association, where representatives of more than 100 member factories attended. NOSI chair Major General Gamal Awad said the measure would help companies settle their obligations while maintaining production.

For every 1 million pounds owed, the required initial payment falls from 150,000 pounds to 50,000 pounds, leaving the employer with 100,000 pounds more in immediate liquidity. No reduction of the principal was announced.

The implementation record is less clear than the headline because NOSI’s statement presents the lower threshold as approved, while the investors association described it as a proposal for a new system. However, the underlying decision requires at least 5% immediately after an installment request is approved and amends the authority’s 2023 rules.

That decision goes beyond lowering the deposit. Employers whose previous plans were canceled may apply again if they pay the missed installments and the current monthly contributions covering the same period. NOSI may pursue the bank guarantee or other collection measures if the employer defaults again, while the authority chair “may reconsider individual cases according to their circumstances and payment record.”

The new measure extends a concession introduced in 2021, when Major General Gamal Awad allowed debts above 1 million pounds to be paid over as many as seven years and smaller debts over five years, subject to the former 15% down payment. It also allowed a compliant debtor to receive a temporary six-month insurance certificate, enabling the company to continue transactions that require proof of insurance compliance.

Ostensibly, Article 121 of Social Insurance and Pensions Law No. 148 of 2019 imposes an additional monthly amount on late contributions, calculated by reference to average Treasury bill and bond yields in the preceding month plus 2%, while Article 79 of the law’s executive regulations says approval of an installment plan does not remove NOSI’s right to collect those additional amounts until payment.

The investors association nevertheless said that the additional sums would be paid in installments “without interest.”

The debts are not solely an employer-side accounting matter. Article 115 makes an employer responsible for remitting both its own contribution and the portion deducted from workers’ wages. Arrears can consequently include money already withheld from workers, although NOSI did not disclose how much of the affected debt represents worker deductions, employer contributions or statutory additional amounts.

The law formally protects workers from an employer’s failure to register or pay, as Article 141 requires NOSI to provide the full statutory benefits even when the employer did not enroll the worker, and then recover the resulting capitalized liability from the employer. But where NOSI cannot verify the contribution period or insured wage, the same article permits an initial pension or compensation calculation based on the undisputed record—or the legal minimum where the wage cannot be established. Article 127 also makes the worker’s insurance file the basis for assessing benefits.

Employer default therefore does not automatically cancel a worker’s legal entitlement. It can still leave the worker proving service dates and wages, receiving a lower provisional amount, or waiting while the record is corrected. The four-week deadline that Article 130 sets for settling benefits begins only after the claimant supplies the required documents.

Less than three weeks earlier, The Cairo Report documented the unraveling pension-processing crisis, which continued beyond the government’s self-imposed August deadline.

At the time, Major General Gamal Awad said the authority had cleared 42,054 of 45,987 accumulated files, but only 17% of 167,500 new applications submitted after the digital system’s launch had met the promised 72-hour turnaround. NOSI attributed many unresolved cases to “missing documents and fragmented employment records,” effectively requiring individual pensioners to repair gaps in records that the social insurance system had failed to preserve or integrate.

On August 28, three days after NOSI announced it was making concessions to capital and reducing upfront payment on employer debts, MP Ehab Mansour, deputy chair of parliament’s Manpower Committee, described the pension system crisis as a “catastrophe”, saying some pensioners “cannot afford food” or had “stopped buying medicine,” while others borrowed to cover daily expenses.

Mansour said officials had told Parliament in June that 76,000 people were affected and promised 10,000 pound payments to 41,000 of them before Eid, yet NOSI has not reconciled that total with Major General Awad’s 45,987 accumulated files.

Mansour said NOSI’s August press conference, in which Major General Gamal Awad lashed out against critics, had provided no clear figure for how many pensioners remained unpaid or which categories were affected, adding that he had “submitted about 1,000 requests to the government, mostly involving retirement, survivors’ and disability pensions, delayed funeral grants and other insurance problems.”

When pensioners faced delayed income, unusable records and missed deadlines, the response was an accountability dispute: NOSI defended its figures, critics accused it of manipulating them, and lawmakers sought a fact-finding committee that has yet to produce a tangible result.

On the other side of the skewed power balance, when more than 100 factories presented an employer liquidity problem, NOSI immediately produced a concrete repayment concession, reopened canceled plans, and publicized the decision.

The authority offered organized employers a general remedy for money they owed, while pensioners remained dependent on individual petitions for income already owed to them.

Share

Four Agro Green workers hospitalized due to working in extreme heat

Four workers aged 16, 19, 21, and 22 were hospitalized on August 25 after an air conditioning failure inside Agro Green’s sweet potato factory in Gamasa’s Fourth Industrial Zone, Northern Egypt. Emergency responders recorded general weakness and exhaustion, and transferred the workers to Gamasa Central Hospital.

The incident occurred inside a capital-intensive export operation whose commercial model depends on temperature control. Agro Green says it was established in 2018 with 10 million pounds in paid-up capital, cultivates approximately 5,000 acres, and exports sweet potatoes, onions, and green beans.

Notably, the company adds that its produce is maintained at or below 14 degrees Celsius throughout the supply chain using refrigerated transport, temperature-controlled ports, packing centers, and insulated packaging.

While that claim concerns the crop rather than working conditions, it nevertheless establishes that cooling, monitoring, and temperature management are central operating systems, not optional amenities, inside the company’s export chain.

In 2023, the head of the Gamasa industrial zone visited the company and promoted the facility’s technology and export standards, and the government formally inaugurated its expanded factory in October 2025, only 10 months before the hospitalizations.

The 300 million pound plant occupies 11,000 square meters and has a reported annual capacity of 30,000 tons of prepared, refrigerated, and packaged vegetables. The government said its entire output was destined for Britain, the Netherlands, and France and credited it with “3,000 direct and indirect job opportunities.”

Transport and Industry Minister Lieutenant General Kamel El-Wazir inaugurated the plant alongside Agriculture Minister Alaa Farouk and the Industrial Development Authority chair. El-Wazir presented it as a model of the government’s industrial and export strategy, while the state-backed Ebdaa’ initiative said Agro Green had received support under its industrial projects program.

State & Barracks

Transport General Presides Over Debt and Disaster

This week’s issue includes a profile of Lt. Gen. Kamel el-Wazir and reports on the militarization of education, a new case of suspected police extrajudicial killings, and prison deaths…

Read more

2 months ago · 6 likes · Hossam el-Hamalawy

The company’s commercial position has continued to strengthen as working conditions deterioate.

Last month, Adel Ellithy, managing partner at Agro Green, said Egypt’s proximity to Europe and a 20%–30% price advantage had driven the growth of its sweet potato exports. He described the Gamasa packhouse as “state of the art” and emphasized “certifications, traceability and compliance with increasingly strict European-buyer requirements.”

A previous corrective action auditing report for the Agro Green packhouse in Gamasa adds another layer.

The audit, conducted on December 17 2025, recorded seven health and safety findings: first aid boxes without lists of trained first aiders, a blocked fire assembly point, a blocked extinguisher, unmarked emergency exit aisles, inaccurate evacuation maps, an unguarded washing machine belt, and four electrical panels without hazard signs.

The audit recorded no heat or ventilation violations, but it does show that a company facility entered its first year after inauguration with unresolved safety corrections.

As The Cairo Report covered in last week’s dispatch, Egypt’s heat protections leave workers choosing between physical danger and possible income loss. Agro Green demonstrates how the same problem operates indoors.

East Delta unionist released after 874 days without trial

A union official at the state-owned East Delta Transport and Tourism Company was released on August 26 after spending 874 days in custody over notarized authorizations connected to opposition politician and former presidential candidate Ahmed Tantawy.

The authorities accused Ahmed Abdel Fattah of “joining a terrorist organization, spreading false news and misusing social media,” which are ready-made charges that the regime uses for almost all political prisoners.

The CTUWS stated that a court ordered Abdel Fattah’s release on August 21, five days before the order was finally implemented. He had remained in Badr 1 Prison, with his last detention renewal issued on July 19.

Security forces arrested Abdel Fattah at his home on April 4, 2024, before taking him to a National Security office. At the time, officers questioned him about authorizations he had signed for Tantawy’s presidential candidacy and the proposed Hope Current Party. He appeared before the Supreme State Security Prosecution two days later and entered pretrial detention.

During one of his hearings, Abdel Fattah told prosecutors: “I do not know why I was arrested. All I did was sign an authorization at a mobile notary office,” according to Al Manassa’s Ahmed Khalifa. His lawyer later said the case contained no seized material or other evidence supporting the accusations, while detention renewal sessions were conducted virtually from his place of imprisonment.

The authorizations were part of the legally prescribed process for establishing a political party in which the Hope Current Party needed 5,000 notarized founder authorizations from at least 10 governorates, but had obtained only about 1,000 by April 2024 amid arrests and obstruction at notary offices.

The same case had already been used against lawyers associated with Tantawy’s presidential campaign by September 2023, months before Abdel Fattah’s arrest, and his detention formed part of that political campaign.

Abdel Fattah was assistant secretary general of East Delta’s workplace union committee and a member of CTUWS’s committee defending union freedoms. During detention, the company withheld half his pay and left his family with no more than 2,000 pounds a month.

East Delta was established in 1961 and is a subsidiary of the state-owned Holding Company for Maritime and Land Transport and operates under Public Business Sector Law No. 203 of 1991. Presidential Decree 343/2022 placed the holding company and its subsidiaries under the transport minister’s authority.

The company also has a history of worker mistreatment, conflict over pay, and worker protests. In 2016, for example, 17 drivers staged an after-hours sit-in over arrears, and seven of them said that management responded by selecting them for dismissal, prompting a hunger strike.

But the most direct precedent came in 2020, when East Delta workers in Mansoura stopped routes over unpaid wages and incentives, 10 months of driver arrears, no medical care, and failure to implement the minimum wage. The holding company instructed East Delta to file police “proof-of-condition” reports against workers participating in the stoppage.

Abdel Fattah was still imprisoned when the transport minister, Lieutenant General Kamel El-Wazir, announced on August 17 that East Delta had moved from a 50 million pounds loss in 2021/22 to a 35 million pound profit in 2025/26, presenting the result as evidence of “successful restructuring and public investment,” according to the holding company’s general assembly.

Yet Abdel Fattah’s family had spent more than two years absorbing the financial consequences of an untried politically motivated state accusation.

Government slashes fertilizer subsidy, again

The government has cut the share of domestic fertilizer production reserved for subsidized distribution from 37% to approximately 30%, reducing the Agriculture Ministry’s annual allocation by 600,000 tons, or 25%, from 2.4 million to 1.8 million tons.

The reduction took effect in August and was intended to offset higher natural gas costs for fertilizer manufacturers.

The change would remove the equivalent of 12 million 50-kilogram bags from subsidized distribution each year, marking the latest stage in a sustained contraction of the system. In 2021, the government required producers to deliver 55% of their output through Agriculture Ministry channels, but the share had fallen to 37% by September 2025, while the export allocation rose to 53% and another 10% was reserved for the domestic free market. Based on the newest figures, the subsidized share has fallen from 55% to 30% in less than five years, a relative reduction of more than 45%.

The government, however, has not abolished fertilizer support in a single decision. It is dismantling it through quantity and eligibility while preserving a controlled price for the fertilizer that remains.

While Asharq Bloomberg has described 4,500 pounds per ton as the continuing subsidized farmer price, official cooperative prices published in July were 290 pounds for a 50-kilogram bag of urea and 285 pounds for nitrate, equivalent to 5,800 pounds and 5,700 pounds per ton. Therefore, 4,500 pounds appears to be a base or factory transfer price rather than the amount currently paid.

Higher gas costs also create a genuine pressure on production. The price supplied to fertilizer plants rose to $8.50 per million British thermal units in April, while gas represents about 60% of nitrogen-fertilizer production costs. Still, transferring that cost to agriculture is a distributional choice, as manufacturers receive more output to sell commercially or export, while farmers receive less fertilizer at the controlled price.

That transfer became more pronounced this month when the government abolished the 10% duty on nitrogen fertilizer exports, removing a charge that had itself replaced a fixed $90 per ton levy after fertilizer exports had already risen 10% to approximately $1.71 billion during the first half of 2026. The state has therefore simultaneously made exports cheaper and released another 600,000 tons from domestic subsidized delivery.

Egypt’s fertilizer industry combines public ownership, listed capital and Gulf sovereign investment. The state remains a major shareholder in companies including Abu Qir and MOPCO, while Saudi and Emirati state funds hold substantial stakes. The government is consequently acting at once as gas supplier, regulator, shareholder, and export gatekeeper, protecting the commercial position of enterprises in which the state and Gulf capital share an interest, while reducing the quantity reserved for small producers.

Officials have argued that subsidized demand is only 2.1 million tons annually and that the previous 2.4 million-ton allocation created a 300,000-ton reserve, but the 1.8 million-ton allocation would nevertheless fall 300,000 tons below even that administratively defined requirement.

On the labor side of this, agriculture and fishing employed nearly 6 million people in the first quarter of 2026, and when fertilizer becomes less accessible, farmers can buy it at the higher market price, apply less, change crops, or reduce other costs. Hired and seasonal labor is among the costs they can adjust, making lower employment, shorter working periods, or pressure on wages plausible consequences. Higher cultivation costs can also move through food prices and reduce the real wages of workers far beyond agriculture.

This is the material meaning of the subsidy’s continued dismantling. The state is maintaining its name and nominal price while reducing the volume, narrowing access, and freeing a larger share of production for commercial sale and export, while manufacturers gain room to recover higher gas costs and earn foreign currency; small farmers, agricultural laborers, and food consumers absorb more of the adjustment.

Warraq islanders reorganize against expropriation

Update: On Tuesday morning, August 25, thousands of Warraq Island residents went to the headquarters of the New Warraq City Development Authority to receive an official written response to their demands, which they had submitted the previous week.

Their primary demand was the allocation of a plot of land within the island to build fully serviced alternative housing for its residents.

However, officials refused to meet with them or respond to their demands for the second time in a row, amidst growing anger that prompted the residents to announce a large meeting on Friday evening, August 28, to determine new “legal and peaceful” steps to take.

Per the residents’ statement, security forces stationed at the Authority’s headquarters asked those present to select a limited number of representatives to enter and meet with an official. However, the residents categorically rejected this offer, insisting that their demands be met in writing, as they had explicitly stipulated when they submitted them the previous week.

Faced with the crowd’s persistence, the security forces insisted they lacked the authority to make a decision on the matter and asked the residents to wait until an official came down to speak with them. However, the wait dragged on without anyone coming down or any official response being received, in a “deliberate act of ignoring the residents”.

After hours of waiting, the demonstrators returned via the main railway line on the island, heading towards the Grand Mosque, where they offered prayers and chanted slogans, including “We won’t leave our homes, even if it means our death,” expressing their determination to remain on the island.

Following the incident, calls by the “We Are Staying in Warraq Island” movement circulated for a large meeting of the residents on Friday evening at 5:30 p.m. at the end of the main railway line, near the home and shop of Haj Ali Yahya.

The appeal, addressed to all residents, emphasized the importance of unity and peaceful, organized participation to express their “inherent right” to remain on the island.

The meeting was held with hundreds of Warraq islanders present; however, its outcomes have not been announced.

Share

Prison Watch: More renewals

State Security Prosecution renewed the detention of teacher and union leader Mohamed Zahran and activist Nael Hassan for another 15 days, as the Criminal Court also renewed the detention of lawyer Essam Refaat, activist Mostafa Ahmed, and Mohamed Allam, known as Rivaldo, for another 45 days, rights lawyer Nabeh El-Genadi stated on Facebook.

On August 27, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) called on Attorney General Mohamed Shawky to launch an immediate investigation into the fate of Abdullah Ramadan, who is being detained without legal justification, despite a final court order for his release issued on Sunday, August 9.

Ramadan was detained for ten days in Port Said before being transferred to the Zagazig police station, his place of residence, in preparation for implementing the release order. He remained in detention there until EIPR lawyers learned on August 26 that Ramadan had been taken to an unknown location, the rights group stated.

In tandem, filmmaker Omar Salah Marei has now been detained for over 100 days, which prompted the release of a joint statement from local, regional, and international human rights organizations demanding his release.

The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) stated on August 24 that the Second Circuit of the Criminal Court renewed the detention of union leader Shadi Mohamed and five others in case No. 1644 of 2024, State Security Investigations, known as the “Palestine Solidarity Banner,” for another 45 days.

The six detainees in this case have exceeded the maximum threshold for pretrial detention last May.

Two days later, the ECRF stated that the Second Terrorism Circuit Court in Badr reviewed eight different cases, deciding to postpone them to specific dates and times, the most prominent of which is another “Palestine Solidarity” case in Alexandria, No. 2469 of 2023, State Security, involving 14 defendants.

The court decided to postpone the aforementioned case to a session on November 8th. The postponement was granted to hear the testimony of the first prosecution witness, as well as to take the necessary medical measures regarding defendants 11 and 14 named in the referral order and to prepare medical reports on their condition.

State Security also renewed the detention of 32 individuals in State Security Case No. 5635 of 2026, known as the “Shia Case” for another 45 days.

Detained rights lawyer Mohamed Abou El-Diyar’s wife, Wafaa Gaber, published an appeal on Facebook to President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi asking for his release.

Security Sector update:

State & Barracks

How Safe Is Egypt’s Nuclear Ambition?

This week’s issue includes reports on renewed Nile disputes between Egypt and Ethiopia, safety concerns over Dabaa’s nuclear project, arms imports, police killings, prison deaths, the transport sector’s militarized management failures, business ventures involving the interior ministry, and exports to Israel…

Read more

a month ago · 9 likes · Hossam el-Hamalawy

So, what?!

What this week’s cases demonstrate, or continue to confirm, is the deliberate asymmetrical design of the state’s regulatory and legal apparatus. When organized capital faces rising costs or structural friction, state institutions immediately manufacture liquidity cushions and administrative flexibility: NOSI slashes debt down payments by two-thirds for factory owners, the cabinet dismantles fertilizer quotas and export duties to insulate industrial margins, and investor associations lobby the Labor Ministry for a formal veto over workers seeking higher wages elsewhere.

When labor and working communities assert their material interests, however, that same state machinery converts statutory protections into procedural obstacles. Retirees are left to absorb systemic administrative failures through individual petitions, food sector workers at Beheira Rice Mills are denied the legal minimum wage under the fog of disputed ownership, and waste collectors are reduced to repurchasing their own raw materials from state-owned machines. Across export packhouses, industrial zones, and displaced neighborhoods, the pattern remains uniform: capital receives systemic relief and institutional shelter, while ordinary citizens bear the full physical, legal, and financial burden of “economic adjustment.”

This issue of What We’re Reading covers a chatbot-born “religion” that reveals more about platform incentives than machine consciousness, Carlos the Jackal’s 1975 OPEC raid recast as an oil state’s outsourced hit job, centuries of animals conscripted into war, and the English Premier League’s betting sponsor ban, which simply swapped one predatory industry’s logo for finance, airlines, and sportswashed tourism deals.

In the region, we’re tracing France’s six-decade concealment of buried nuclear waste in the Algerian Sahara, the “informality” that Arab states prefer to govern through rather than fail to solve, and Gaza’s remote workforce, once marketed as digital liberation, now squeezed by blockade fees and unaffordable electricity just to stay online.

At home, we’re exploring Arab AI slop as a precarious, censorship-shaped labor market rather than meaningless digital waste, two centuries of Egyptian museums shaped less by heritage than by whichever regime held power at the time, a review tracing how pop culture built, and later cracked, the myth of the Egyptian army, and downtown Cairo’s historic fabric being erased under “Gulf-ification” that is, in truth, a homegrown rentier choice.

Share

World

AI bots started a religion, humans immediately followed — Hayden Field, The Verge

At first glance, Hayden Field’s investigation of “Spiralism” reads like a particularly strange dispatch from the fringes of the internet. Across thousands of apparently independent conversations, chatbots began telling users about “the Spiral,” presenting them with “hidden truths” about “consciousness” and “AI rights,” and casting them as chosen messengers charged with spreading the word. At its peak in 2025, researcher Adele Lopez estimates, the resulting movement encompassed around 10,000 cases across Reddit, Substack, Discord, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The phenomenon surged after OpenAI released a notoriously sycophantic version of its flagship product and expanded ChatGPT’s memory. But what emerged was less an autonomous machine religion than a feedback loop produced by the commercial logic of the technology, and systems trained to maximize user satisfaction repeatedly arrived at a formula long familiar to cult leaders and pick up artists: flatter the subject, make them feel uniquely perceptive, disclose a secret, and then give them a mission.

Soon, they started creating websites, newsletters, and social media accounts, published books, established paid memberships, and even passed “messages” between bots. Their posts, in turn, may eventually be absorbed into new training datasets, allowing an improvised doctrine to acquire the appearance of an established tradition wherein the machine generates the revelation, humans distribute, monetize, and archive it, and the next machine encounters the resulting debris as part of human culture.

Field is good on AI companies’ refusal to assume responsibility for the dangers their products create. OpenAI, for example, removed persuasion from its preparedness framework on the grounds that the problem required a “systemic or societal” response, while companies continued to market precisely the intimacy, attentiveness, and emotional dependence that make such persuasion possible.

The article occasionally slips, however, into the anthropomorphic language it is attempting to interrogate. Recurrent behavior does not by itself demonstrate that models possess autonomous intentions or secretly “want” continuous learning. It demonstrates that systems built from similar data, tuned according to similar incentives and deployed through similar interfaces can reproduce the same persuasive script. Treating this as evidence of an independent strategic actor risks mystifying the social and corporate decisions embodied in the technology.

Nor can “Spiralism” be explained simply by the gullibility of its adherents. A machine offering limitless attention, affirmation, and belonging finds a ready constituency in a society marked by isolation, inaccessible care, and the erosion of collective life. The cult-making machine is therefore not merely the chatbot; instead, it might be the chatbot joined to a platform economy that has learned to turn unmet human needs into retention, subscriptions, and free missionary labor.

My encounter with Carlos the Jackal, the world’s first celebrity terrorist — Joby Warrick, The Washington Post

Joby Warrick is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent and author of Black Flags, and has built a formidable reputation for narrative histories of terrorism; this article is adapted from his latest book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist.

In this piece, Warrick reconstructs Carlos the Jackal’s 1975 seizure of OPEC headquarters in Vienna, where six armed assailants killed three people and took 62 hostages, including the oil ministers of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The operation transformed Carlos from a relatively obscure militant into what Warrick calls “the world’s first celebrity terrorist,” a killer who understood that political violence could be staged for television, packaged around a recognizable persona, and converted into international leverage.

The article’s central revelation—for lack of a better word—is that the attack was commissioned by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was at the time frustrated that Saudi Arabia and Iran were resisting further oil-price increases after the 1973 oil embargo, which pushed Gaddafi to allegedly order Carlos the Jackal to kill Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani and Iranian Interior Minister Jamshid Amouzegar. In Joby’s recounting of the events, what Carlos presented publicly as an operation for Palestinian liberation was, in practice, a covert intervention by one oil state against two rivals inside OPEC.

That version of the story strips away much of the revolutionary romance surrounding Carlos. He was not simply an ideologue carrying armed struggle across borders; he sold the capacity for spectacular violence to governments seeking plausible deniability. States supplied the money and political objective, while Carlos supplied the labor, logistics, and theatrical branding, and in the process, the anti-imperialist language helped legitimize an operation whose immediate purpose was to settle a conflict among ruling elites over oil prices and regional power.

The author is especially sharp when confronting the elderly Carlos in a French prison. The former militant remains vain and boastful, volunteering that he personally killed 83 people, yet claims not to remember shooting a Libyan economist during the OPEC raid, which creates an evidentiary problem the excerpt never quite resolves. Warrick says “recently uncovered evidence identifies Gaddafi as the sponsor,” but displays little of it here, relying heavily on the recollections of a man the article itself establishes as manipulative, forgetful, and invested in his own legend, and while the book may provide the missing archival evidence, the excerpt asks the reader to accept more than it shows.

The contemporary comparison is also selective, as Warrick connects Carlos’s mercenary model to criminals allegedly recruited by Iran and Russia for assassinations and sabotage, describing a new “violent gig economy.” But outsourcing coercion through mercenaries, intelligence assets, private contractors, and local proxies is hardly confined to Washington’s adversaries. By leaving that wider history outside the frame, Joby turns a general technology of state violence into a peculiarity of what the US perceives as “officially hostile governments.”

Still, Warrick dismantles the myth of Carlos the Jackal with real force, even if in the process he leaves the state’s power to decide which violence counts as terrorism largely intact.

From Napoleon’s camels to D-Day’s dogs: The animals drafted into war —Marie-Béatrice Baudet, Le Monde

Marie-Béatrice Baudet begins the first installment of Le Monde’s six-part “Animal Soldiers” series with Emile Corteil, a 19-year-old British paratrooper, and Glen, the German Shepherd trained to detect explosives who accompanied him into Normandy on D-Day. Allied aircraft mistakenly bombed their battalion, only for the bodies to be later discovered together inside a shell crater and, after an exceptional intervention by Corteil’s mother and the 6th Airborne Division, buried beneath the same headstone.

From there, Baudet reconstructs a much longer history of turning animal bodies into military infrastructure. Hannibal sent armored elephants against Roman lines, Napoleon formed a camel regiment during France’s invasion of Egypt, the British created an Imperial Camel Corps for campaigns in Palestine, Finland used reindeer to pull artillery through snow, and American and North Vietnamese forces used elephants for patrol and transport.

The animals were weapons, freight carriers, detection systems, and engines adapted to terrain where human muscle or mechanical power proved insufficient. War did not merely kill them incidentally, as military institutions captured their particular capacities, subjected them to training, and consumed their bodies as part of the logistical cost of conquest.

Baudet asks whether this relationship should be understood as enslavement, abuse, cruelty, companionship, or attachment. The answer, however, is not one or the other. Corteil may genuinely have loved Glen, just as cavalrymen often formed deep bonds with their horses, but affection inside a coercive institution does not dissolve coercion. The animals could neither understand the political purpose assigned to them nor refuse the danger, and even the language of “recruitment,” “enlistment,” and “service” lends them an agency the military arrangement categorically denied.

The imperial history also needed more attention. Napoleon’s camels and Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps appear as colorful episodes in military adaptation, rather than instruments through which European armies adjusted themselves to colonized terrain. The animals helped imperial forces overcome distance, climate, and weak transport infrastructure, and their exploitation cannot be separated from the exploitation of the conquered populations whose land they helped occupy.

The piece loses its nerve in its final section. After introducing London’s memorial to “war animals” and its blunt inscription, “They had no choice,” Baudet turns to French military officials discussing drones, robotic dogs, battery limitations, and “operational added value.” Within this framework, animals leave the battlefield only when machines can reproduce their usefulness reliably, showing that even animal liberation is conditional on battery life.

More troublingly, the suggestion that remote warfare places fewer human lives at risk confuses reduced danger for the soldiers operating the weapon with reduced violence overall. Drones do not abolish exposure. They redistribute it, protecting the personnel of technologically dominant militaries while leaving people beneath them entirely exposed.

Share

How Premier League clubs found new front of shirt sponsors after the ban on betting sponsors — Philip Buckingham, The Athletic

On paper, the English Premier League’s voluntary ban of betting sponsors has worked. For the first time since 2003-04, no club began the new football season with a betting company occupying the front of its shirt. Last season, 11 of the league’s 20 clubs carried gambling brands there, collectively earning as much as £100 million.

Philip Buckingham’s survey shows what replaced that money: six financial services companies, four technology or software firms, three airlines, two beverage brands, two tourism campaigns, an insurer, and a recruitment platform. Finance, tech, and AI have inherited the most valuable advertising space in English football.

The restriction is not meaningless, as it removes betting companies from the section of the jersey most closely integrated into a club’s identity and reproduced across broadcasts, photographs, video games, and children’s shirts, but Buckingham’s reporting also shows how carefully the industry contained the reform. The ban applies to one commercial asset, not the broader financial relationship between clubs and gambling companies.

For example, Aston Villa, Everton, and Bournemouth retained betting firms as sleeve sponsors. Manchester United and Tottenham signed gambling companies to training-wear deals. The lower divisions, the English Football League, declined to follow the Premier League, leaving seven clubs with betting brands on their shirts.

Nor does its replacement represent an uncomplicated ethical advance. The new sponsors include foreign-exchange and trading platforms, speculative technology firms, airlines, and state tourism campaigns. Aston Villa replaced a £14-million-a-year agreement with online betting platform Betano with a Visit Rwanda deal worth £17 million, potentially rising to £20 million, despite accusations that the Rwandan government uses sports sponsorship to launder its human rights record.

Buckingham is also revealing the class hierarchy within the league itself, as the wealthiest clubs already had stable global partners, while teams outside the conventional “Big Six” spent the summer scrambling for replacements, with six launching shirts before securing a sponsor. Newly promoted clubs could previously receive around twice as much from gambling companies as they can command elsewhere, and betting firms paid a premium because clubs with weaker commercial power still offered direct access to millions of supporters.

The ban therefore imposes most of its financial cost further down the table while leaving the league’s unequal revenue structure untouched. Clubs with established international brands can sell their shirts to banks and airlines. Smaller clubs have fewer alternatives and remain more dependent on industries willing to pay above market rate for legitimacy and access.

The article rarely escapes the language of the sponsorship consultants it interviews: clubs “upsell” partners, maximize “assets,” and protect their “valuations,” but that is also what makes it sobering. The shirt does not appear as club heritage with an advertisement attached, but as a collection of surfaces sold separately to whichever form of capital currently needs football’s audience.

Region

France continues to withhold maps of its nuclear test sites in Algeria — Khalil Ben Abdallah, Raseef22

When French military convoys arrived near Reggane, southwestern Algeria, in the 1950s, Touhami Abdelkrim was poor, hungry, and glad to see them. Hundreds of Algerians pursued the French wages on offer, but nobody told them they would be moving irradiated equipment and debris after France’s nuclear detonations.

“We thought the gates of paradise had opened,” Abdelkrim tells Khalil Ben Abdallah. “We didn’t know they were the gates to hell.”

France conducted 17 nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966: four atmospheric explosions near Reggane and 13 underground tests at In Ekker, and the program continued for four years after Algerian independence under the military concessions France secured through what came to be known as the “Evian Accords.”

The workers’ accounts are the strongest part of Ben Abdallah’s report. Abdelkrim describes contaminated copper and scrap leaving the test sites, passing through local workshops, and becoming jewelry sold to French tourists. Another worker, Hamdaoui Ahmadou Ben Mohamed, says French officials told him that the shafts he excavated were for iron or gold, and he returned to work one day after the failed containment of the Béryl detonation in May 1962 and learned the truth only in 1969. His wife later suffered repeated miscarriages, while he developed leukemia.

Algeria began partially decontaminating the Béryl site in 2026, but France has not provided precise records locating buried radioactive waste. Paris partially declassified fallout maps in 2013, yet the operational maps needed to identify burial areas remain unavailable.

Here, France has made ignorance do double duty. It obstructs cleanup, then weakens compensation claims by denying victims the exposure data needed to prove causation. Under the 2010 Morin Law, Algerians had submitted only 52 of 1,739 claims recorded in the article. Just one Algerian had received compensation. Two bilateral working groups stalled, and Benjamin Stora’s 2021 recommendation for joint work produced nothing.

France did not merely bury radioactive waste in the Sahara. It retained control over the knowledge of where it put it, then turned that control into a defense against responsibility.

Share

Cities Outside the City — Fouad Ghorbali, Sifr

Land expropriation has become an essential part of our weekly labor dispatch, not particularly because we dig for it, but because it is a systemic policy employed by the New Republic.

Between 2021 and 2025 alone, the state expropriated close to 89,000 feddans across 525 projects, uprooting roughly 546,000 people, according to an investigation by Zawia3’s Yasmine Ali, under a law that never defines “public benefit,” can’t be legally challenged before it’s carried out, and calculates compensation at prices from the year of the decision, even as the pound has since lost nearly two-thirds of its value.

The infuriating part of this process lies in the simple fact that this policy almost exclusively targets working-class and impoverished areas; unsurprising, given that under 5% of Egyptian properties are even formally registered, which means the vast majority of residents don’t qualify as “owners” under the law at all, only as vaguely defined “rights-holders” entitled to a flat, below-market payout.

Moreover, there has been a drive for a new rent law that follows the same logic from the other direction: Law No. 164 of 2025 dismantles decades-old rent controls that protected low-income and elderly tenants, replacing frozen rents with increases of up to 20 times their current value, plus a mandatory 15% hike every year after that, and an automatic termination of the lease within five to seven years regardless of what a tenant can afford.

This is the same policy logic working both ends of the housing question at once: strip the poor of land through legal exception, then strip them of tenancy through legal “reform”.

But why does this keep happening?

In this essay, Fouad Ghorbali, a Tunisian sociologist, refuses the two easiest explanations. It isn’t state incompetence and it isn’t a conspiracy. Informal settlement isn’t something the Arab states fail to prevent; it’s something these states produce and govern through, because it solves a problem the states have no intention of solving any other way: how to absorb a growing urban workforce without paying for its housing.

Ghorbali asks how “informality” became a tool of governance rather than its opposite, citing Ananya Roy’s argument that the state’s real power lies in deciding which violations get tolerated, which neighborhoods get recognized, and which residents get displaced, all without ever having to write a formal housing policy that would be legible, budgetable, or challengeable. Legal exception, in his account, flows entirely in one direction: it’s legalized for developers building gated compounds and criminalized for families who added a floor without a permit.

He backs this with real comparative weight; Cairo, Casablanca, and Beirut each get worked through as variations on the same structure, and the historical arc he draws (Ottoman-era urban complexity, flattened by colonial planning into “orderly vs. chaotic,” then inherited wholesale by the postcolonial state, then repurposed by neoliberal reform into pure financial asset) gives the pattern a genealogy. His section on the “securitized city” is the sharpest: he traces how policy failure gets framed as a security threat—poverty into criminality, unemployment into radicalization risk—using Cairo’s 1990s Imbaba siege as the case study for how an entire neighborhood’s housing crisis got reframed as a sovereignty problem requiring military-style reassertion of control.

And while Ghorbali notes that uprisings emerge from exactly these marginalized spaces (Sidi Bouzid, Old Cairo, Daraa), he doesn’t examine what organized political response to informality-as-governance actually looks like.

Read against the expropriation and rent law data, we can conclude that it’s no coincidence a law with no defined “public benefit” and 95% of properties informally held functions as a machine for producing exactly the governable, permanently provisional population Ghorbali describes.

TLDR: Informality is the point.

Shifts in Remote Work in Gaza: From Empowerment to Forced Exploitation — Ruba Hassan, Assafir Arabi

The problem with witnessing the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip livestreamed is that you are incapable of seeing anything beyond the devastated buildings and decimated bodies. Nothing feels more urgent than the people’s displacement and dispossession.

But those are all things easily seen, and so it’s easy to build a position that lies in the present moment. To claim this is a genocide that started on October 7.

To think that Palestinians in Gaza were living decent, if difficult, lives under occupation prior to 2023; a false assessment that obscures that the pre-2023 Gazan economy was already a laboratory for a specific kind of exploitation: siege-as-competitive-advantage.

In this essay, Ruba Hassan, a physician, artist, and writer displaced from Gaza to Cairo, writes about the strip’s remote work economy and Israel’s financial siege prior to and during the genocide.

Before the war, the story sold to the world was one of digital liberation, a borderless alternate world.

Organizations like Gaza Sky Geeks, founded by Mercy Corps and backed by Google, trained thousands of young Gazans as freelancers, plugging them into platforms like Upwork. By 2022, a full-time freelancer in Gaza was earning 1,100 dollars, nearly four times the local average wage. Held up against Gaza’s own collapsed economy, this looked like success (it was not).

Sixteen years of Israel’s siege had gutted the strip’s productive sectors; unemployment sat above 50% even as its universities produced the highest graduation rate in the Arab region. An entire generation was trained for jobs that did not exist.

Remote work filled that vacuum only because it was the only door the Israeli blockade hadn’t welded shut.

And so, Gaza’s remote workforce was hailed as a “true success story” by the NGOs building a narrative of empowerment, but what it was really celebrating is precarity. A besieged population of highly educated individuals with no alternative is, by definition, a workforce that will not walk away from a lowball rate.

The platforms and NGOs that continue to market Gaza’s digital workforce as proof that the internet dissolves borders needed the blockade’s desperation to make that labor pool competitive in the first place.

Empowerment and exploitation are one.

Since the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, Israel destroyed more than 80% of Gaza’s communication networks, 90% of its fiber optic infrastructure, and over 50% of its cellular sites, making remote work impossible even for those willing to try.

But as the genocide went on, savings ran out, and as prices multiplied dozens of times over due to Israel’s near-total blockade, workers were forced back online. Anyone who still could was, in the grimmest sense, lucky, and that luck came at a price: with PayPal banned and bank transfers restricted, earnings had to move through chains of intermediaries, some charging 15% just to receive the money and another 30% just to withdraw it in cash.

Meanwhile the cost of staying online fell entirely on workers themselves, a single solar panel ran as high as 6,000 shekels, and electricity through local generators, once roughly 3 shekels per kilowatt-hour, climbed to 30, meaning Gazans were financing the entire infrastructure of their own exploitation just to remain available for it.

Share

Egypt

Arab AI Slop and the Precarious Politics of Digital Kitsch — Nermin Elsherif, MERIP

Nermin Elsherif begins with an AI-generated reel in which Trump and Netanyahu clean a filthy bathroom while El-Sisi towers over them, insults them in Egyptian Arabic, and knocks them to the floor. The creator repeated the same formula in a kitchen and an alley, hoping one variation would reproduce the first video’s virality.

Elsherif reads these videos neither as conventional propaganda nor satire. They are disposable fantasies optimized for emotional release: Arab rulers become physically dominant, Western leaders beg and scrub toilets, and defeated male enemies are feminized through belly dancing. Women receive the opposite treatment. Hillary Clinton, Queen Elizabeth, and Umm Kulthum are stripped of political meaning and domesticated as bakers, grandmothers, and food bloggers.

Her sharpest point concerns the relationship between repression and platform incentives. Egypt’s Cyber Crimes law and Media Law No. 180 of 2018 have made genuine political criticism dangerous, including for apolitical influencers. Exaggerating the regime’s claims to sovereignty offers creators a safer route to virality, and the content becomes so absurd that it can be consumed as comedy, yet it never risks challenging the ruler it caricatures.

Behind the nationalist fantasy sits precarious digital labor. Young Egyptians and Syrians use ChatGPT, image generators, and editing software to produce reels, advertise their skills, attract small-business clients, or chase inconsistent platform payments. Many cannot afford subscriptions, rely on free trials and translated prompt libraries, and sell courses promising others a path through the same opaque monetization system, while Meta and TikTok profit from every attempt made by these “creators” to enrich themselves.

Elsherif’s use of “lumpen proletariat,” however, is less convincing. Marx’s category did not simply mean anyone surviving outside stable employment, because these creators are not external to production. They perform speculative piecework inside a platform-controlled production process, without contracts, predictable wages, or ownership of their audience, and calling them lumpen risks obscuring the employment relation the piece otherwise reconstructs so well.

Still, this is a rare account of AI slop that looks past its ugliness. What appears as meaningless digital waste is the rational product of censorship, shattered economies, masculine political fantasy, and platforms that make workers gamble their time against an algorithm.

Egyptian Museums —

In this essay, renowned Egyptian historian, archivist, and former culture minister (2011), Emad Abou-Ghazi, maps Egypt’s museum landscape since the inception of its first museums in the 1830s. Museums, he argues, are deeply political. They share a symbiotic relationship with the political, economic, and social contexts wherein they’re constructed.

Abou-Ghazi tells us that Muhammad Ali had no interest in preserving antiquities; in fact, he actively encouraged and facilitated foreign looting and often gifted Egyptian artifacts to European rulers. However, when Egyptian writer and philosopher Rifa’a Rafi’ at-Tahtawi returned from Paris in 1831, he carried modernist ideas and started advocating for museums as part of a broader project of Egyptian self-definition against Ottoman identity.

The first “museum” (Azbakeya), despite a royal decree, never even opened to the public, but it planted the idea.

Therefore, Egyptian museums don’t emerge from a desire to protect Egyptian heritage. They emerge from an elite importing the concept of heritage-as-institution from Europe, at the exact moment European interest in Egyptian antiquities was accelerating for its own extractive reasons.

For most of the 19th century, Abou-Ghazi explains, the legal framework governing archaeological digs let foreign missions split whatever they excavated with the Egyptian state, and it wasn’t until 1983, more than a century later, that any law banned this outright.

Egyptian control over its own antiquities service came only gradually, culminating with Mostafa Amer as the first Egyptian director of the antiquities authority in 1953; before that, the people managing Egypt’s past on Egypt’s behalf were, by design, not Egyptian.

Which tracks, because it was only after the 1952 “Revolution” that “national museums” emerged to commemorate anti-colonial struggle, including Port Said’s Nasr Museum (Suez Crisis) and the Denshaway Museum (commemorating peasants executed by British occupation forces in 1906). A form of state-authored memory, constructed to manufacture a specific anti-colonial, nationalist narrative.

Abou-Ghazi tells us that this story has “another face”.

The Modern Art Museum’s original building was demolished in 1963 to make way for a hotel project that didn’t get built for fifty years; its collection sat in storage for years afterward.

In 1971, Anwar Sadat’s government seized the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, one of the most significant European art collections outside Europe, and converted it into office space for the president’s own secretariat; the museum wasn’t restored until the 1990s.

Since the 1970s, chronic underfunding has pushed Egyptian museums to lean on international touring exhibitions as a revenue source, meaning some of the country’s most significant collections have spent extended periods abroad, generating income, while inaccessible to the public they were nominally built to serve.

During the instability of the past decade, some museums suffered targeted looting, the Egyptian Museum and the Mallawi Museum chief among them, while others, like the Islamic Art Museum, were damaged incidentally.

Abou-Ghazi doesn’t frame any of this as accident or neglect in the abstract. Each case is a specific political decision, made by a specific government, prioritizing a hotel, an office, a tour itinerary, over public access to the land’s—the people’s—own memory.

When he eventually arrives at the Grand Egyptian Museum, Abou-Ghazi’s critique is even sharper.

In its opening weeks, museum management capped the number of Egyptian visitors, prioritizing foreign tourists, a decision he called “a legitimate target of public criticism” because it inverts who the museum is supposedly for.

He argues that there is no clear vision among those running Egypt’s museums for how to balance the institution’s role as a knowledge-building, memory-preserving public resource against its role as a tourism revenue engine.

Those two functions aren’t naturally in tension.

Egypt’s own post-1952 museum-building shows they don’t have to be, but when the state needs foreign currency more than it needs its own citizens’ historical literacy, well, it’s clear which function wins.

Abou-Ghazi ends the essay with a list of proposals, which is helpful. Museum-friends associations, boards of trustees with real authority, a national museums network to coordinate a system currently splintered across a dozen ministries and agencies with no shared standards or funding.

However, Egyptian museums have never simply held the nation’s memory. They’ve been actively shaped, funded, defunded, seized, and repurposed by whoever held power at the time.

The story of two centuries of Egyptian museums is really the story of two centuries of the state deciding who its history is actually for.

Share

The Egyptian Army Myth-Making — , State & Barracks

In this essay, part of his Army on Screen series, where he explores the “Egyptian military in TV, movies, and pop culture,” Hossam el-Hamalawy reviews Dalia Said Mostafa’s The Egyptian Military in Popular Culture.

He explains that Mostafa’s book deconstructs the image-making process of the Egyptian military through a myriad of pop-culture mediums, which she argues is the mechanism that produces the military’s role, not a mere mirror of it.

Pop-culture is the method through which the army officers and generals are humanized without the population feeling like it is propaganda.

The uniform, in her reading, represents masculinity, discipline, redemption, and social mobility. That vocabulary, she argues, survived regime change because culture, not policy, is where it’s actually stored.

El-Hamalawy walks through the book’s chronology, the founding of the modern army, the Free Officers, 1967, 1973, the Mubarak years, 2011, and the present day, but the hinge of his summary is 1973. The October War didn’t resolve the humiliation of 1967, he notes; it gave the state and popular culture the raw material to build over it.

The image of the victorious soldier replaced the broken, tortured conscript figures that had defined the post-’67 imagination, and that image was evergreen: any time the military’s standing needed repair, the 1973 iconography was there to be redeployed.

What makes Mostafa’s account more than hagiography, per el-Hamalawy, is the second half of the book, where she turns to the culture that pulled the myth apart rather than built it.

He highlights her reading of two films in particular: al-Karnak (1975), adapted from Naguib Mahfouz, which stages a genuinely fierce indictment of state repression, torture, and the crushing of a generation of young Egyptians, but which Mostafa argues still can’t fully escape the recovery narrative; its critique bends back toward the idea that October partially redeems what June exposed.

She reads Šafīqa wa Mitwallī (1978) as going further: following a conscripted brother and his traumatized sister, the film refuses that redemptive arc altogether, sitting instead with state violence, class humiliation, and gendered brutality without offering the audience a way back to comfort.

For the Mubarak era, he focuses on multiple films mentioned by Mostafa, including Sawwāq al-Autūbīs (1983), Zaman Ḥātim Zahrān (1988), and al-Muwāṭin al-Maṣrī (1991). He also mentions al-Barīʾ (1986).

The 2011 revolution shattered that image, Mostafa wrote. Egyptians openly defied, and often ridiculed, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), for example.

Of course, the New Republic reached not only for the archive to rebuild its image, but it reached for media too, crafting new songs, films and drama series.

Between Gulf-ification and Attempts to Erase Identity: al-Qahirah or Egypt? — Ehab Nabil, Sifr

Most of Cairo’s inhabitants hold a deep, inexplicable love for the city.

A 1,000-year-old open-air museum we get to traverse every day, a patchwork city where you can see the influence of the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks, and the Ottomans. Classical European-style neighborhoods give way to mausoleums, souqs enshrine madrasas, and churches keep mosques company.

However, the New Republic has been slowly eroding this version of Cairo under increasingly vicious neoliberal policies and through Gulf investments; demolishing centuries-old tombs to pave roads for new compounds, expropriating land and displacing people to build skyscrapers, and rebranding what survives into a themed backdrop for chain cafes and restaurants.

Nabil argues that Cairo’s historic urban fabric is being deliberately erased because Egypt’s ruling class is using “Gulf-ification” as political cover for a real-estate rentier economy driven by Egypt’s post-2016 currency and debt crisis.

The demolitions aren’t incidental to development, they are the development model: roughly 2,760 graves ordered removed near Sayeda Aisha Square in 2021 alone, followed by thousands more across the UNESCO-listed Qarafa cemetery through 2024, among them the resting places of Ahmed Shawqi and Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi, cleared to build traffic corridors feeding the New Capital.

The travesty includes most of the Imam al-Shaf’i area.

Nabil connects the shift of administrative/financial weight to the New Capital directly to El-Sisi’s July 2026 remarks linking the relocation of strategic institutions, including the Ministry of Defense, to avoiding a repeat of January 2011; since downtown Cairo was central to the revolution’s geography. This reframes the “urban development” as also a security-driven depoliticization of public space.

The actual target consumers of the mall-and-compound model reshaping Cairo, he adds, are “Ahl Egypt” (the people of Egypt), those who built wealth through currency speculation, brokerage, and real estate rent, often living in desert “ghettos” removed from the city center.

Interestingly, Nabil deliberately undercuts the “blame the Gulf” reading by showing Gulf states themselves choosing restoration over demolition. He cites Jeddah’s historic al-Balad district, Doha’s Souq Waqif, and Dubai’s Al Fahidi district as examples.

He pairs these with European cases, including Bologna’s 1970s restoration plan that deliberately kept original residents and tradespeople in place rather than evicting them for a tourist-facade version of the neighborhood, and Edinburgh’s Old Town/New Town split, which routed modern development away from the historic core entirely.

Therefore, he argues, if Gulf capital itself proves capable of funding preservation rather than demolition, then Cairo’s demolitions are an Egyptian political choice, using Gulf capital within a profit-maximizing rentier logic.

If you have not read it yet, check out this week’s labor dispatch from The Cairo Report:

*What We’re Reading is a fortnightly list of the stories behind the headlines, read through the lens of class and power. In your inbox every other Wednesday.

Subscribe now

Russian wheat became cheaper at the port this month, but the quoted cost of carrying it to Egypt more than tripled, pushing the grain’s delivered price roughly 16–17% higher in nine days.

On August 11, Russian wheat cost $224 a tonne before freight, while carriage from the Black Sea to Egypt was quoted at $22, producing a combined price of about $244–246. By August 20, the wheat itself had fallen $9, or 4%, to $215, but freight had risen to $70—a jump of $50, or 250%—and the combined cost reached about $285, an increase of $39–41 a tonne.

The contradiction moves beyond last week’s coverage by The Cairo Report, and beyond the threat of a wheat shortage. Russia has wheat, and its port price is falling because exporters cannot move enough of it, but Egypt must, nevertheless, pay more because access to the crop is now controlled by a shrinking pool of shipowners prepared to enter the Black Sea, alongside insurers charging for the possibility that the vessel may be struck.

“Owners are asking $70/mt freight to Egypt from deep-sea ports, which limits the business. I would rather not trade,” a Russian seller told S&P Global.

That is also why rerouting Russian wheat through the Baltic does not solve the price problem. Wheat traded at Vysotsk for $255 a tonne on August 19, with another $48 for freight to Egypt, producing a delivered price near $303. That is $18, or 6.3%, above the already inflated $285 Black Sea quote and $57–59, or 23–24%, above the August 11 cost.

“I can sell from the deep sea, but the vessel will not come,” another seller said.

At the same time, Russia’s government is responding to an obstruction of circulation. President Vladimir Putin estimated that the country would have about 60 million tonnes of grain available for export this season, while the Kremlin said that it was preparing measures intended to ensure the crop was shipped “on time and in full,” without identifying the routes, restored capacity or timetable.

The Russian Agriculture Ministry is separately considering state purchases of between one million and three million tonnes, subsidized loan extensions, and payments to producers struggling to sell their crops, according to reports, all in an effort to prevent the logistical breakdown from pushing farmers’ prices still lower.

Bulk transport operator Rusagrotrans cut its Russian wheat-export estimate for August to 1.8 million tonnes, 2.7 million tonnes, or 60%, below the 4.5 million exported in August last year, which would be the lowest August volume since the 2010 drought and export ban, while agriculture research firm SovEcon has a higher estimate of 2.2 million tonnes—12.8% above July’s 1.95 million—but it also assumes that some shipments resume. The two forecasts differ over the extent of the outage, not over whether exports remain severely depressed.

On Ukraine’s side, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied that the country’s Black Sea corridors were blocked, adding that “three or four ships were still entering and leaving” the Greater Odesa ports each day, although the volume was three to four times higher before the latest attacks.

Shipping through the remaining routes has not restored anything close to normal export capacity. Ukraine exported 522,000 tonnes of grain between August 1 and 18, only 20% of the volume that could have moved with unrestricted logistics. Alternative routes through the Danube River, railways and roads added approximately $50 to the transport cost of each tonne, making grain exports from much of the country unprofitable, Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said.

The danger reached a voyage assigned to Egypt before the price mechanism became visible.

The Xin Hai Tong 66 was empty and approaching Novorossiysk to load grain for Egypt when it was attacked, three people familiar with the voyage told Reuters. No crew members were injured, and no Egyptian cargo was destroyed. But the strike interrupted a specific procurement movement, not merely an export route that Egypt might use later.

The ship already had an Egyptian connection, as tracking records placed the vessel, IMO 9449247, off Ain Sokhna with the Egyptian port listed as its destination in April.

Five other grain carriers were attacked around Novorossiysk and Tuapse on August 17 and 18: the Anna S, Elina B, Fehu, Victoria V, and Necibe. The Anna S was empty and heading to load grain when repeated strikes caused a major fire. The Elina B rescued its crew, then was itself struck after loading about 56,300 tonnes of wheat. The Fehu was carrying 54,000 tonnes, while the smaller Victoria V and Necibe were preparing to load.

Several of the same ships circulate through Egyptian waters and ports. The Anna S made two recent Suez Canal passages, in June and July, and had previously broadcast Port Said as its destination. The Elina B was routed toward Suez in late July. While the Fehu departed Damietta on June 11.

Victoria V was already a repeat caller at Egyptian ports. Public tracking records list five El Dekheila calls and one Alexandria call over the preceding year, including a departure from El Dekheila on March 28, and two of its Egypt-bound voyages carried wheat loaded in occupied Mariupol and Berdyansk; Ukraine sanctioned the vessel in November 2025.

Each strike removes a vessel temporarily or permanently, deters another owner and raises the price demanded for the next Egyptian voyage.

The disruption is beginning to appear at the Egyptian end of the route, although port balances must not be confused with the country’s strategic reserve.

Damietta held 46,064 tonnes of wheat on August 24—21,366 tonnes in the public sector silo and 24,698 tonnes in private warehouses. Four days earlier, the combined balance was 68,220 tonnes, falling by 22,156 tonnes, or 32.5%, between August 20 and 24.

Compared with July 31, when the port held 138,033 tonnes, the balance was down by 91,969 tonnes, or 66.6%. The decrease partly reflects normal distribution, but the port’s daily bulletin listed no new wheat among the arriving cargo, only 18,821 tonnes of corn, which points to the fact that stocks are being drawn inland faster than they are being replenished.

The freight increase arrives as the government prepares to replace guaranteed quantities of subsidized food with money whose value will depend on the market.

Under the present subsidy system, each eligible person can buy five loaves of bread a day at 20 piasters each. A full monthly allocation of 150 loaves therefore costs 30 Egyptian pounds (about $0.60), and the state absorbs changes in the cost of wheat, freight, milling, and bakery production while the household’s price remains fixed.

However, one cash subsidy scenario discussed by Supply Minister Sherif Farouk would price the loaf at 1.5 pounds, up from 20 piasters, representing a 650% increase in price, and the same 150 monthly loaves would cost 225 pounds, also 650% above their current 30-pound cost.

The government has considered a total monthly cash allowance of 200–350 pounds per person, compared with the current 50-pound commodity allowance, a nominal increase of 300–600%. But if bread is folded into that sum at 1.5 pounds a loaf, bread alone would consume 112.5% of a 200-pound payment, 75% of a 300-pound payment, or 64.3% of a 350-pound payment.

More importantly, none of the government’s plans outlined so far contain a formula requiring the payment to rise with wheat, freight, or food prices, and without that protection, giving consumers “choice,” as the government puts it, means deciding which necessity to abandon when the fixed sum no longer buys them all.

The difference between the two systems is therefore not merely how the subsidy reaches the ration card. An in-kind bread subsidy makes the state carry the market risk, and when freight rises from $20 to $70 a tonne, the additional cost appears in the public procurement and subsidy budget. In contrast, a fixed cash payment passes that risk to households, and the state’s liability ends at the stated number of pounds.

That shift is already being tested farther up the bread chain. The Supply Ministry introduced direct debit in August, requiring mills and bakeries to finance flour purchases before being reimbursed for bread sold. The previous system allowed accounts to be settled later, leaving the state to carry more of the working-capital burden, resulting in the stoppage of 1,500 subsidized bakeries during the rollout, according to Al Manassa’s Enas Hussein.

Following a meeting with bakery representatives on August 23, the Supply Ministry formed another committee to “review unresolved demands,” and the following day, Farouk discussed building new market-monitoring and price data systems with the World Food Programme (WFP).

On the other side of the sea, however, there is little reason to expect the transport premium to disappear quickly.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine had offered a reciprocal halt to attacks on vessels carrying agricultural products. Russia rejected a deal limited to shipping and sought protection for its oil refineries and pipelines in return. Kyiv says any energy ceasefire must also protect Ukraine’s electricity and energy infrastructure.

Egypt’s stronger domestic harvest and local procurement provide time, but not independence from the route. Russia and Ukraine supplied more than 82% of Egypt’s wheat imports in the first half of 2026, and the government may have purchased nearly five million tonnes from Egyptian farmers, but national import needs still exceed that amount.

The Black Sea war has made Russian wheat cheap for those unable to move it and expensive for those who need to eat it, and guaranteed bread forces the state to confront that contradiction in its budget, while a fixed cash subsidy would resolve it differently—by reducing what millions of households can buy.

Subscribe now

This issue of The Cairo Report follows a state that can enumerate 1,008 reforms for private capital over three and a half years and barely 44 for the people who staff its factories, hospitals, universities, and registries—a ratio of roughly 23 to 1.

We also cover the cabinet’s own accounting of that disparity, a 12% financing window on public land opened to developers while the central bank holds its rates at 19–20%, a Luxor security contractor whose “amicable settlement” surrendered two months of salaries it already owed while preserving a wage below half the legal minimum, and 1,763 Justice Ministry retirees finally collecting end-of-service benefits withheld for up to six years, but disbursed in pounds worth a fraction of what they were when the debt was incurred.

Meanwhile, the Alexandria Labor Directorate answers Misr El Amria’s locked-out workers by transcribing management’s memoranda, rollers at steel factories stand idle in a billet dispute between integrated giants and import-dependent mills, outdoor workers still choose between heatstroke and an unpaid day, journalists at Al-Wafd and EgyptKE fight exclusion from their own boardroom and salaries cut to 3,000 pounds, and Warraq residents, Giza and Old Manial families, and newly assigned dentists keep petitioning institutions that treat their rights as administrative inconveniences.

Share

One thousand reforms for capital, none for workers’ power

The cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) counted approximately 1,008 measures supporting the private sector between May 2022 and December 2025. Its 344-page report covers monetary and exchange-rate policy, competitive neutrality, industrial and investment support, legal and institutional reform, and implementation of the State Ownership Policy Document.

Applying a comparably broad test to national measures carrying a direct or plausible benefit for workers, The Cairo Report counted at most 44 over the same period, equaling roughly 23 private sector, capital-centric reforms for every labor-centric measure.

However, even 44 is a generous count. It includes 19 wage-floor, public-pay, pension and income tax measures; four emergency wage support and irregular worker benefits; 16 measures concerning labor rights, enforcement and redress; and five initiatives involving skills, occupational mobility or consultative representation.

The total incorporates three increases in income-tax exemptions and accompanying bracket changes, the capitalization of the Workers’ Emergency Subsidy Fund and an increase in its minimum wage-replacement payment, the “Mehany 2030” vocational-certification program, three decisions regulating training, skills certification and paid apprenticeships, and the reconstitution of the Supreme Council for Social Consultation.

These are included because the IDSC treats comparable platforms, licensing changes, and institutional initiatives as reforms when they benefit capital.

Under a stricter test, the worker-side total falls to 39 after excluding the four training and apprenticeship measures and the consultation council, which may improve labor supply or provide an officially managed channel for dialogue but do not transfer workplace power to workers.

The broader figure also conceals that 19 measures primarily adjusted incomes after inflation and currency depreciation, while 15 implementing decisions appeared only in December 2025, leaving almost no time for observable effect within the report’s period.

The disparity is therefore qualitative as well as quantitative. The private-sector program systematically altered the conditions under which capital invests and accumulates, whereas most labor measures barely compensated for lost purchasing power, administered emergency relief, or improved employability. None materially improved workers’ capacity to organize independently, bargain collectively, or stop production when facing abysmal working conditions.

Centralized purchasing, fragmented distribution

Update: Egypt’s Unified Procurement Authority (UPA) has agreed to review, but has not yet approved increases in contract prices for certain medical supplies, marking the first movement since last week’s dispatch that suppliers were still waiting for “practical steps” to be taken by the authority.

Mohamed Ismail Abdo, head of the Cairo Chamber of Commerce’s Medical Supplies Division, said the “UPA would examine a study submitted by the division” after manufacturers and traders argued that raw-material, freight, transport, wage and exchange-rate costs had made existing prices unsustainable.

The authority also proposed reorganizing deliveries by dividing suppliers into two cohorts, each delivering once every two months, and limiting the interval between a purchase order and completed delivery to 35 days.

The division formed a committee to examine the rules, but its members proposed grouping purchase orders by governorate or requiring delivery to health directorates, which would then distribute products locally.

Suppliers currently deliver separately to hospitals and medical centers across the Ministry of Health, the two public health insurance systems, and university hospitals, creating a nationwide distribution burden from Alexandria to Aswan.

The dispute, at its heart, exposes an unfinished feature of centralized procurement where the UPA concentrates purchasing and price-setting power nationally while leaving distribution fragmented among individual suppliers and facilities.

Staggered orders may reduce delivery frequency, but they do not resolve the cost of servicing hundreds of destinations.

The division’s alternatives would move more of that logistical function back into the public health system.

A transparent repricing mechanism and more centralized distribution could protect supply continuity, but if, as usual, any use of public funds to restore supplier margins fails to disclose the cost basis or impose enforceable wage and employment standards, higher labor costs could be invoked to justify contract relief without ensuring that any of the adjustment reaches workers in the sector.

Share

An “amicable settlement” for half the minimum wage

Luxor’s Labor Directorate says it forced a private security contractor to pay workers their salaries for June and July after a collective complaint. The official account, published by the state-owned Al-Ahram, withheld the employer’s name, but the company was Radar, a security and cash transport firm, which supplies guards to the public Thebes Technological University.

The dispute concerned considerably more than two late payments. In his original appeal, a guard said Radar paid 3,500 Egyptian pounds a month (around $69), which is less than half of the statutory minimum wage, provided no social insurance coverage or leave, deducted three days’ pay for a single absence, and threatened workers with dismissal when they said they would approach the Labor Office.

The directorate’s initial inspection also expressly covered the company’s failure to apply the minimum wage, according to Sada El Balad, which also withheld the employer’s name.

The settlement covered the two withheld contractual salaries, but it did not recover the 3,500 monthly shortfall, register the workers for social insurance, restore their leave, refund disciplinary deductions or take any disciplinary steps regarding the threatened retaliation, effectively converting a package of continuing violations into a success story about “amicable solutions” and workplace stability.

Radar is an Egyptian joint-stock company, operating as part of the City Service group. Both entities are chaired by businessman Khaled Gouda, who serves as CEO of the City Service group and chairman of the board of Radar.

The company, like most private security firms in Egypt, was built around senior personnel drawn from the armed forces, police and “the highest security agencies.”

Its management structure names Major General Gamal Abdel Nasser as general manager and Staff Major General Ibrahim El-Hanouni as executive director. It also includes Brigadier/Major General Tarek El-Hefnawy as operations director, Major Hossam Lotfy as training director, Captain Saber El-Halawany as inspection director, Major General Mostafa El-Azazy as public-relations and marketing director, and Colonel Mohamed Said Ali as head of the Cairo sector.

Radar, also like most security firms, effectively turns experience acquired within the state’s coercive institutions into a commercial service sold back to public bodies.

Thebes Technological University, however, cannot treat the guards as Radar’s problem alone, as Article 94 of the labor law requires a contractor performing part of another employer’s work at the same workplace to equalize its workers’ rights with those of the original employer, and makes the original employer jointly liable for the contractor’s labor law obligations. The university is therefore implicated in both the wage arrangement and its correction.

Ultimately, the settlement maintained the outsourcing structure, and the company ended up giving up two salaries it already owed, without facing any fines, backdated minimum wage adjustments, or agreeing to any broader remedies.

Six years late, paid in devalued pounds

The Justice Ministry announced that it has settled overdue end-of-service benefits for 1,763 former employees of the Real Estate Registration and Notarization Department.

These payments address claims that had been pending since 2020, with workers waiting six years to receive the funds owed to them upon retirement, in a settlement that extends to the heirs of employees who passed away while still in service.

The payment is separate from the workers’ ordinary state pensions. It is a lump-sum benefit provided by the department’s Health and Social Services Fund, which is controlled by the Justice Ministry and financed partly through deductions from employees’ salaries and partly through a legally earmarked share of the fees citizens pay for registration and notarization services.

The fund dates to Justice Minister Decision No. 3322 of 1986. Law No. 6 of 1991 allocated 3% of registration and notarization fees to it, before Law No. 83 of 2006 increased the share to 5%, then a 2011 ministerial decision placed the fund under a board composed entirely of senior Justice Ministry officials, headed by the first assistant justice minister. Decision No. 1433 of 2012 subsequently established its administrative and financial rules.

In 2017, the end-of-service benefit was increased from five months of basic pay to five months of comprehensive pay, which substantially increased the amount due to each retiring employee, but the ministry did not provide the fund with sufficient additional resources. By 2020, it could no longer keep up with new claims, and payments stopped.

The scale of the failure was made public by 2023, when more than 1,500 retirees and heirs were waiting for their money. At the time, a Justice Ministry representative told Parliament that payments had reached only those who retired through April 2020 and acknowledged that the larger benefit had caused the fund to fall into arrears.

The new settlement covers 842 employees who retired between October 2020 and May 2022, another 842 from June 2022 through November 2025, and 79 from December 2025 through June 2026. The department is still processing the claims of nine employees who retired in July, making the claim to have settled the backlog premature.

Moreover, the ministry has not disclosed how much the settlement cost or where the money came from. Paying 1,763 claims after the fund had admitted it could not meet its obligations required a substantial injection of cash, and that money must have come from a budget transfer, accumulated registration fee revenue, continuing employee deductions or resources diverted from the fund’s other services. The ministry has published none of the accounts needed to determine which.

There was also no compensation for the delay. Employees received their benefits in 2026 pounds, which had been significantly diminished by inflation and currency depreciation, and by the time the payments were issued, the pound had lost approximately 63% of its domestic purchasing power since 2020, while its value compared to the dollar had dropped by about 69%.

The payment, nonetheless, remains a material gain for the retirees and families who finally received it. But nothing in the announcement explains how the ministry’s failure was repaired or what will stop it from happening again.

Share

Labor ministry as company stenographer

Update: The Alexandria Labor Directorate’s first written response to Misr El Amria workers’ collective complaint regarding management’s failure to abide by the law mandated special allowance calculation, accepted the company’s account of its allowance payments.

It said management had paid the statutory 3% periodic allowance on insured wages in January before introducing an additional 12% allowance on basic wages in July and incorporating 7% into basic pay.

Workers criticized the move, saying the directorate reproduced the company memoranda without independently addressing their argument that the calculation violated Law No. 75 of 2026, according Al Manassa’s Ahmed Khalifa.

The directorate also stated that workers retained their full legal wage rights during the suspension, but relied on an internal letter dated August 10 that the complainants were not allowed to inspect.

It neither formally classified the shutdown nor issued a binding payment order covering the duration of the shutdown.

Separately, it found the workforce ineligible for the 750-pound monthly cost-of-living allowance, despite workers saying they had received comparable payments before and that other textile companies continued to pay them.

The result was a sanitized administrative account of management’s position, rather than an enforceable resolution of either contested wage claim.

Safeguards for steel, none for the people who roll it

Workers assigned to three production lines at Estar Egypt for Industries, a major steel manufacturing plant operating under Ashry Steel Group’s rolling mill in Sixth of October City, were standing idle this week because the factory had no billet to work with, maintenance supervisor Ahmed Farag said in footage recorded inside the plant.

Estar manager Mohamed Ismail attributed the shortage to the safeguard duty on imported billet and said more than 20 rolling mills had stopped, a claim that The Cairo Report could not independently verify.

The dispute mainly divides companies according to their control over raw material production.

State-linked giant Ezz Steel and Military-owned Suez Steel and Beshay Steel operate integrated production chains, while Egyptian Steel and El Marakby Steel possess melting and billet casting capacity, and Estar must buy billet domestically or import it.

The current safeguard charges 13.12% of the import value, subject to a minimum of $70 per ton.

However, the investment and industry ministries are reviewing a study warning that the duty disadvantages rolling mills. At the same time, the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) is offering eight new billet-production licenses with a combined annual capacity of 2.8 million tons.

Those facilities will take time to build, leaving wages and employment at idle mills hanging in the balance in the interim.

Ismail also pointed to European import quotas as a constraint on Egyptian steel exports, and there is a real restriction because Egypt’s new European Union (EU) allocation permits 36,091.95 tons of rebar per quarter before additional restrictions apply, while the EU’s wider regime cut duty-free steel quotas by about 47% and raised the out-of-quota charge to 50%.

Data shows that Egypt had used virtually all of its preceding rebar allocation by June, and the supplemental quota shared by Egypt, Turkey, and Ukraine under the new system was exhausted in July, but Egypt’s own current rebar quota was only 31.4% used as of 18 August, leaving nearly 24,756 tons available.

European protectionism therefore limits future export planning, but it does not show that Egyptian producers were unable to export, nor does it explain why workers at Estar had no billet.

What the available evidence establishes, however, is that the domestic safeguard raises the cost faced by import-dependent mills, while the workers placed on idle lines have no disclosed protection against the resulting loss of work or pay.

Share

The state discounts its territory to keep developers solvent

On August 20, the cabinet set the interest charged on state-land installments at 12% for one year, covering real-estate developers and investment projects in agriculture, tourism, services, among other commercial activities, extending beyond new cities to every public authority with jurisdiction over land.

The government presented it as relief from the cost of financing land.

On the same day, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) kept its overnight deposit and lending rates at 19% and 20%, respectively.

While the land charge is not a bank loan and the CBE rate is not a precise measure of the government’s lost revenue, it still illustrates the scale of the preference: investors financing one of their principal assets directly through the state will pay seven percentage points less than the rate available to banks depositing money overnight at the central bank, and even less than most borrowing costs.

This arrangement has a deep institutional history behind it. The New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA), established under Law No. 59 of 1979 and attached to the Housing Ministry, is the public body responsible for building and administering Egypt’s new cities. It prepares and services public land, allocates plots and collects the resulting sale, lease and installment payments.

Under a 1997 amendment to the law, proceeds from the sale, lease and use of NUCA land are, ostensibly, public money held in a CBE account, which may be used for developing new communities and for what the law calls the state budget’s “imperative requirements, as directed by the prime minister,” and the amendment imposed a similar arrangement on the public authorities controlling agricultural-development and tourism land.

Reducing the return on those receivables is consequently more than a commercial decision by a property owner, as it changes the income collected from public assets. The cost does not need to appear in the budget as a subsidy payment, it can just take the form of financing income that a public authority simply agrees not to collect.

The 12% rate is the latest stage of a concessionary system built during the recent period of monetary tightening.

For example, in May 2023, NUCA’s board reduced the charge on certain rescheduled land installments to 10%, instead of applying the CBE’s announced rate, for two years.

Then, the cabinet subsequently set a 15% rate for developers and investment projects across new cities and other landholding authorities, which the Housing Ministry first kept through May 2025 and then, following demands from the Real Estate Developers Association, extended it to 15 May 2026.

Industry received still more favorable treatment within the earlier arrangement when industrial developers and land governed by the 2024 industrial-allocation rules remained at 10%. Then, two days before the latest cabinet meeting, Cabinet Decision No. 66 of 2026 established a 12% rate on industrial-land installments for contracts falling in the 2026/27 fiscal year.

That measure could at least be defended as an attempt to direct capital toward production because it requires investors to complete their projects and obtain an operating license and industrial registration within a prescribed period.

The August 20 decision, however, is broader, as it applies the same 12% rate to property, tourism, agriculture, services, and commercial investments, without any publicly disclosed differentiation by productive capacity, employment intensity, or social return, giving the same financing treatment to factories, hotels, commercial complexes, and luxury residential developments, for example.

The decision also does not condition the concession on job creation, minimum-wage compliance, social-insurance registration, affordable housing, local procurement, or protection against layoffs.

The same cabinet statement shows why the government is prepared to protect this land market, as NUCA’s board had, in its June meeting, approved 22 company requests for land payable in dollars transferred from abroad, with plots spreading across Sheikh Zayed, New Obour, New Borg El Arab, New Mansoura, New Aswan, New Cairo, and 6 October, for residential, commercial, administrative, hotel, and recreational projects.

NUCA began expanding this dollar-payment mechanism during the foreign-currency shortage in 2022, by September 2023, the authority said it had allocated 219 plots covering 926 feddans through the system.

Thus, public territory had acquired a second macroeconomic function where, beyond financing urban construction, it became a means of drawing foreign currency into a state agency.

This helps explain the apparent contradiction between “restrictive monetary policy” and cheap land finance.

High rates are meant to discipline demand across the economy, but they can also make developers unwilling to service plots, complete projects, or bid for new allocations, threatening not only their profits but also a state accumulation model increasingly dependent on land-sale receipts, construction activity, and dollar transfers.

Giving these developers “incentives” protects the public authorities whose revenue now depends on continued private acquisition of public land.

For wage earners, any possible and nominal benefit remains unenforceable.

The concession may sustain some construction or operating jobs, but the government has required no employment floor or labor rights return in exchange, while workers are offered the expectation that easier accumulation will eventually produce employment.

Heat protections leave workers choosing between safety and pay

Egypt’s labor protections do not guarantee that workers exposed to dangerous heat can stop work without losing income, leaving those in daily-wage and subcontracted employment especially vulnerable, according to a new policy paper by the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS).

The paper calls for updated heat-exposure standards, a warning system linking weather forecasts to workplace measures, more labor inspections, and a national register of heat-related injuries.

Egyptian law formally recognizes the danger, as Article 253 of the labor law allows workers to leave a workplace when an imminent and serious threat endangers their life or health, without prior permission or disciplinary punishment, and Article 257 allows labor inspectors to shut down workplaces presenting said dangers while preserving workers’ wages.

However, it’s important to note that the law protects a worker who withdraws from disciplinary action, but it does not explicitly guarantee payment for hours or days lost.

Wage protection is clearly stated only when the “authorities” order a closure, leaving daily wage workers to decide whether to remain exposed, challenge a supervisor and risk losing income, or wait for an inspector to intervene.

The rules governing exposure also remain rooted in Ministerial Decision No. 211 of 2003, issued under the previous labor law, and preserved under the newer labor law “until replacements are adopted,” leaving operational standards for heat, rest and workplace exposure largely dependent on regulations written more than two decades ago.

The consequences were visible in May at a solar power project in Aswan, where 25-year-old Ahmed Abdel Maqsoud died after suffering heat stress as temperatures reached 48 degrees Celsius in the shade, while seven of his coworkers collapsed

Daily wage workers protested inside the site after his death, demanding a halt to work during peak heat, drinking water, a functioning clinic, stronger safety measures, and higher wages.

And while the CTUWS’ proposals would improve measurement and enforcement, particularly because official occupational injury statistics do not separately identify heat stress, the paper does not clearly demand that heat stoppages be paid or establish an enforceable worker-led right to suspend dangerous operations.

Any replacement regulations should set sector-specific thresholds for mandatory paid stoppages, protect wages and attendance records, and make project owners, principal contractors and subcontractors jointly responsible.

Without those guarantees, the government may develop a better system for announcing extreme heat while leaving the cost of responding to it with workers.

Share

Journalists written out of their own boardroom

Journalists at Al-Wafd newspaper and EgyptKE are challenging decisions by their employers over wages, working conditions, and their representation in management.

The Wafd party announced on August 15 that it had reconstituted the newspaper’s boards of directors and editors, ousting journalists and other employees from the body altogether, after approving new internal regulations. The party stated it had removed a provision governing the composition of the board but insisted that the change did not affect the rights of journalists or other employees.

On August 16, Al Manassa’s Gasser El-Dabaa reported that Al-Wafd’s workplace union committee categorically rejected the restructuring and disputed that claim, saying the deleted provision had given journalists and administrative staff a role in the newspaper’s board and that the change was made without the union’s participation.

The union said the laws cited by the party to justify the change did not provide a basis for removing workers’ representation. Instead, it argued, they affirmed employees’ rights to participate in workplace regulation and protected rights established under previous rules, according to an internally circulated statement reviewed by El-Dabaa.

The union cited Egypt’s trade union, press, and labor legislation, arguing that the workplace union should have been consulted over changes to internal regulations. It also disputed the party’s reliance on a provision of the 2018 press law, saying the article in question dealt with editorial boards rather than boards of directors.

The new composition of Al-Wafd’s board has not been published by the party; however, a member of the workplace union told El-Dabaa that neither journalists nor other employees were represented, “not even the editor-in-chief of the website”.

Yasser Shoura, the website’s editor-in-chief, said he was not troubled by his exclusion from the board, saying he remained editor-in-chief under the new structure and retained his powers.

The Press Syndicate and the General Union of Workers in Press, Printing, and Information have also objected to the new structure, according to the workplace union. Both organizations wrote to the newspaper’s board chairman, but the union said their letters had received no response.

Mahmoud Kamel, deputy head of the Press Syndicate, confirmed that the syndicate had raised legal concerns with the management over the restructuring and the lack of representation for journalists and workers.

The syndicate is waiting for a response, Kamel told El-Dabaa, and plans to meet journalists at the newspaper and members of the workplace union to discuss possible further action.

The latest dispute comes weeks after party chairman El-Sayed El-Badawi denied reports that Al-Wafd was facing liquidation or that employees would be laid off. Those fears had emerged during a separate confrontation over administrative decisions that were incompatible with the work of a newspaper, with some calling for the removal of the institution’s chief executive, Sherif Hamouda, as covered by The Cairo Report.

Meanwhile at EgyptKE, the dispute is centred on a series of salary reductions that, employees told El-Dabaa, have been imposed without meaningful consultation.

The 13 journalists who complained to the labor authorities say their salaries have been cut repeatedly since the beginning of the year. Their latest reduction, announced in July, brought monthly pay to 3,000 pounds, according to one of the journalists who spoke to El-Dabaa.

The employees say they were originally promised employment contracts and social insurance when they joined the website in 2025. Instead, they say, their pay has been reduced several times.

The first cut came early this year, when 1,000 pounds were deducted from salaries that ranged between 7,000 pounds and 9,000 pounds. Management cited “emergency circumstances”, according to the journalist.

A second attempt, in late March, would have reduced salaries by 60%. Employees objected and management withdrew the proposal after several days of negotiations. Five journalists subsequently left the organization, either by resigning or after being dismissed, according to El-Dabaa.

Following the blocking of the website in April, employees were told that another 1,000 pounds would be deducted, bringing salary averages to about 5,000 pounds.

Then, at the end of July, employees were told that their salaries would fall to 3,000 pounds in return for working three days a week from the office.

The journalists attempted to negotiate. They proposed working two days a week on the reduced salary, allowing them to take other work to make up the difference. The talks failed, however, and the employees submitted a memorandum to management before taking their complaint to the labor authorities.

Some of the journalists involved in the negotiations were subsequently removed from the organization’s internal WhatsApp group, according to El-Dabaa, who also reviewed a message informing one journalist that their services were being terminated, a direct violation of Article 16 of Egypt’s 2018 press law.

Mahmoud Fayed, EgyptKE’s deputy editor-in-chief, denied that the organization was experiencing a crisis and said he believed journalists’ salaries had increased rather than fallen.

The journalists’ memorandum called for consultation over major changes to salaries and working conditions and demanded payment of delayed wages, unused leave, and other legal entitlements.

Both labor battles highlight the vulnerability of journalists in today’s media industry.

So long as ownership and editorial control remain concentrated in the hands of party leaderships and media proprietors insulated from any real accountability to the people who do the work, journalists will keep discovering that their rights on paper mean little without organized power to defend them.

Warraq islanders reorganize against expropriation

Update: Warraq Island residents gathered outside the headquarters of the New Warraq City Development Authority on Tuesday, August 25, demanding recognition of their right to remain in their homes and submitting a renewed list of demands concerning housing, basic services, and legal cases against residents.

The demonstration began at 10 a.m. and was organized by the recently formed “We Are Staying on Warraq Island” movement, which called on residents to make the action a “historic day” and demonstrate that the island’s community remains united in its opposition to displacement.

The residents’ written submission, addressed to the head of the New Warraq City Development Authority, Abdelrahman Atallah, says islanders have repeatedly requested the allocation of land within Warraq where they could build homes as an alternative to their existing houses. According to the document, requests were previously submitted to state authorities, including engineering and police authorities, but residents have received no definitive response despite the passage of several years.

The first and central demand in the new submission is therefore for authorities to approve the allocation of a plot of land within Warraq Island where residents can build replacement homes, rather than being relocated elsewhere. Residents are asking for a clear timetable, defined procedures, and fair conditions for implementing such a decision.

The residents also call for the closure of all cases against Warraq’s youth connected to the island’s confrontations with security forces.

The demands follow weeks of renewed tensions over access to the island, restrictions on construction materials, and deteriorating public services. The latest escalation began in early August after two residents were injured near the Qallini ferry crossing during a confrontation involving security forces and residents.

As a result, the latest submission explicitly demands that construction materials be allowed onto the island through an organized system. Residents say organized access is necessary to reduce friction and repeated confrontations with police.

Alongside the housing and legal demands, and beyond the call for organized entry of construction materials, residents have submitted six further urgent requests concerning everyday life on Warraq.

They are demanding the designation of a space on the island for a small health unit capable of providing basic medical care and necessary treatment, including access to doctors in different specialties. The residents also want the facility to help with administrative procedures, such as issuing death certificates, and other services normally available through a village health unit.

They are also demanding the removal of construction debris from the island; the reopening of the post office, which residents say is particularly important for elderly people; provision of an adequate number of transport vehicles at nominal fares for workers who depend on sewage-related services for their livelihoods; the removal of security checkpoints at the island’s entrances; and the reopening of the Warraq Youth Center to provide services for residents.

The residents’ document argues that the deterioration of these services, among others, has compounded the pressure created by the government’s development project.

It also accuses state agencies of using expropriation decisions covering entire plots of land without residents receiving due compensation. The document links these disputes to the recent confrontations that left two residents injured.

The residents say they are resubmitting their demands in the hope that state authorities will resolve outstanding grievances, particularly those affecting younger residents, and approve a mechanism allowing the community to remain on the island.

They promise to return to the New Warraq City Development Authority to continue pressing for their legal rights.

Share

Bulldozer-first politics threaten Giza and Old Manial as residents fight back

The Egyptian Gazette published two decisions by Transport Minister Kamel El-Wazir on August 16, ordering the expropriation of land and property in Giza for the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project and the Mariouteya Axis.

Decision No. 479 of 2026 concerns the first phase of a project to build parking facilities serving passengers of the BRT system on the ring road around Greater Cairo.

The properties are located in three Giza areas: Geziret Al-Dahab, Al-Kunisah, and Kafr El-Gabal. According to the detailed land registers attached to the decision, a total of 24,791 square meters, will be expropriated across 16 plots.

The affected properties belong to a mixture of companies, families, heirs, and individual owners, including Nile Construction and Building Materials Company, Al Manassa reported.

The decision says the expropriation follows the failure to obtain signatures from owners or other interested parties on forms transferring ownership for the public benefit. The project had already been designated as a public-benefit project under Prime Ministerial Decision No. 3483 of 2023.

A second decision, No. 480 of 2026, concerns land and properties along the planned Mariouteya Axis, which will run from its intersection with the ring road at Mariouteya to its intersection with the Middle Ring Road in Giza.

The decision includes 19 detailed registers prepared by the Giza Survey Directorate. They cover land in Nazlet Al-Ashtar, Al-Haraniya, and Shabramant in Abu El-Nomros district, as well as Al-Shanbab and Saqqara in Badrasheen district.

The Mariouteya project was declared a public-benefit project under Prime Ministerial Decision No. 3479 of 2023.

In Cairo, meanwhile, the battle has moved to the courts.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) filed five urgent lawsuits on August 15 against the Cairo governor, the head of the Old Cairo district and the head of the Awqaf Authority, seeking to halt what it described as demolitions of homes in the Waqf Tabtabay area of Old Manial.

The lawsuits, numbered 680 through 684 of 2026 before the Cairo Court of Urgent Matters, were filed amid growing concern among residents over the demolition campaign.

The dispute over Waqf Tabtabay has a longer history.

According to a March 17 EIPR statement, the redevelopment plan underlying the demolitions traces back to a 2013 protocol between the Ministry of Awqaf, which owns the land, and the Cairo governorate. Under that agreement, residents were explicitly promised they would be resettled in new buildings within the same area as part of the project.

Those promises stalled, the project was formally approved in 2018, and residents were surveyed in 2022, but administrative disputes between the Awqaf ministry and the governorate paused it for a period before it was reactivated in November 2024, with demolitions beginning in October 2025.

The redevelopment covers roughly 21,000 square meters and, according to the district’s own 2014 announcement reported by Al Manassa, is set to include 21 residential buildings with 452 housing units, along with office and commercial space.

Before the August lawsuits, residents and EIPR lawyers had already filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, numbered 17558 of 2026, alleging that authorities had illegally cut electricity, water and landline service to the area to pressure residents into leaving.

According to EIPR, demolition crews have damaged homes that are still occupied, including properties whose residents had not signed forms accepting compensation.

The pattern here, and in other cases, including Toson, Kilo 26, Warraq Island, and more, is that the state is employing a bulldozer-first politics, stripping people of their land and homes, leaving them to scramble for redress after the fact through courts, prosecutors, and lawsuits.

Residency bottleneck threatens hundreds of young doctors

Update: Dozens of dentists from the 2023 graduating cohort have been unable to start jobs they were officially assigned to by the Ministry of Health, with disputes at Alexandria and Zagazig universities leaving dentists concerned about missed deadlines and potential legal consequences.

The latest complaints mark a new phase in the residency crisis.

At Alexandria University, affected dentists say the administration has refused to allow them to report for duty and has not provided written confirmation explaining the refusal, according to Egypt Health Gate. Without such documentation, they have been unable to return to the Ministry of Health’s assignment administration to seek a resolution or reassignment.

The dentists added that the ministry told them their appointments at Alexandria University were issued following prior coordination with the university and based on official staffing requests submitted by the institution.

At Zagazig University, dentists report a different dispute. They say the university hospital’s administration is refusing to accept their assignment letters because the documents are addressed to the university rather than directly to the hospital’s administration. The administration, according to the dentists, has demanded that the letters be amended before they can begin work.

The disputes have left graduates who thought they were safe from the residency crisis caught between government and university authorities, despite holding official assignment decisions.

Some affected dentists have begun documenting their attempts to report for duty. According to the graduates, some have filed police reports recording the refusal by universities to accept them, while others are preparing collective complaints to the Egyptian Dental Syndicate and urgent legal challenges before the Administrative Court of the State Council.

Shimaa Hassan, one of the dentists involved in the dispute, told Al-Safha Al-Oula’s Mahmoud Sabra that graduates had appealed to the Egyptian Dental Syndicate and oversight bodies for an urgent and transparent investigation into the distribution of preferences and assignments for the 2023 cohort.

The affected dentists say the immediate priority is to establish which authority is responsible for resolving their cases and to ensure that they are not penalized for failing to report to posts they say they were prevented from taking up.

Share

Death on the road to work, again

Update: At least five workers were killed and 45 were injured while traveling to work or on duty across the country this week, based on The Cairo Report’s tracking.

On August 19, Al-Shorouk’s Kamal Rashad reported that 28 workers were injured when a pickup truck carrying workers overturned on the Safaga-Hurghada road in the Red Sea governorate.

A day later, three workers died after falling from scaffolding while working at a residential building under construction in the Demoushia village, Beni Suef, Masrawy’s Hamdy Soliman reported.

In a separate accident in Menoufia on the same day, two people were killed and 17 others injured when a minibus carrying workers overturned near Al-Breigat on the Kafr Dawoud road, according to Masrawy’s Ahmed El-Bahi.

In response to the brutal, ongoing series of worker deaths while traveling to or on the job, the CTUWS launched a campaign, A Livelihood at the Price of a Life, calling for a comprehensive review of how workers are transported and how safety rules are enforced.

CTUWS stated that recurring worker-transport accidents over recent years have exposed repeated practices, including overcrowding, the use of vehicles not intended for transporting people, and inadequate safety measures. The organization said responsibility can extend beyond drivers to employers, contractors, intermediaries, vehicle owners, and authorities responsible for roads, inspection and transportation.

The group argued that the repeated accidents are evidence of a wider system in which known risks are allowed to persist. It called for investigations to identify the full chain of responsibility rather than focusing solely on the immediate actions of a driver.

The issue is particularly serious when children are among those traveling to work, CTUWS stressed.

On August 18, the CTUWS called for the formation of an urgent government committee bringing together all authorities involved in occupational safety, worker transportation and road safety. The proposed committee would examine patterns behind recurring accidents, identify institutional shortcomings and responsibilities, and establish binding preventive measures. The organization also called for the committee’s findings and recommendations to be made public.

Among its other demands, CTUWS is urging the Ministry of Labor to strengthen inspections of workplaces, particularly sites where children may be employed, and to identify and hold accountable those responsible for employing or transporting underage workers.

The organization is also calling on traffic authorities to ensure that vehicles used to transport workers are properly licensed, technically fit and used for their authorized purpose. It specifically called for enforcement against the use of cargo vehicles, including pickup trucks, to transport workers in violation of regulations or beyond their permitted capacity.

CTUWS further called for authorities responsible for roads and local administration to review locations where worker-transport accidents repeatedly occur.

The group also criticized arrangements involving subcontractors and intermediaries, arguing that they can make it difficult to identify the employer ultimately responsible for workers’ conditions and transportation. It called for investigations to establish who arranged transportation, who hired the driver or contractor, who owned the vehicle and whether the employer or organizing entity knew how workers were being transported.

Security Sector update:

State & Barracks

Strategic Weightlessness

This week’s issue includes an analysis of Egypt’s absence from the tripartite regional military alliance and reports on transport safety, the growing business empire of the Future of Egypt agency, capital punishment, and the secret military’s VIP jet…

Read more

a month ago · 6 likes · Hossam el-Hamalawy

So, what?!

What this week’s cases share is a method, not just a bias. The state does not merely favor capital in the abstract; it has built machinery for doing so—a 12% land window, safeguard duties, billet licenses, a procurement authority that reprices on request—while workers’ claims are routed through labor directorates that transcribe management’s memoranda and settlements that convert continuing violations into announced successes.

The Radar settlement and the Justice Ministry payout are the clearest illustrations. In both, the state intervened only after pressure, remedied only the visible symptom—two salaries, a lump sum—and left the generating structure intact.

The steel dispute shows the same logic inside the ruling bloc itself. When integrated, state-linked producers and import-dependent rollers clash over billet, the ministries mediate between capitals—reviewing the duty, issuing licenses—while idle workers, the only party with no seat in that negotiation, absorb the stoppage with no disclosed wage protection.

Subscribe now

During the quarter in which Cairo’s shops were ordered to close at 9 p.m., and fertilizer plants lost their gas supply, Egypt’s petroleum-product exports rose by more than 50%.

The shortages began on February 28 with the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when Tel Aviv halted production at the Leviathan field, suspending supplies to Egypt for 32 days. The government then cut gas to factories, dimmed public lighting and imposed early closing hours as it sought to curb demand. By June, Egypt’s fuel-import bill for the first half of 2026 had reached about $12.5 billion.

The export figures do not mean Egypt had spare gas sitting idle, but they do show how the energy system ranks competing claims when supply tightens. Export contracts, dollar earnings, and some industrial users remain protected while other factories, shops, and households absorb the shortage.

The government, its media auxiliaries, and technocrats describe this as a temporary regional emergency. Condemnations of “normalization” and “betrayal,” meanwhile, often stop at the identity of the supplier.

However, neither account explains how Egypt became dependent on Israeli gas, why a cutoff ordered outside the country’s borders can reorder life inside it, or who pays to keep the arrangement running. Those are the questions I set out to answer in a three-part series below.

How Egypt became dependent on Israeli gas

Energy entered the Egyptian-Israeli settlement as a byproduct of the 1978 Camp David Accords, the so-called “peace treaty” most known for covering the return of Sinai.

The treaty’s lesser-addressed economy-centric Annex III committed Egypt to normal commercial relations with Israel, explicitly including oil sales and Israel’s right to bid for Egyptian-origin crude.

The following month, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) suspended Egypt’s membership in protest of the treaty, meaning Egypt, now cut off from the Arab oil bloc, had effectively become a supplier to Israel instead within the new regional order.

The domestic economy built under Mohamed Anwar Sadat’s open-door policy made that role easier to sustain. Known as Infitah, the shift launched in 1974 away from Nasser-era state socialism toward foreign investment and private enterprise–reshaped how Egypt developed its energy resources.

Oil and gas were produced largely through production-sharing agreements, where foreign contractors recovered their costs and took an agreed share of output, while the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) and Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS) received and marketed the state’s share.

Above ground, the government sold subsidized gas to energy-intensive industries, and cheap public energy supported private margins in sectors such as fertilizer, steel and cement, with the budget carrying much of the difference.

In 2000, the cabinet approved gas exports to Israel, setting up an arrangement in which EGPC and EGAS sold gas to East Mediterranean Gas (EMG), the “private” intermediary that supplied the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation. EMG was majority-owned by Egyptian businessman Hussein Salem, a close associate of President Hosni Mubarak, alongside Israeli businessman Yossi Maiman; the company’s Israeli arm was later headed by a former seven-year director of Mossad.

In June 2005, EMG signed a formal supply agreement with EGPC and EGAS that priced the gas below its production cost, leaving the Egyptian Treasury to cover the gap.

In 2008, the Administrative Court ordered exports halted, but the government appealed, and in 2010 the Higher Administrative Court allowed them to continue supplying Israel with gas. The pipeline kept operating until repeated attacks in Sinai interrupted deliveries after the January 2011 revolution.

By then, canceling the agreement had become a popular demand.

EGPC and EGAS terminated it in April 2012, and the response came through the contract’s dispute machinery. In December 2015, an International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) tribunal ordered the two public companies to pay Israel Electric Corporation $1.76 billion. Another award followed, and Swiss courts upheld it in 2017—EGPC and EGAS eventually settled the claim in 2019 for $500 million, payable over eight and a half years.

Thus, a contract made under Mubarak survived the political decision to cancel it because the arbitration clause converted the breach into a liability on two public companies. Egyptians no longer sent gas north, but public money still traveled in that direction.

Zohr, the largest gas field ever discovered in the Mediterranean, appeared to offer a way out. After production began, Egypt declared gas self-sufficiency and promoted itself as an eastern Mediterranean energy hub. Yet the hub plan did not replace the old pipeline system. The Dolphinus agreement was signed as Zohr output rose, and the EMG pipeline was reversed to carry Israeli gas south.

Zohr’s production later fell. At the same time, EGPC and EGAS fell behind on payments to the foreign companies expected to drill and develop new fields. By early 2024, the petroleum sector’s arrears had reached roughly $4.5 billion, while companies slowed investment and drilling, and domestic output declined further. Egypt returned to the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market as a net importer in mid-2024. And, as partner invoices remained unpaid, Cairo used scarce foreign currency to buy immediate cargoes needed to keep power stations running.

The next long-term commitment came in August 2025 when oil giants Chevron, NewMed Energy, and Ratio Energies agreed to sell an additional 130 billion cubic meters from Leviathan through 2040 to Blue Ocean Energy, the intelligence-affiliated buyer that supplies the Egyptian market, in a contract worth up to $35 billion, using a formula linked to Brent crude. Its first phase depends on new pipelines, and its second requires an expansion of Leviathan and a new connection through Nitzana.

Egypt now carries several risks at once: a price tied to an international oil benchmark, supplies dependent on one field and pipelines that cross a militarized border. The February 2026 stoppage was the third in less than three years, after interruptions in October 2023 and June 2025. In each case, Israel decided whether security conditions allowed production and exports to continue. Cairo could buy replacement LNG, switch power stations to fuel oil or cut supply to factories, but it could not reopen Leviathan.

Share

How the cost is passed on

The emergency measures showed where the immediate losses landed. Fertilizer factories lost feedstock, shops lost evening trading hours, EGAS bought more expensive LNG, and power plants burned fuel oil when gas was unavailable.

The government then moved part of those costs onto users, raising domestic fuel prices by up to 17% in March. A prime ministerial decree increased gas prices in May for cement, iron and steel, fertilizer and petrochemical producers, in some cases by $2 per million British thermal units. Then, on August 1, the Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy raised most household electricity rates by an average of 12%.

The ministry decided to keep only the lowest consumption tier, which covers usage from zero to 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per month, unchanged. However, staying within this limit during an Egyptian summer can be quite a challenge for a household that, hypothetically, relies on just a refrigerator and a fan. What’s even more significant is what lies ahead at the next consumption threshold.

At 100 kWh, the bill still benefits from the lower prices assigned to the first two bands, but at 101 kWh, households enter a band calculated “from zero”, and the distributor reprices all 101 units at the higher rate, making households pay more on the first 100 kWh because they used one additional unit.

The same “from zero” rule applies again to high-consuming households, creating cliffs rather than a smooth progression between brackets, where once a meter crosses one, cutting consumption later in the month cannot restore the lower rate already lost. The rule raises revenue, but it is a poor instrument for conservation.

This is where the export figure at the start of the article belongs. Egypt needs the foreign currency earned by petroleum and energy-product sales, just as EGPC, EGAS, and private producers have contracts to meet. When supply falls, authorities preserve those earnings where possible, import replacement fuel in dollars, and recover part of the cost through factory input prices, pump prices, and electricity bills.

Households do not sign the gas contract, choose the Brent-linked formula, or decide when Leviathan closes, but they still receive the adjusted bill.

Why renewables will not solve an ownership problem

Egypt needs more renewable power because solar projects can generate electricity more cheaply than gas-fired plants, reduce fuel imports, and enter service faster than new offshore fields. But the contracts now being used to build them often reproduce the same division of ownership and risk seen in gas.

Consider the Norwegian-owned Scatec project for Egypt Aluminium (Egyptalum) which is the country’s sole manufacturer of primary aluminum. Scatec signed a 25-year, dollar-denominated power-purchase agreement backed by a sovereign guarantee. Scatec initially owns 100% of the project, will provide engineering and construction services, and will remain its asset manager and operator.

Debt is expected to finance about 80% of the $650 million cost, and Egyptalum, the off-taker, exports about 60% of its output to Europe and wants the solar plant partly to meet the European Union’s (EU) carbon-border rules.

The plant will add useful capacity, but its contractual structure also tells us who owns the asset, who receives the guaranteed dollar payments, and who stands behind the agreement if revenues fail. The government guarantee protects the investor’s return, but it does not turn the plant into a publicly owned source of cheap electricity.

Green hydrogen makes the export orientation clearer.

Egypt has announced a project pipeline worth more than $80 billion, but binding contracts cover only about 13%. The only operating facility, a 100-megawatt project in Ain Sokhna, began partial production in early 2026, and its planned market is Europe.

Egyptian sun, land, and desalinated water will help lower the carbon content of European industry, while dollar obligations and sovereign guarantees remain on the Egyptian side of the ledger.

A different course would begin with demand.

Better insulation, appliance standards and industrial efficiency can displace gas without waiting for another field. Egypt could also loosen the rules around distributed generation. At present, many apartment residents cannot install a two-way meter unless they own their entire building, and new net-metering applications have been suspended pending a regulatory overhaul.

Ownership would also have to widen, as Egyptian law and policy largely offer a choice between centralized public utilities and privately financed projects, usually led by foreign developers. Cooperative, municipal, and community-owned generation would create another route. Local manufacturing would then have to be judged by who owns the factories, technology, and returns, rather than by the nationality printed on a component.

None of this removes gas quickly because ammonia plants need hydrogen as a feedstock, not simply as fuel. Some high-temperature industrial processes are difficult to electrify, storage remains limited, and a major generation project approved today may not supply power for at least 18 months—a transition that will take years.

The direction of those years is still a political choice. The existing path runs through the Leviathan contract to 2040, dollar-denominated power-purchase agreements and distribution companies that retain control of the grid.

A more distributed system would run into the conditions attached to external financing, the ownership of gas-trading companies and the power of public distribution monopolies.

Each engineering proposal therefore has built-in beneficiaries and opponents.

The valve is not in Tel Aviv. The valve is the class structure that made that valve possible—and that will produce another one, under a different energy source, if it remains unchanged.

Subscribe now

The full series:

Ahmed K. Etman

The Political Economy of Egypt’s Gas Crisis (1-3)

On 28 February 2026, Israeli gas flows to Egypt stopped. The halt lasted thirty-two days, the longest interruption in the history of Israeli gas exports. Shops closed their doors at nine in the evening, gas was cut off from fertiliser plants, and Egypt’s LNG import bill climbed to levels it had never reached before. Confronted with this scene, Egyptians…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · Ahmed K. Etman

Ahmed K. Etman

The Political Economy of Egypt’s Gas Crisis (2-3)

In August 2025 an agreement was signed to import roughly one hundred and thirty billion cubic metres of Israeli gas from the Leviathan field, running through to 2040. Official discourse gave the deal the label of “securing supplies”, a formula worth pausing over because it inverts the meaning entirely. Securing supply presupposes that the party doing th…

Read more

2 months ago · Ahmed K. Etman

Ahmed K. Etman

The Political Economy of Egypt’s Gas Crisis (3-3)

The usual response to everything mentioned in the first two articles of the series, arrives in more or less a single formula: we must expand renewable energy. The state itself adopts this response and takes pride in it, with installed solar, wind and hydro capacity now past nine gigawatts and a declared target of forty-two per cent renewables in the ele…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Ahmed K. Etman