September, 24 2019, 12:00am EDT

World Leaders Must Act To Stop Egyptian President al-Sisi's Repressive Crackdown
WASHINGTON
Ahead of further protests expected on Friday, world leaders must confront President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and utterly condemn the crackdown he has waged to counter the outbreak of protests in recent days, said Amnesty International as heads of state meet at the UN General Assembly in New York this week.
Amnesty International has documented how the Egyptian security forces have carried out sweeping arrests of protesters, rounded up journalists, human rights lawyers, activists, protesters and political figures in a bid to silence critics and deter further protests from taking place. The government has also added the BBC and Alhurra news to the list of 513 other websites already blocked in Egypt and disrupted online messaging applications to thwart further protests.
"The government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is clearly shaken to its core by the outbreak of protests and has launched a full-throttle clampdown to crush demonstrations and intimidate activists, journalists and others into silence," said Najia Bounaim, North Africa Campaigns Director at Amnesty International.
"The world must not stand silently by as President al-Sisi tramples all over Egyptians' rights to peaceful protest and freedom of expression. Instead of escalating this repressive backlash, the Egyptian authorities must immediately release all those detained for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly and allow further protests on Friday to go ahead."
Amnesty International has documented the arrests of at least 59 people from five cities across Egypt during protests that took place on the nights of September 20 and 21. Local human rights organizations have reported hundreds of arrests all over Egypt. The Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights reported that 964 individuals have been arrested in relation to the protests between September 19 and 24.
President al-Sisi responded to questions from media in New York yesterday claiming that the protests were instigated by "political Islam," however Amnesty International found that in fact the protesters came from an extremely diverse range of age, socioeconomic, gender and religious backgrounds, including non-political backgrounds. All those detained faced the same "terrorism"- related charges.
Police violence
In scenes that have not been witnessed in Egypt for years, crowds of protesters gathered in Cairo's iconic Tahrir square, as well as in Alexandria, Dumyat, Mahala, and in Suez chanting slogans against President al-Sisi's rule and decrying corruption and detention. The response from the authorities was swift.
Amnesty International has verified three videos showing police officers beating protesters taken into custody and firing birdshot and tear gas to disperse crowds of peaceful protesters.
One of the videos shows police officers beating an unarmed protester before dragging him into an armored vehicle, while another policeman opened fire with birdshot on people running away from vehicles.
Using verified video footage showing Egyptian security forces, Amnesty International has identified the vehicles as French-made MIDS and Italian-made IVECO armored vehicles. Amnesty International has previously documented the use of French MIDS in repressing protests in Egypt.
"These protests came as a shock because the authorities thought they had permanently intimidated protesters through the heavy-handed tactics of the past six years including arbitrary arrests and the use of excessive force, including lethal force. The fact that protesters risked their lives and liberty to protest against President al-Sisi's rule suggests his ruthless tactics have garnered frustration and anger," said Najia Bounaim.
Sweeping arrests
Hundreds of detainees have been held in Central Security Forces camps without access to their lawyers or families. Some were later released, but at least 274 were brought before the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP), and at least 146 in front of local prosecution offices in Cairo, which was seconded by the SSSP to keep up with the numbers arrested, according to the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights and lawyers.
According to lawyers, prosecutors questioned suspects about their participation in the protests and told them they were being investigated on charges that include "aiding a terrorist group in achieving its goals," "spreading false news," "participating in unauthorized protests," and "misusing social media" to disseminate information of a "terrorist group," a term used to describe the Muslim Brotherhood, before ordering their detention for 15 days.
Politicians, journalists, activists rounded up
In the aftermath of the protests, Egypt's security forces have continued with a campaign of repression rounding up lawyers, journalists, activists and politicians.
Amnesty International has also documented the arrest of five journalists. Sayed Abdellah, who had been sharing news about the protest in Suez on his Facebook account, was arrested at home on September 22; and Mohammed Ibrahim, founder of the well-known blog "Oxygen Egypt", was arrested for posting videos about the protests when he attended a police station in Cairo on September 21 as part of his probation conditions.
Prominent human rights lawyer and activist, Mahienour el-Masry was seized by men in plainclothes at around 7 pm on September 22 and bundled into a minivan after she left the SSSP building where she had been representing a detained human rights lawyer. She was later questioned by an SSSP prosecutor on the unfounded charges including "aiding a terrorist group in achieving its goals" and "spreading false news" in a case that dates back to protests that took place in March 2019, before ordering her detention pending investigations.
At least three people have been also arrested from their homes in Suez, including Rashad Mohammed Kamal, a labour leader who also took part in the protests. The authorities have also continued with arrests across in Egypt, with at least seven party leaders and lawyers arrested in the early hours of September 24.
Other politicians arrested include Abed Aziz Husseini, the vice president of the Karama party, following a statement issued by the party announcing it was suspending its activities in response to unprecedented repression and Abdel Nasser Ismail, vice president of the Popular Socialist Coalition Party.
"President al-Sisi will face a crucial test over the coming days. The world will be watching his response to the protests and if his repressive crackdown continues to intensify, Egypt's international allies must send a clear message that the ruthless crushing of peaceful dissent will not be tolerated," said Najia Bounaim.
Media censorship and internet disruption
Amnesty International has observed and verified ongoing network disruption activities targeting web content and media platforms, such as BBC News, and web services including communication apps, such as Wire. These have either been blocked or restricted making it harder to communicate or access information. Amnesty also received alerts of temporary service disruptions on WhatApp and Signal.
"It seems the authorities are trying out new network interference tactics to restrict people's ability to access information, communicate securely and organize. They are keeping an eye on how people are adapting and learning to develop counter measures," said Ramy Raoof, Tactical Technologist at Amnesty Tech.
The Supreme Council for Media Regulation confirmed that BBC News' website had been blocked due to "inaccurate" coverage of the demonstrations. Egypt's State Information Service also warned foreign correspondents that they should "abide by internationally recognized professional standards in their coverage of Egyptian affairs and news".
Background:
Scattered protests first broke out in cities across Egypt on September 20 and 21, calling on President al-Sisi to resign. The protests are believed to have been sparked by corruption allegations shared by former army contractor Mohamad Ali accusing army leaders and the president of wasting public money on building luxury properties.
The day before the protests began, police arrested the brother of US-based Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, Hazem, because of videos Wael had posted in which he criticizes the Egyptian authorities and President al-Sisi. Both were later accused of "aiding terrorist groups" by the SSSP.
This statement is available at: https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/world-leaders-must-act-to-stop-president-al-sisis-repressive-crackdown/
Follow Amnesty International USA on Twitter.
Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
(212) 807-8400LATEST NEWS
At Least 95 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks Including Massacres at Beach Café, Aid Points
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," said one eyewitness to a strike on the popular al-Baqa Café.
Jun 30, 2025
Israeli forces ramped up their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip Monday, killing at least 95 Palestinians in attacks including massacres at a seaside café and a humanitarian aid distribution center and bombings of five school shelters housing displaced families and a hospital where refugees were sheltering in tents.
An Israeli strike targeted the al-Baqa Café in western Gaza City, one of the few operating businesses remaining after 633 days of Israel's obliteration of the coastal strip and a popular gathering place for journalists, university students, artists, and others seeking reliable internet service and a respite from nearly 21 months of near-relentless attacks.
Medical sources said at least 33 civilians were killed and nearly 50 others wounded in the massacre, including footballer Mustafa Abu Amira, photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab—who survived an earlier Israeli airstrike and is reportedly the 227th journalists killed by Israel since October 2023—and prominent artist Frans Al-Salmi, whose final painting depicting a young Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces resembles photographs of its slain creator posted on social media after her killing.
Warning: Photos shows image of death
Survivor Ali Abu Ateila toldThe Associated Press that the café was crowded with women and children at the time of the attack.
"Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake," he said.
Another survivor of the massacre told Britain's Sky News: "All I see is blood... Unbelievable. People come here to take a break from what they see inside Gaza. They come westward to breathe."
Eyewitness Ahmed Al-Nayrab toldAgence France-Presse that a "huge explosion shook the area."
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," he said. "It was a scene that made your skin crawl."
Witnesses and officials said Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking food and other humanitarian aid from a U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution point in southern Gaza, killing 15 people amid near-daily massacres of aid-seekers.
"We were targeted by artillery," survivor Monzer Hisham Ismail told The Associated Press. Another survivor, Yousef Mahmoud Mokheimar, told the AP that Israeli troops "fired at us indiscriminately." Mokheimar was shot in the leg, another man who tried to rescue him was also shot.
IDF troops have killed nearly 600 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded more than 4,000 others over the past month, with Israeli military officers and soldiers saying they were ordered to deliberately fire on civilians in search of food and other necessities amid Israel's weaponized starvation of Gaza.
Another 13 people were reportedly killed Monday when IDF warplanes bombed an aid warehouse in the Zeitoun quarter of southern Gaza City, according to al-Ahli Baptist Hospital officials cited by The Palestine Chronicle. IDF warplanes also reportedly bombed five schools housing displaced families, three of them in Zeitoun. Israeli forces also bombed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinian families are sheltering in tents. It was reportedly the 12th time the hospital has been bombed since the start of the war.
The World Health Organization has documented more than 700 attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities since October 2023. Most of Gaza's hospitals are out of service due to Israeli attacks, some of which have been called genocidal by United Nations experts.
Israel's overall behavior in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 204,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been found to be generally accurate and even a likely undercount by peer-reviewed studies.
The intensified IDF attacks follow Israel's issuance of new forced evacuation orders amid the ongoing Operation Gideon's Chariots, an ongoing offensive which aims to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population, possibly to make way for Jewish recolonization as advocated by many right-wing Israelis.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'We Cannot Be Silent': Tlaib Leads 19 US Lawmakers Demanding Israel Stop Starving Gaza
"This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help."
Jun 30, 2025
As the death toll from Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians continues to rise amid the ongoing U.S.-backed genocidal assault and siege of the Gaza Strip, Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Monday led 18 congressional colleagues in a letter demanding that the Trump administration push for an immediate cease-fire, an end to the Israeli blockade, and a resumption of humanitarian aid into the embattled coastal enclave.
"We are outraged at the weaponization of humanitarian aid and escalating use of starvation as a weapon of war by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people in Gaza," Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—and the other lawmakers wrote in their letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "For over three months, Israeli authorities have blocked nearly all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, fueling mass starvation and suffering among over 2 million people. This follows over 600 days of bombardment, destruction, and forced displacement, and nearly two decades of siege."
"According to experts, 100% of the population is now at risk of famine, and nearly half a million civilians, most of them children, are facing 'catastrophic' conditions of 'starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels,'" the legislators noted. "These actions are a direct violation of both U.S. and international humanitarian law, with devastating human consequences."
Gaza officials have reported that hundreds of Palestinians—including at least 66 children—have died in Gaza from malnutrition and lack of medicine since Israel ratcheted up its siege in early March. Earlier this month, the United Nations Children's Fund warned that childhood malnutrition was "rising at an alarming rate," with 5,119 children under the age of 5 treated for the life-threatening condition in May alone. Of those treated children, 636 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, the most lethal form of the condition.
Meanwhile, nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 others have been injured as Israeli occupation forces carry out near-daily massacres of desperate people seeking food and other humanitarian aid at or near distribution sites run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Israel Defense Forces officers and troops have said that they were ordered to shoot and shell aid-seeking Gazans, even when they posed no threat.
"This is not aid," the lawmakers' letter argues. "UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has warned that, under the GHF, 'aid distribution has become a death trap.' We cannot allow this to continue."
"We strongly oppose any efforts to dismantle the existing U.N.-led humanitarian coordination system in Gaza, which is ready to resume operations immediately once the blockade is lifted," the legislators wrote. "Replacing this system with the GHF further restricts lifesaving aid and undermines the work of long-standing, trusted humanitarian organizations. The result of this policy will be continued starvation and famine."
"We cannot be silent. This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help," the lawmakers added. "We demand an immediate end to the blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry into Gaza, the restoration of U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting cease-fire. Any other path forward is a path toward greater hunger, famine, and death."
Since launching the retaliatory annihilation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed at least 56,531 Palestinians and wounded more than 133,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which also says over 14,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Upward of 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, often more than once.
On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated a call for a cease-fire deal that would secure the release of the remaining 22 living Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas.
In addition to Tlaib, the letter to Rubio was signed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Henry "Hank"Johnson (Ga.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Mark Pocan (Wisc.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Paul Tonko (N.Y.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.).
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden National Security Adviser Among Those Crafting 'Project 2029' Policy Agenda for Democrats
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
Jun 30, 2025
Amid the latest battle over the direction the Democratic Party should move in, a number of strategists and political advisers from across the center-left's ideological spectrum are assembling a committee to determine the policy agenda they hope will be taken up by a Democratic successor to President Donald Trump.
Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
The project is being assembled by former Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, now co-founder of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and includes Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser under the Biden administration; Jim Kessler, founder of the centrist think tank Third Way; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
As The New York Times noted in its reporting on Project 2029, the panel is being convened amid extensive infighting regarding how the Democratic Party can win back control of the White House and Congress.
After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
Progressives have called on party leaders to back Mamdani, pointing to his popularity with young voters, and accept that his clear message about making life more affordable for working families resonated with Democratic constituents.
But speaking to the Times, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake exemplified how many of the party's strategists have insisted that candidates only need to package their messages to voters differently—not change the messages to match the political priorities of Mamdani and other popular progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"We didn't lack policies," Lake told the Times of recent national elections. "But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies."
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have drawn crowds of thousands in red districts this year at Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies—another sign, progressives say, that voters are responding to politicians who focus on billionaires' outsized control over the U.S. political system and on economic justice.
Project 2029's inclusion of strategists like Kessler, who declared economic populism "a dead end for Democrats" in 2013, demonstrates "the whole problem [with Democratic leadership] in a nutshell," said Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass—as does Sullivan's seat on the advisory board.
As national security adviser to President Joe Biden, Sullivan played a key role in the administration's defense and funding of Israel's assault on Gaza, which international experts and human rights groups have said is a genocide.
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade: Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Israel/Gaza War, and the 2024 Joe Biden campaign," said Nick Field of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
"Jake Sullivan is shaping domestic policy for the next Democratic administration," he added. "Who is happy with the Biden foreign policy legacy?"
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular