The mother of a pro-democracy activist imprisoned in Egypt is seriously ill in a London hospital after resuming a monthslong hunger strike aimed at pressing for her son's release, her family said Friday. Laila Soueif was admitted to St. Thomas' Hospital on Thursday night with dangerously low blood-sugar levels, the AP reports. "The bottom line is, we're losing her," her daughter, Sanaa Seif, said outside the hospital, adding that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer "needs to act now. Not tomorrow, not Monday, but right now."
Soueif has been on a hunger strike since Sep. 29 to protest the imprisonment of her son Alaa Abd El Fattah, a British-Egyptian dual national who has been in prison in Egypt since September 2019. He was sentenced in December 2021 to five years in prison for spreading false news and should have been released last year, but Egyptian authorities refused to count the more than two years he'd spent in pretrial detention and ordered him held until January 2027. Soueif spent weeks camped outside Britain's Foreign Office and the prime minister's Downing Street office to highlight her son's case.
Soueif, believed to be in her late 60s, was previously admitted to the hospital in February, with doctors warning she was at "high risk of sudden death." She agreed in early March to move to a partial hunger strike after Starmer pledged to press Egypt to release her son. Soueif resumed her full hunger strike on May 20, saying, "Nothing has changed, nothing is happening." The family says Soueif has lost 42% of her body weight during the 242-day hunger strike and that she has received glucagon treatment, which induces the liver to break down stored fat to obtain glucose, but continues to refuse glucose, which would provide her with calories.
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Abd El Fattah has been on his own hunger strike for 90 days following his mother's admission to the hospital in February. The British government said that Starmer raised his case in a call with the Egyptian president last week, and that Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer discussed it with Egypt's Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty on Sunday. "We remain in regular contact with Laila and her family and have checked on her welfare," the Foreign Office said in a statement. "We are committed to securing Alaa Abd El Fattah's release and continue to press for this at the highest levels of the Egyptian government."
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