Last week was sunny but by Tuesday morning, the threat of rain had returned with a spitting blustery wind and grey clouds. The colour had run from the London sky, and also from the face of Sanaa Seif. She stood on the street near Westminster Bridge and contemplated the potential death of her mother in St Thomas’s hospital behind us.
Seif’s brother is Alaa Abd el-Fattah, an Egyptian-born British citizen and human rights activist who is being held – as a political prisoner, his supporters allege – in detention by the Egyptian authorities. The United Nations said his imprisonment is arbitrary.
Their mother is Laila Soueif, a slight, frail but seemingly fiercely determined 69-year-old woman – an Egyptian born in Britain – who has been on various degrees of a hunger strike in London for months over the detention of her son. He was jailed in 2019 for distributing “fake news” and is still being held even though his term is up.
Now Soueif is refusing all calories – a full hunger strike. She has lost half her body weight. Last week she was admitted to hospital for the second time. Her family said it was a “miracle” she was even conscious, given her dangerously low blood sugar levels. At the time of writing on Tuesday, she was seriously ill.
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Two weeks ago I met her in Whitehall outside Downing Street and asked her how far she was prepared to go with her hunger strike campaign. “To the end,” she said.
Soueif’s hunger strike is designed to shame Egyptian authorities into releasing her son, and also to ratchet up the pressure on UK prime minister Keir Starmer. The family want him to personally intervene once again with Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who so far has resisted all British attempts to secure the release of Abd el-Fattah. He is also on hunger strike in Egypt so that Soueif does not protest alone. Mother and son, each risking death in solidarity with the other.
On Tuesday Seif (31) stood nervously beneath the ominous London sky, directly across the river Thames from Westminster’s houses of parliament where political pressure is ramping up on Starmer to get tough with Sisi. Issues of politics and high diplomacy hung in the air. But the love and worry of a daughter and sister was on show the most.
“Her [Soueif’s] blood sugars were actually up last night. The doctors say her body has found a little pocket of fat to burn ... Her body is fighting, she is with us,” said Seif, the strain of her family’s plight clear on her face.
“I just hope Downing Street uses the time her body has given us well.”
Seif was supposed to fly to Cairo on Tuesday to visit her brother in prison, but she said she couldn’t leave her mother when she was so ill. Her uncle in Egypt got a letter from his mother to Abd el-Fattah explaining she was in hospital. They got two back from him.
One was written before his mother’s hospitalisation. “It was nice. He had found a stray cat,” said Seif. The second letter came after he received news of Soueif’s rapid deterioration: “It was confused, short.”
Seif was joined outside St Thomas’s on Tuesday by MPs including former Labour shadow deputy chancellor, John McDonnell, who raised Abd el-Fattah’s case in the House of Commons with Starmer during prime ministers questions two weeks ago.
There also was Scottish National Party MP Brendan O’Hara, a member of the all party parliamentary group (APPG) on arbitrary detention; Labour peer Janet Whitaker; Liberal Democrat MP Olly Glover; Labour MP Tim Roca and Green MP Siân Berry.
McDonnell said the UK government has “tried the carrot” of offering Sisi visits and trade terms. “Now we need more of the stick,” he said. McDonnell and O’Hara suggested Starmer should issue a travel advisory warning British citizens against going to Egypt. That would put pressure on its vital tourism industry.
“We are on the brink now of a potential loss of life. We think the only thing that will shift Sisi is direct representation from Starmer again,” said McDonnell. The two leaders last spoke in February, to no avail.
The politicians expressed confusion as to why Egypt would be so stubborn with the UK over the seemingly illegal detention of a British citizen. The two nations have had a friendly bilateral relationship. Egypt is not, for example, Iran. Starmer has also courted Sisi’s co-operation over issues related to Gaza.
Yet, McDonnell said, Egypt’s leader seems to have taken a “personal interest” in keeping Abd el-Fattah behind bars. The prisoner’s father, the late Ahmed Seif el-Islam, was also a human-rights activist in Egypt.
Soueif has suggested she is willing to die for her son. Seif said that she told doctors in London that if her mother’s life was in danger and she lost capacity, she and her other sister would want to save Soueif.
“That is our position as daughters. But I also understand her position as a mother.”
