Mother of Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah resumes full hunger strike
Standing outside Downing Street on the 233rd day of her hunger strike, Laila Soueif, the mother of imprisoned British-Egyptian activist and writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah, cut a fragile but resolute figure.
“I’m going to continue to the end,” 69-year-old Soueif told reporters, “whether the end is my collapse or Alaa’s release.”
Soueif is stopping her intake of the 300 calories a day she has subsisted on since 28 February, after she shifted to a partial hunger strike.
Soueif has not eaten since 29 September 2024, the date Abd el-Fattah’s five-year sentence was due to end, subsisting on herbal tea, black coffee and rehydration salts.
Following months of deadlock and inaction by the new Labour government, she launched her hunger strike that day.
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Since then, she has lost 42 percent of her body weight and now weighs just 49kg.
Soueif was hospitalised with dangerously low blood sugar on the 149th day of her hunger strike in February.
After a phone call between British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on 28 February, she moved to a partial hunger strike, taking a daily 300-calorie liquid nutritional supplement.
Since then, Soueif and her family have noticed small signs that something is shifting.
On a visit to her son in Wadi el-Natrun prison on 6 May, Soueif and her daughter Sanaa met Abd el-Fattah in an office. The family had become accustomed to conducting their visits through a glass barrier, but this time Soueif could embrace her son.
But on her next visit, eight days later, he was back behind the barrier.
“I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I was just looking at him,” Soueif told Middle East Eye.
During that visit, Abd el-Fattah’s sister, Sanaa, dissolved into tears. “She was the one crying, and he was the one calming her,” Soueif said.
Little else has changed since that call. Abd el-Fattah continues to be denied consular access, and the authorities remain silent.
Now, another three months of inaction has prompted Soueif to resume a full hunger strike, and she is more resolute than ever.
“Nothing has changed, nothing is happening. I am Alaa’s mother; we are Alaa’s family. What actually happens to Alaa is what we care about. We have used up more days than we ever thought we had. We need Alaa released now. We need Alaa with us now. We need Alaa reunited with his son Khaled now,” she said.
Abd el-Fattah is observing a hunger strike himself, marking 81 days without food on Tuesday.
“Between my second visit and my third visit ... I could see he'd lost weight during the nine days. And I know that Alaa has health problems, like a tendency to develop stomach ulcers,” Soueif said.
“So this is exactly the kind of health problem which hunger strike isn't any good for.”
“I’m worried. The fact that I miraculously managed 150 days doesn't make 81 days a small amount of time,” she added.
The writer and political activist was initially held on 28 September 2019 after sharing a social media post raising awareness about a fellow prisoner who allegedly died as a result of torture.
After Abd el-Fattah’s arrest, he was referred to the Supreme State Security Prosecution, which charged him in a case numbered 1356 with joining a terrorist group, spreading false news, and misusing social media.
The writer was subsequently held in pre-trial detention for two years.
Abd el-Fattah was referred to a new trial on 10 October 2021 before the Emergency State Security Court, which sentenced him two months later to five years in prison. The sentence was ratified by the military governor on 3 January 2022.
According to his lawyer, Khaled Ali, Abd el-Fattah would have completed five years in prison on 29 September 2024, but authorities intend to keep him in prison until 3 January 2027.
No concessions
Soueif’s shift to a partial hunger strike bought the campaign some time, but now, the family can’t afford to wait for incremental shifts and assurances from the UK government.
“I feel in my heart that when I moved to a partial hunger strike, the urgency was taken out of the situation,” she said.
“So everyone said they could take their time.”
But now she’s not making any concessions, she said.
Despite her frailty, Soueif is able to stand before a crowd of reporters and is even able to crack jokes and laugh - she said with a chuckle that Abd el-Fattah had lost a lot of weight but “he was overweight anyway”.
She will also continue her daily vigils outside Downing Street.
“I’m feeling stronger than I expected to feel at this point. Like any stubborn person, when I’m doing something like this press conference, I feel like I could do anything,” she said.
But, in quieter moments, her decision and its implications weigh heavily on her.
'You want your mother to be a mother, not someone notorious, even if the notoriety is good'
- Laila Soueif, mother of Alaa Abd el-Fattah
“I’m not scared, because I came to this decision quite some time ago. But I’m worried about Alaa, Sanaa and Mona,” she told MEE.
“I simply realise that it’s quite horrible to leave your children with this icon of a martyr mother. It’s a bit less horrible than leaving them with a mother to be ashamed of. You want your mother to be a mother, not someone notorious, even if the notoriety is good.
“On the other hand, I’m 70, I’ve lived a full and rich life, and they need to get back to their lives.”
Khaled, her 14-year-old grandson, needs his father, she said.
“He’s autistic, so he has a very pressing need for their father,” she said.
Soueif believes that her strike will ultimately succeed in securing her son’s release, but she’s doubtful she’ll live to see it.
“I’m almost 90 percent sure that, in the end, Alaa will be free. I’m not at all sure that it’ll be in time to save my health and my life,” she said.
“As Alaa puts it, governments are like dinosaurs, they move very slowly.”
‘Raze the prisons to the ground’
Soueif emphasised that the campaign extends beyond Abd el-Fattah’s release - it is serving to bring the issue of Egypt’s rights abuses under greater international scrutiny.
“I appreciate very much the sympathy and support this has garnered and, whatever happens to me, I hope it will go on, but not just until Alaa is released,” she said.
“This campaign, because it has gone on so long, has raised the issue of British nationals held illegally abroad in Egypt, and it has raised the issue of Egyptians held in arbitrary detention in Egypt.”
She added that the campaign “has reversed stereotypes” and highlighted that arbitrary detention impacts Egyptians from all ideologies, “not just Islamists”.
“The majority of people are not even politically engaged; they have just been caught up in the fight,” she told MEE.
“Egypt is a very stratified society. So if people get caught up in the net, no one cares. But sometimes they make a mistake and catch someone who’s upper middle class or a known artist.”
Egypt’s prison population has exploded since Sisi swept to power in a military coup in 2013. Now, the prison population is estimated to be around 120,000.
Egyptian rights groups have reported that prison conditions in the country have deteriorated sharply in recent months, with a spate of detainee deaths due to medical neglect documented this year.
For Soueif, the trend is due to a greater degree of impunity enjoyed by the Egyptian authorities amid Israel’s war on Gaza.
“[Benjamin] Netanyahu [Israel's prime minister] has been discovering and showing everyone that you can do anything,” she told MEE. “If you can have a genocide in Gaza, then who’s going to bother about a few people in prison not getting family visits?”
Her son, she emphasised, is far from alone.
“There are families who have not visited their sons or daughters for years,” she said.
“I want you to remember that there is a bigger struggle. For me, as Alaa’s mother, I can’t wait for the whole world to be right. Get my son out.
“But for everyone who is interested in humanity, we need to raze the prisons to the ground, in the words of an American folksinger,” she said with a smile.
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