WHEN Huda texted to ask whether joining the Global March to Gaza was worth the risk, I said no.
I was sitting in an airport when the message from my childhood friend came in. Three gray ticks, then a follow-up before I could reply: “I have to do something. I can’t keep watching.”
Huda is Egyptian, but grew up in Kuwait, swallowing down news bulletins with her father over breakfast; Al Jazeera always hummed in their home like background static. At four, she remembered seeing twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah shot in his father’s embrace on-screen by Israeli occupation bullets during the Second Intifada. By seven, she’d learned how to duct-tape windows during a missile scare in Kuwait City.
Now, two decades later, she was sitting in Cairo, trying to decide if joining an international protest might land her in prison—or worse. I hesitated before pressing her to prioritize her safety, walking her through the risks: for the foreign marchers, the worst-case scenario is deportation; for Huda, it begins with enforced disappearance.
I knew Huda’s fire. She had once tried to organize a Palestine solidarity run in 2021, amid the Save Sheikh Jarrah campaign, when Israeli forces displaced the people of the neighborhood, bulldozing homes and forcibly evicting residents to make way for settlers. No chants, no flags, no slogans, just bodies moving silently through the city in keffiyehs. Even that required negotiations with friends of friends in the security services, background checks for participants, fallback routes. Huda called it a “small victory.” Not in numbers or impact; in simply disrupting the calculus of fear.
“In Egypt, organizing is an act of brinkmanship.” Huda said. “Every message, every step, weighs your voice against your mother’s grief.” Still, Huda moved carefully.
“I still don’t know what happened to Nour,” she told me, by way of explanation. Her friend Nour had left in the summer of third grade in Kuwait, telling Huda she was finally going home to see her family in Gaza, but she never came back.
“Some days I imagine she died,” Huda said. “Other days I imagine she found her way home and stayed. Either way, I hope she made it to Palestine.” She paused. “I guess I’ve always marched for her.”
My phone stayed lit with Huda’s messages long after I stopped replying. I was five years out of a six-year incarceration in Egyptian prisons myself. I knew the weight of a decision like hers. I had marched, too, once, in hopes of rewriting a future.
But when the March to Gaza arrived, even Huda—like many of Egypt’s activists and aid workers—were halted by questions about the relationship between transnational solidarity and local political contexts.
WITH a death toll nearing, by some estimates, one hundred thousand in June, Gaza lay in ruins: entire bloodlines erased, families crushed beneath rubble, hospitals reduced to ash. For months, the Israeli occupation weaponized hunger, thirst, and illness into tools of annihilation. Aid convoys were blocked and bombed. Occupation soldiers starved men, women, and children, or shot them dead in concentration-camp-style food lines. The Rafah crossing—Gaza’s final lifeline—was sealed by the Israeli occupation, with the full complicity of the Egyptian regime. The world watched as governments not only failed to act, but poured money into the slaughter. Out of that desperation came the mandate of the Global March to Gaza: If states would not act, people must break the siege.
A press release on the campaign’s website opened with a provocation: “Join the march, raise your voice, and be present where it matters most.” Participants were slated to gather in Cairo on June 12, then travel by bus to Al Arish on June 13. From there, a forty-eight-kilometer march would begin, lasting two to three days on foot, followed by three days of camping near the Rafah border, “to negotiate the opening of the Rafah terminal with the Egyptian authorities.”
Reassurances were peppered throughout the website: this is a legal march from Cairo to Rafah. All necessary legal and diplomatic precautions are being taken.
But for many Egyptians watching from within, alarms sounded.
The organizers’ map charted a route across the Suez Canal and into North Sinai, a militarized territory tightly controlled by the Egyptian military. There was no mention of coordination with local legal experts or human rights defenders. Just a list of slogans, logistics for foreign arrivals, and a call to action.
To observers in Cairo, the march organizers seemed to rely on the assumption that visibility would offer protection, and that a large enough crowd, with cameras and foreign passports, might compel the state to stand down. In fact, the official homepage explains that the strength “lies in our visibility,” arguing that if thousands of peaceful citizens are turned back or arrested, “the entire world will know,” creating “unprecedented pressure” on the Egyptian regime.
“The idea that the government would be too embarrassed to stop the march because of international visibility was naive at best,” said Hossam Bahgat, the executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a prominent Cairo-based rights group, who followed the campaign closely. “It was poorly conceived, badly planned, and irresponsibly executed, reflecting a lack of awareness of Egypt’s situation as a military dictatorship and a highly securitized environment.”
The march had not yet begun. But already, a rift had opened up between the organizers and those on the ground.
BEFORE even the first plane landed, the silence from Egyptian authorities quickly shifted into strategic noise: disinformation, veiled threats by state-affiliated figures against the march, and state-controlled troll farms flooding timelines with talk of foreign plots, regime destabilization, and insults to national sovereignty.
As march participants began to arrive at Cairo International Airport on June 11, the backlash broke the surface. Egyptian security forces raided hotels across the city, and dozens of international participants—Algerians, French, Dutch, Turkish, and others—were dragged from their rooms. At the airport, officers seized passports, searched phones. Some arrivals were interrogated, others beaten. By nightfall, many had been deported.
Still, some groups made it through. They gathered, organized, and began the march as planned. But before reaching the city of Ismailia, separated from the Sinai by the Suez Canal, they were halted at a checkpoint. State security forces encircled them, seized their passports, and held them in place. Then, mobs of baltagiyya—state-controlled goons—brutalized the participants.
“We categorically condemned the assault on these peaceful activists,” Bahgat said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that there either was a poorly conceived strategy, or—even worse—no strategy whatsoever.”
The march’s failure was the least of its consequences. While participants quickly left, posting about their experiences on social media, shockwaves began to ripple across Egypt.
IN early July, three weeks after the marchers had left Egypt, six Egyptians were forcibly disappeared and later brought before the Supreme State Security Prosecution. They were charged with terrorism and spreading false information for participating in a private group chat that discussed support for the Global March to Gaza. The group had taken no action; the charges were based solely on conversation.
Among those detained was a sixty-seven-year-old physician with multiple health conditions. Despite her medical vulnerability, prosecutors renewed her pretrial detention for 15 days via video conference, dismissing defense appeals and presenting no evidence. All six remain in custody.
Filed under Case No. 4880/2025, this prosecution has not come as a shock to anyone in the country. It is part of a broader crackdown on pro-Palestine expression in Egypt: at least 170 individuals have been detained in similar cases since the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza began in October 2023. More importantly, it is but a fractal of the wider reality of the security apparatus that has governed Egypt since its 2013 military coup.
The aftermath of Egypt’s fleeting 2011 revolution has yielded an unrelenting counterrevolution that has all but eradicated dissent across the country. Since the 2013 military coup that installed Abdel Fattah El-Sisi at the helm of the government, state-sponsored massacres—Rabaa, Al-Nahda, Al-Manassa, and more—slaughtered protesters by the thousands and decimated street movement. More than sixty thousand political prisoners crowd the country’s prison system, many held without charge, others recycled endlessly through fabricated cases. Thousands have spent over a decade behind bars for merely protesting or sharing a Facebook post. Hundreds have died inside from torture, medical neglect, or suffocation in overcrowded cells. All civic sectors—unions, parties, independent media—have been razed. The Tahrir revolution remains the deepest rupture in Egypt’s modern political order, a moment when the people briefly glimpsed a liberated future. The regime’s core strategy since has been to prevent, at any cost, the conditions that might lead to the revolution’s recurrence.
Over fourteen years after the revolution was stamped out, Egyptians have been systematically depoliticized, impoverished, and propagandized. Beyond repression, the regime erected dystopian institutions like the National Training Academy, factories for state-trained “engaged citizens” who are then installed in key leadership posts and handed parliamentary seats, serving a dual function as mouthpieces for state propaganda and props in a charade of youth empowerment. State-controlled media became the only media; independent outlets were banned, their staff arrested; art, literature, and cinema were reduced to sanitized propaganda. The revolution wasn’t just defeated; it was gutted, its hollow filled with an illusion of a functioning state.
Egypt, like any country, has its share of regime loyalists, anti-revolutionaries, and a public swayed by state propaganda, many of whom echo the state’s rhetoric on Palestine and Gaza. Yet, for countless Egyptians, the bond with Palestine runs far deeper, rooted in a shared historic wound. The 1970s in Egypt witnessed a burgeoning body of literature that commended the Palestinian resistance and urged against normalization with Israel, led by voices like Amal Dunqul and Ahmed Fouad Negm. In October 2000, the Second Intifada sent shockwaves through Egyptian universities, sparking spontaneous protests that spilled into schools in an escalation unseen in generations. The fury reignited in 2002 as occupation tanks rolled into the West Bank, with Cairo University becoming the epicenter of days-long clashes that spread to Alexandria and Daqahlia. When Egyptians rose in the 2011 revolution, toppling the Mubarak dictatorship, their gaze turned instantly to Palestine: Tahrir Square bloomed with Palestinian flags and the call for a third intifada; protesters stormed the occupier’s embassy, and Ahmed El-Shahat scaled its walls to burn its flag and raise Egypt’s. In 2012, the Rafah border swung open to waves of Egyptian convoys crossing under fire to stand beside their besieged kin.
Today, despite all the risks, the fight for Palestine still lies at the heart of Egyptians’ political struggle. After October 2023, activists held a series of protests on the steps of Cairo’s Journalist Syndicate. Hundreds gathered to denounce Egypt’s role in the Gaza siege, calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and the opening of the Rafah crossing. The first wave of arrests arrived fast; authorities detained at least ten activists. As repression intensified and arrests escalated, the limited rallies were eventually forced to stop.
Another protest in Cairo was organized by dozens of feminist activists. At least sixteen of the participants, including prominent journalists and human rights lawyers, were detained. The protest, which aimed to denounce violence against women in Sudan and Gaza, was violently dispersed by security forces. Activists had attempted to deliver a letter to the UN Women’s Office, criticizing its silence on wartime abuses. The detained women were subjected to enforced disappearance for hours before being released.
One of the leading figures behind some of these efforts was the Egyptian poet and revolutionary Ahmed Douma.
Douma, one of the most recognizable faces of the 2011 revolution, spent ten years in prison—much of it in solitary confinement—often denied medical care, books, or even light. In 2023, he emerged after losing a decade of his life behind bars to find that release did not mean freedom. His persecution never ended. Douma cannot apply to graduate school or publish books. He remains banned from travel. His bank account is frozen. He cannot renew his passport. He has been repeatedly summoned for interrogation, assaulted in public, and targeted by smear campaigns.
And still, when word of the Global March to Gaza reached Egypt, Douma did not retreat.
“From the beginning, we placed ourselves in service to the march,” he told me. Egyptian activists had no seat at the planning table, he said, no role in shaping the strategy, and yet they stepped in, offering legal support, logistical coordination, and physical protection for international delegates. When protesters were being beaten, they pushed all critiques aside and unequivocally condemned the march’s repression. Some helped relocate activists when police raided their hotels. They liaised with intermediaries negotiating with the state. They did all this despite knowing what it would cost. For them, Palestine is not a symbolic gesture. It is, as Douma put it, “the mother of all struggles.”
All this history and present struggle was on Huda’s mind when her position on the march shifted completely. She had watched the wave of online backlash from foreigners directed at Egyptians, painting them as cowards and complicit. One viral post in particular stuck with her: a group of foreigners berating Egyptians to “rise or step aside” so outsiders could do what needed to be done.
Huda grew frustrated by what she considered a blatant disregard and disrespect for the Egyptian people’s history of struggle and the perils of today’s status quo. “We need revolution. We know that more than anyone,” she said. “But it is nothing short of a colonial attitude to expect a brutalized population’s revolution to take place on your schedule to accommodate your solidarity march’s timeline.”
And yet, the risks borne by Egyptian activists were but a part of the fallout. The march’s aftermath also endangered the very people it aimed to support, upending the fragile solidarity networks that had quietly sustained displaced Palestinians in Cairo.
DINA doesn’t call herself an organizer. She isn’t part of an NGO, doesn’t hold press conferences, and never planned to be doing this work at all. A medical professional by training, she first found herself doing aid work in 2011 during the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes—weeklong street battles in downtown Cairo between protesters and security forces under the post-Mubarak military council rule—tending to wounded protesters attacked by police. What began as a moment of fury turned into something quieter, steadier: showing up where the system refused to.
Since October 2023, more than one hundred thousand Palestinians have crossed the Rafah border through what has become a displacement industry, an extortion complex monopolized by the tribal leader turned businessman Ibrahim al-Argany to organize entry into Cairo. Once inside, they’ve found themselves in a legal void. Egypt grants Palestinians from Gaza, at most, a forty-five-day tourist permit. No refugee status, no residency, no path to regularization. Stripped of legal recognition, they are barred from formal work, banking, public health care, and enrollment in state schools. With Egypt blocking UNRWA operations and preventing UNHCR from registering them, Palestinians who are able to cross into Egypt exist entirely outside formal protection systems, surviving in an opaque limbo sustained only by personal networks and ad hoc charity.
Today, Dina moves across Greater Cairo coordinating medical care for those displaced Palestinians who have nowhere else to turn. She schedules appointments, explains diagnoses, buys medication, and fundraises for surgeries. Sometimes, she steps outside her medical profession, hunting for apartments, explaining immigration loopholes, finding informal tutors for kids who can’t enroll in school. If someone needs a place to sleep or a few days of food, she finds that too. “I don’t see it as activism,” Dina said. “I see it as friendship.”
The work is invisible by necessity. With even small fundraisers criminalized, the state surveils anything that looks like crowdfunding. “We were advised not to accept money from anyone we didn’t personally know and trust,” Dina said. “It is terrifying.”
These support networks aren’t institutions; they’re held together by people like Dina—overextended, often alone, operating on instinct. Teachers, pharmacists, translators, students. What they share is a refusal to look away.
Layla, another Cairo-based Egyptian maneuvering through the ad hoc solidarity networks for Palestinians, felt increasing frustration when she heard of the march. From Cairo, what struck her was how little any of it seemed anchored in place.
When the March began gathering headlines, her irritation grew. What grated Layla most wasn’t the action per se; it was the erasure. No one asked how public protests might endanger Egyptians already helping behind the scenes. No one paused to think whether local support systems—cobbled together through word of mouth and sheer desperation—could survive a sudden spotlight. And no one stayed long enough to even witness the aftermath.
“It was like Egypt didn’t exist to them,” she said. “The fear. The risk. The people actually living here. None of it existed.”
When the March to Gaza arrived, what worried aid workers like Layla and Dina most was how easily it might collapse what little had been built. They knew it was unlikely the Egyptian state would make any distinction between public protest and underground aid. After the march, Layla said, authorities grew suspicious of anyone helping displaced Palestinians, assuming they were political operatives. Refugees faced new hostility: her Palestinian friends were stopped in the street and questioned about their whereabouts and residency status, which was often precarious. Many began keeping a lower profile, and the aid workers doing the quiet work had to grow quieter still.
It didn’t take long. Mere weeks later, Egyptian security forces arrested several teams of local volunteers involved in grassroots fundraising efforts to support food kitchens (known as tikiyas) in the Gaza Strip. These initiatives had been responding to the Israeli occupation’s starvation of Palestinians in besieged Gaza. According to the Egyptian news and fact-checking platform Saheeh Masr, some of those detained were released after signing pledges to cease all aid-related activities. However, an unknown number of volunteers remain in custody. Several Egyptian-funded tikiyas were forced to shut down, disrupting food distribution to thousands of Palestinians who rely on these meals for daily survival.
The anger of on-the-ground aid workers over the March to Gaza wasn’t merely about discourse or tone; it came from proximity, from witnessing Palestinians in Gaza and in their Cairo exile being surveilled or losing access to the underground aid networks they relied on.
For Layla, activism is not posters or slogans or Instagram stories. It’s sitting across from a mother who hasn’t slept in weeks, helping her manage the toll of displacement on her children’s traumatized bodies. It’s absorbing their horror stories without flinching, so they don’t feel like a burden and shut down. It’s suppressing your own panic because the person in front of you has survived far worse. “You listen,” she said. “You ask what they need—not what makes you feel good.”
AN alternative model of transnational solidarity has already been growing for both foreign activists and diaspora activists with Western passports. Individual volunteers have been arriving in Cairo for the past two years, treating local knowledge not as an obstacle to be bypassed, but as the primary condition for action.
Dahlia Attoui—a Lebanese Palestinian Syrian artist who holds a French passport—is one. They arrived on a plane from Los Angeles in the earliest weeks of the Israeli genocide, pulled by panic. Two of their closest friends were still trapped in Gaza. There was no plan, only urgency.
On the ground, they found a chaotic situation, not only for newly displaced Gazans, but for Cairo’s long-ignored refugee populations: Palestinians, Sudanese, Syrians. What began as a personal mission for their friends spiraled into something larger. They began registering other families for evacuation from Gaza. Word spread; more came. Eventually, they were supporting more than seventy cases, many of whom made it out of Gaza. Some didn’t.
Dahlia entered a different kind of relationship with those displaced into Cairo. Under the current regime, the country has been plunged into mounting debt and economic misery, a situation that’s dire for most Egyptians, let alone refugees. “You have to let the reality on the ground rewire your methods.” Dahlia said. “Defer to those who carry generational knowledge of risk, and place care over clout.”
When the March was announced, Dahlia was one of the earliest Cairo-based organizers to sound the alarm publicly, and they weren’t alone. Fellow aid workers, mutual aid groups, even some foreign volunteers already embedded in Cairo all warned the march organizers: the risks were too high, the networks too fragile, the consequences irreversible. But the campaign moved forward.
“They knew we were here,” Dahlia said. “They just didn’t think they needed us.”
What made all this possible? Dahlia paused, then answered: “A mix of hubris, disconnect, and a very different ethical framework imported from Western organizing spaces, where visibility is equated with courage, and leadership is assumed by whoever speaks loudest.”
Rooted in traditions of liberal individualism, this framework, they said, valorizes disruption and presence as the ultimate manifestation of resistance. War-torn countries become a canvas, not a place with people and history and stakes and grief, but a stage for unresolved guilt and rage.
The march gave many around the world something to do, an action to cling to in the face of unbearable catastrophe. But everyone I spoke to has reiterated the same thing: they don’t reject transnational solidarity; they, in fact, deem it critical. But a different ethic guides those living under the boot. In Cairo, solidarity is measured not in decibels but in durability. It is a slow, quiet accumulation of trust, risk, and responsibility. It is communal. It privileges protection over optics. And when foreign-led campaigns ignore the stakes that guide on-the-ground movements, transnational solidarity risks resembling the same colonial structures it seeks to dismantle.
The demand was simple: use your privilege, but let solidarity mean standing behind, not over.
“Sometimes,” Huda said, “the most difficult, revolutionary thing one can do is not be seen.”
Note: Huda, Dina, and Layla are pseudonyms. Their identities have been withheld to protect their safety as they operate under increasingly dangerous conditions in Cairo, where the disclosure of their real names could result in arrest.
