Prominent activist Alaa Abdel Fattah has ended a hunger strike that lasted nearly nine months, his sister, Sanaa Seif, announced yesterday. The strike, which Abdel Fattah began in March while imprisoned at Wadi Al-Natrun, was in protest of his continued detention.
“We received a letter from Alaa saying he has broken his strike, and tomorrow I am going to his visitation. It will be the first visit where I can bring him food,” Seif wrote yesterday.
Abdel Fattah began his most recent hunger strike on March 1, after learning of his mother's, academic Laila Soueif's, deteriorating health. She was also on a hunger strike at the time.
In late June, Abdel Fattah transitioned to a partial strike, adding no more than 200 calories to the liquids he had been consuming since the beginning of his strike.
Soueif herself had begun a hunger strike in late September 2024, on the day her son was scheduled to be released from prison.
Months later, in early March 2025, she transitioned to a partial strike after receiving promises that a resolution was possible.
However, she once again resumed a full strike in May after local and international efforts to secure her son's release yielded no results. Responding to repeated pleas from friends, Soueif eventually ended her strike on July 14.
Abdel Fattah was arrested on Sept. 28, 2019, on charges of “publishing, broadcasting, and disseminating false news and statements inside and outside the country, misusing a social media platform, participating in a terrorist group with knowledge of its aims, and joining a group established in violation of the law.”
He was sentenced to five years in prison in December 2021, following two years of pretrial detention.
According to a previous statement by lawyer Khaled Ali to Al Manassa, Abdel Fattah was due for release at the end of last September.
However, authorities did not count his time in pretrial detention toward the sentence, instead post-dating his prison term to the emergency state security court's ratification of the verdict on Jan. 3, 2022.
Article 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure stipulates that the duration of a custodial sentence begins “on the day the convicted person is arrested based on the enforceable sentence, with a deduction for the periods of pretrial detention and arrest.”
Article 484 of the same law states that “the period of pretrial detention shall be deducted from the lightest of the custodial sentences imposed on the defendant, when there are multiple sentences.”
On July 21, the Cairo Criminal Court's First Terrorism Circuit decided to remove Abdel Fattah's name from the list of terrorists, human rights lawyer Khaled Ali announced on Facebook.
The decision was made based on a request submitted by Public Prosecutor Mohamed Shawky, clarified Ali to Al Manassa.
