The mother of the imprisoned British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has announced she has resumed a near-total hunger strike, stopping taking the 300-calorie supplements she had been consuming on her partial hunger strike for the past three months.
Since the start of her hunger strike 233 days ago, Laila Soueif, 69, has lost 36kg, about 42% of her original body weight, and now weighs 49kg. She is taking the life-endangering step in protest at the continued detention of her son in Cairo beyond his five-year sentence.
She has not eaten any food since 29 September 2024, the date her son’s prison sentence was due to end, and has been surviving only on herbal tea, black coffee and rehydration salts.
At the start of March, amid signs that the UK government was doing more behind the scenes to secure her son’s release, she began a less stringent form of hunger strike, taking a daily 300-calorie liquid nutritional supplement, but on Tuesday she said she was stopping having the supplement after discussions with her family.
She had started taking the supplement after being encouraged by a call that the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, had made on 28 February to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, in which he had lobbied for her son’s release.
The Egyptian government refuses to recognise Abd el-Fattah’s British citizenship and does not provide the British embassy in Cairo with consular access. There were signs that the UK national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, was speaking with Egyptian intelligence services, seen as closer to the decision-making centre inside the Egyptian government than the Foreign Office.
Soueif said: “It seemed to everyone around me that it was only reasonable to allow a few weeks for a process that might lead to Alaa’s release without me incurring permanent damage to my health, or worse.”
On the 149th day of her hunger strike in February, Soueif was taken to hospital with dangerously low blood sugar, blood pressure and sodium levels. During her week-long admission at St Thomas’ hospital in London she was given a glucose drip after her blood sugar level dropped to 1.5mmol/L.Soueif, a mathematics professor, has resumed her daily one-hour vigil outside Downing Street to press Starmer to make her son’s release a priority in Britain’s relations with Egypt.
Explaining her decision to resume a full hunger strike, Soueif said: “I have never seen [the UK government] act as if the situation was urgent, except when I was hospitalised. For me and for my family the situation is urgent. 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.”
Soueif returned to London on Saturday after a visit to Egypt where she was able to visit her son on three occasions in Wadi el-Natrun prison. He is also on hunger strike, reaching his 81st day on Tuesday without consuming any calories.
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On her prison visit on the 6 May, Soueif was able to visit her son in an office and hug him for the first time since October. However, despite agreement that this could happen again, on a visit on 14 May the Egyptian authorities only let her see him from behind glass. Her first visit on 4 May was also behind glass.
In April, Abd el-Fattah had fallen ill with vomiting, severe stomach pains and dizziness and received treatment from doctors in prison.