This issue of The Cairo Report covers four developments that took place over the past week: the renewed protests and subsequent arrest of unpaid workers at the Agriculture Ministry, a phantom exceptional grant that failed to reach informal laborers, the escalating medical neglect of detained unionist Shadi Mohamed, and the coercive utility cuts and pressure tactics deployed to enforce evictions for the ring road in Alexandria's Toson neighborhood.
Agriculture Ministry workers: From unpaid to detained
Update: Security forces arrested at least six Agriculture Ministry employees after they renewed protests over wages withheld for five years, while one woman and one man remained in custody according to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), four others were released.
The arrests came days after hundreds of women employees from agricultural directorates in several governorates marched on July 6 from the ministry’s headquarters in Dokki to the Central Administration for Seed Testing and Certification (CASC) near Cairo University, demanding payment of wages that have been withheld since their 2021 court-backed appointments.
Workers had first gathered outside the ministry on June 23. At that protest, ministry officials and security personnel told them their demands would be referred to the cabinet. When no payment followed, workers returned to Dokki, and police moved them away from the ministry entrance, prompting the march to the CASC.
The Agriculture Ministry has repeatedly attributed the non-payment to incomplete paperwork or to pending Finance Ministry allocations. On the day of the march, ministry officials told workers that a joint committee, comprising the Agriculture and Finance ministries, would meet in September to review implementation of the rulings and the release of salaries.
The dispute concerns workers long employed on temporary and training contracts in departments including afforestation, seed production and inspection, agricultural reform, extension, and school nutrition. Many obtained final rulings or appointment decisions placing them on permanent budgeted posts, yet continued to report for work without regular pay; estimates of those affected range from roughly 2,400 to 3,700 employees.
Palestine solidarity detainee faces punitive medical neglect
Labor leader and unionist Shadi Mohamed, held in pretrial detention since April 2024, is suffering from a severe injury to his left shoulder that has worsened over recent months to the point where he has completely lost the ability to move his arm. His wife, Salwa Rashid, has accused the prison administration of stalling in providing him with the necessary medical care.
Shadi has been detained since April 30, 2024, along with five others, in connection with Case No. 1644 of 2024, known publicly as the “Palestine Banner” case. He is facing charges of “founding an organization and assuming its leadership,” charges that Rashid argues are disproportionate to the act that triggered them: hanging a banner in solidarity with Palestine off a bridge in Alexandria.
He has also exceeded the legal maximum period for pretrial detention, which is 24 months.
Rashid stated he is being punished for his political stance, not merely for the banner itself. Since his arrest, he has been moved between the 10th of Ramadan Prison and Borg El-Arab 2 Prison.
According to Rashid, Shadi first complained of pain in his left shoulder in April. Despite being given painkillers and anti-inflammatory medication, the pain continued to worsen. On June 3, he told her that doctors believed an MRI scan was needed to check for a possible torn tendon, with the scan result to determine whether surgery would be necessary.
So far, no scan has been scheduled, and Rashid said the effects of the delay were now visible in his arm, which he has completely lost the ability to move.
Rashid said the family submitted two formal requests to the prosecution in the space of two weeks, to no avail. She said she was most recently informed by the prison administration that the delay in scheduling the scan was due to prisoner transfers.
She argued that a person’s life and long-term physical capacity should take priority over transfer schedules or any other administrative consideration, saying she has “knocked on many doors” without knowing what more to do or say.
Beyond the fight to secure her husband’s medical treatment, Rashid spoke to The Cairo Report about the practical fears now shadowing her family, what solidarity from Egypt’s opposition looks like from where she stands, and what keeps her going — offering a rare window into the daily toll of prolonged pretrial detention.
In early 2025, Shadi staged a hunger strike lasting more than four weeks in protest of his transfer from the 10th of Ramadan Prison to Borg El-Arab.
“Shadi’s transfer to Borg El-Arab was carried out in a very arbitrary way, and that was maybe the thing that upset him most, when the head of the Investigations Department in 10th of Ramadan summoned him and handcuffed him without doing anything or explaining any of this to him. That was what increased his sense of anger at the time, and he decided to go straight into a hunger strike, despite my attempts to convince him otherwise,” Rashid told The Cairo Report. “But given the state I saw Shadi in the day after his forced transfer, there was no room for much argument, and I decided to tell him: I’m with you in whatever you decide to do.”
Borg El-Arab, unlike the 10th of Ramadan prison, is much less accommodating.
“Even before Shadi’s transfer, I used to say it [Borg El-Arab prison] was unjust, because I saw the huge difference between 10th of Ramadan Prison and Borg El-Arab,” Rashid said. “Yes, all prisons are equally bad, but I used to say that compared to Borg El-Arab, 10th of Ramadan was a resort—all the cells had beds and TV screens, and the bathrooms had water heaters, and so on—small things that give a person inside prison a bit of dignity. But in Borg El-Arab, people sleep on the floor, let alone everything else that’s missing.”
Shadi previously played a leading role in the independent union at the Lenin Group textile factory in Alexandria’s Amreya Free Zone before being dismissed in 2019 over his involvement in labor protests demanding higher wages. He has since worked both as a weaver and an electrician.
His prolonged detention, however, is driving a practical and financial concern for Rashid.
“The main practical challenge, as I see it, is the issue of him losing his job. I think one of the bad scenarios that comes to mind is that in Egypt, employers tend to prefer younger workers, so that might be part of my worries about when he gets out. But what reassures me a little is that Shadi’s specialty is being a weaver, and that’s a skill that’s in high demand, especially since he’s good at it, so that gives me some reassurance,” she said.
However, the financial concern is much more pressing.
“We’re like many families of detainees. I can say that every time there’s a new wave of price increases, it affects the visitation-related needs a little, and I try to make sure I do not cut back on anything. But honestly, if another wave of inflation hits, I think it would affect things to the point where I might have to settle for one visit instead of two,” Rashid told The Cairo Report.
According to a May 2024 Al Manassa investigation by journalist Sara El-Hareth into the rising cost of prison visits amid inflation, a single “tabliya” visit, in which families leave food, medicine, and clothing with prison guards to pass on to detainees without being allowed to see them directly, costs between 2,500 and 7,000 pounds, and typically does not even cover meat or extras like fruit.
Regarding civil society’s response to Shadi’s case, Rashid was particularly critical.
“The most important forms of solidarity with Shadi so far are the statements issued by the Socialist Popular Alliance Party and the Revolutionary Socialists movement. These are the most honest statements,” she said. “The unions, unfortunately, do not move at all except for the Journalists Syndicate; it’s the only syndicate that speaks about detainees. Even though lawyers have a large share of detained colleagues among them, and doctors after them.”
“As for the labor unions,” Rashid added, “they organize conferences and seminars, nothing more. They rarely speak up for detained workers, except for the occasional mention in a talk here and there.”
The rest of the political parties, Rashid said, “get caught up fighting with each other, and that infighting ends up affecting the situation of detainees”. She explained that, for the most part, each party “only speaks up for its own people,” and if a detainee belongs to a rival party, it is as if that person “is not even detained at all, they act like they do not see them, even though they might be experiencing serious abuses.”
Finally, when asked what she and Shadi look forward to once he’s eventually released, Rashid told The Cairo Report that Shadi hopes to plan a second wedding for them, one that will not be missing the friends who, the first time around, were behind bars. Beyond that, the couple dreams of a child, one they hope will not be much longer in coming.
Irregular labor & the optics of welfare
Registered informal workers said they had not received June’s promised 1,500 EGP (~30.23 USD) grant as of July 9, despite President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s pledge to disburse it monthly from May through July. Workers told Mada Masr’s Ahmed Ashmawy that they visited post offices repeatedly, only to be told no funds had been transferred for the payment.
El-Sisi had previously announced the three-month “exceptional” grant at the Labor Day ceremony, describing it as a measure to support informal workers and improve their conditions. Workers said they received 3,000 pounds in May, combining the regular Labor Day grant with the first installment of the new exceptional payment, but the following month's installment failed to materialize.
The Labor Ministry’s figures show 255,871 informal workers benefiting from its periodic grants, at a total of roughly 767.6 million pounds, paid out on six occasions annually, and drawn from the ministry's Central Fund for Informal Labor Welfare.
The delay has revived longstanding criticism of the fund's scope from Mohamed Abdelkader, former secretary-general of the now-dissolved Independent Union of Informal Workers. Speaking to The Cairo Report, Abdelkader said that “the ministry's database captures only 8% of the country’s roughly 12 million construction and building workers, while withholding grants from 70% of even those registered, despite continuing to collect a 1% levy from contractors on behalf of workers largely absent from its records.”
“The registration process itself has been compromised by brokers and irregular enrollments,” Abdelkader added, noting that “the ministry has offered inconsistent justifications for suspending payments, citing commercial registration status in some cases and enrollment in welfare programs such as Takaful and Karama in others.”
Abdelkader noted that he had previously submitted a formal briefing request to the labor minister ahead of Labor Day, as well as to the head of the House of Representatives’ Manpower Committee, warning that an International Labor Organization (ILO) complaint would follow if the ministry continued to ignore the claims.
While the exact number of wage earners in Egypt’s sprawling informal economy is hard to pin down, conservative estimates put it at just over 65% of the country’s entire workforce.
Expropriation by attrition
Residents of the Toson neighborhood in eastern Alexandria are facing a new campaign of intimidation from a private contracting company trying to buy up their homes ahead of a planned government ring road. The residents’ lawyer, Mohamed Ramadan, stated via Facebook that the firm has damaged property, cut off utilities, and threatened forced eviction to pressure holdouts into selling, even as the underlying legal battle over the road project continues to grind through Egypt’s courts.
On July 8, Ramadan, who has represented Toson residents since 2008, said the Production for Integrated General Supplies and Contracting, a “demolition and excavation company,” has stationed “agents” in the neighborhood to pressure residents into selling.
Notably, the company has a documented relationship with the state through the National Authority for Tunnels (NAT) procurement on the Abu Qir Metro scheme, including a 9.2 million pound demolition package.
Ramadan told The Cairo Report that the company’s representatives have told residents that unnamed “sovereign state bodies” are behind the project, warned that refusal to sell would bring forced eviction, and claimed the firm itself is affiliated with a major security agency. A small number of residents have given in and sold, Ramadan said, but most are resisting.
A visit to the company website yields few results as to who owns the company or its internal hierarchy. Instead, it lists the names of its Board of Directors, of which there are four: Ahmed and Mohamed El-Masry, and Mostafa and Ahmed Dahi.
On the ground, residents describe tactics that go well beyond aggressive negotiation.
In one building of 30 apartments, Ramadan said, the company bought 12 units from their owners and then deliberately damaged the walls and balconies in those units, cracking the remaining apartments and disfiguring the building.
He also accused the company, whose leadership he said includes a retired army general backed by dozens of private security guards, of sabotaging the sewage network and cutting electricity to the area. Residents who tried to file police reports at the second Montaza station were turned away, according to Ramadan.
He added that he and residents plan to take the matter to Egypt’s senior public prosecutor to file a formal complaint against the company, separate from the ongoing court case over the government’s expropriation order itself.
“We will file a complaint against the company regarding [its treatment of] the residents. We will also demand an inspection of the damage they caused in demolishing the houses they bought, and its effect on the other houses, especially the [30 apartment] building I mentioned in the post,” Ramadan told The Cairo Report.
In February, as the case moved through the Alexandria Administrative Court, Ramadan told Al Manassa’s Laila El-Abd that a company had already been acting as a go-between for the state and residents, and that five households had sold their homes for roughly half their market value under “the company’s intimidation.” The campaign has since escalated from below-market price buyouts to property damage and utility sabotage to force the holdouts to give in.
The dispute centers on a 23-kilometer ring road connecting the Mahmoudiya corridor to the new city of Abu Qir, part of a broader East Alexandria development plan. Alexandria’s governor issued Decree No. 88 of 2025 in April, forming a committee, headed by the Montaza II district chief and including officials from the Survey Authority, State Property Protection, the Land Reform Authority, expropriation departments, and military engineers, to catalog properties conflicting with the road’s path.
Survey teams reached Toson that July to count 227 buildings without explaining why, and residents soon learned the area was slated for demolition. The full expropriation decree, published in the official gazette on 22 October 2025, set total compensation at 1.262 billion pounds distributed among owners of 596 plots and properties, with the Armed Forces Engineering Authority (AFEA) handling both payment and project execution.
Government compensation, drawn from a table attached to the expropriation decree, works out to an average of about 2.117 million pounds per property, a figure residents’ representatives told Al Manassa’s El-Abd badly understates the value of homes in the area, some reportedly worth 4 to 5 million pounds or more, and does not account for the cost of finding replacement housing in Alexandria’s current property market.
Residents’ lawyers put the number of affected properties at 260 to 320 homes, along with four mosques and a church, in a district home to between 5,000 and 6,000 people. At the time, Ramadan argued that most of the housing already holds official reconciliation approvals for building violations and is connected to public utility networks, calling the state’s expropriation decision “an abuse of authority”.
In response, Toson residents, via their legal team, filed an appeal against the government through the State Lawsuits Authority.
According to a copy of the Petition to the Court of Administrative Justice in Alexandria obtained by The Cairo Report, the petition was submitted by 62 of Toson’s residents.
“The claim that development works serving the public benefit are being undertaken in the East Abu Qir area is a claim without any basis in truth. The reality of the project is the construction of a yacht marina and a tourist zone whose purpose is not the public benefit; the purpose is rather the establishment of an investment project from which a small class of capital owners will profit, whereby any character of public benefit is negated,” the petition stated.
It added that “what the residents of the area targeted for expropriation now face is not their first confrontation with the administrative authority. Decisions had previously been issued from Alexandria Governorate, by a former Governor of Alexandria, ordering the demolition of the houses erected on the land of this area, in preparation for its allocation to Al-Ittihad Alexandria Club.”
The residents, who challenged that decision, obtained a judgment annulling the demolition decision, the text of which was cited in the petition.
The case law of the Supreme Administrative Court is settled that:
“Where it is established that the purpose of the expropriation is not the achievement of a public benefit, but rather a private purpose or an intent to spite the owners of the property, the decision is contrary to law and shall be annulled.”
(Judgment of the Supreme Administrative Court, Challenge No. 267 of Judicial Year 30, session of 28/4/1985.)”
The current dispute has also had a criminal dimension. In September 2025, residents selected Abdallah Mohamed, 29, as their spokesperson to represent them in meetings with officials. A week after he and other residents met with Kamel El-Wazir, Egypt’s deputy prime minister for industrial development and minister of transport and industry, who pledged to raise the expropriation issue with Alexandria’s governor, Abdallah was arrested.
He was referred to the Supreme State Security Prosecution, which ordered him held pending investigation, on charges including “joining a terrorist group, financing a terrorist group, spreading false news, and misusing social media accounts,” according to his lawyer at the time. Ramadan has said a review of Abdallah’s phone found no evidence supporting the charges, and has called the arrest an attempt to frighten residents into silence. Rights groups have described the detention as arbitrary, arguing his activities, which included speaking to journalists, documenting abuses, and pursuing legal appeals, fell within protected rights to free expression.
At a December 7 hearing, according to an account of the proceedings, a seven-lawyer defense team, including Ramadan, Mahienour El-Massry, Hamdy Khalaf, Mohamed Fattouh, Hamada El-Abd, Ali Hussein, and Mohamed Abdel-Razek, presented the court with a detailed engineering map of an alternative route that would avoid demolishing homes.
The court adjourned the case to January 11 and referred it to the State Commissioners’ Authority for a technical and legal report. That same account named the road project’s ultimate beneficiary as an Emirati investor developing a tourism project.
In February, the court unexpectedly appointed an independent engineering expert committee to evaluate the viability of residents' proposed alternate route, which Ramadan described as a significant decision since the State Commissioners Authority had recommended dismissing the case, stating the “public benefit” requirement was met.
The text of the court’s ruling, delegating the Ministry of Justice Experts Office in Alexandria to appoint a three-member committee from among the experts registered on its roster, was reviewed by The Cairo Report.
According to the ruling’s terms of reference, the committee was tasked with reviewing the prime ministerial decree that designated the road construction project, along with an accompanying power station, as serving the public benefit. The committee was also asked to identify the specific “public benefit” aims of the project, to inspect the plaintiffs’ properties on site and assess their condition and value, and to determine whether implementing the project required expropriating those properties.
However, the panel’s progress, Ramadan said, has so far been slow.
“The head of the expert [committee] has just come back from leave and has not set a meeting date yet. I’m not sure whether the appointment will be soon or not,” Ramadan told The Cairo Report. “We might have to apply pressure to push the date forward, much like forming the committee itself required pressure from the residents on the experts’ office to designate the committee [members].”
“We’re supposed to set a date for a discussion session, then a date for an on-site inspection, and after that, the report gets issued. But the law does not obligate the committee to any specific timeline,” he added.
Toson’s residents have faced this fight before when the area was targeted for the first time in 2008 under Decree No. 957, which sought to seize 42 feddans of irrigated farmland; in May of that year, governorate authorities carried out demolitions accompanied by riot police and bulldozers, destroying several homes on the claim that “the land belonged to the state and the buildings violated code.” Residents sued, and in May 2009, the Administrative Court ordered the demolitions halted.
According to accounts of that period, the state subsequently placed the remaining 30 feddans under “armed guard” and transferred ownership to the Alexandria governorate, a move the residents’ legal team had characterized as circumventing the court’s ruling and Egypt’s agrarian reform law.
“People are scared. They’re scared the state would displace them, but they’re also holding their ground, and they will not abandon their homes and land,” Ramadan concluded.
Security Sector update:
So, what?!
The cases covered this week share a common structural thread: an economic model that routinely shifts its financial and social burdens onto the most vulnerable. A recent paper by Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh defines Egypt's current framework as “landlord capitalism,” a system focused on extracting rent and revenue rather than organizing productive labor.
We see this exact logic in how the state treats its workforce: turning the informal labor fund into a revenue-generating mechanism while withholding grants and forcing civilian agricultural workers to effectively subsidize the ministry through years of unpaid labor.
This extractive approach extends directly to the urban landscape. In Alexandria, the state attempts to secure land for infrastructure to be “developed” by security agencies, not through equitable compensation, but by leveraging private contractors to apply pressure on residents.
Across the board, the priority is to bypass the true costs of state projects by making citizens absorb the deficit.
When this architecture of precarity is challenged, the response is almost always coercive. Whether it is arresting agricultural workers demanding their arrears, prosecuting Toson residents defending their homes, or the continued medical neglect of detained unionists like Shadi Mohamed, the state relies on its security apparatus to manage the fallout of its own economic extraction.