Laila Soueif hospitalized amid hunger strike for her son’s release

Laila Soueif was admitted to St. Thomas’s Hospital in central London on Thursday night as her health deteriorated due to the hunger strike she has been on for over 200 days to call for her son’s release from prison.

Activist and writer Alaa Abd El Fattah has been in prison since 2019, in what United Nations experts ruled earlier this week is arbitrary detention by Egyptian authorities.

Soueif began a hunger strike in 2024, when Abd El Fattah’s prison sentence on false news charges was due to come to an end but prosecutors refused petitions to credit the two years he served in remand detention toward his final sentence.

Soueif has appealed to authorities in both Egypt and the United Kingdom, where she and her family hold second nationality. But “nothing has changed,” Soueif said in a statement 10 days ago, announcing that she would resume the full hunger strike.

At medics’ advice, the assistant mathematics professor at Cairo University had lessened the restrictions on her caloric intake while maintaining a partial hunger strike in recent months following an initial hospital admission in February. 

In a statement on Thursday evening, her family said Soueif’s blood sugar had dropped to dangerous levels. Sharing an image captured at the hospital, Soueif’s daughter, Mona Seif, noted that until this afternoon, Soueif was still conscious but had declined medical intervention.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer last contacted President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on May 22 to push for Abd El Fattah’s release. Though Soueif acknowledged Starmer’s intentions in her announcement that she would resume a full hunger strike, she concluded that “nothing is happening” to release her son, adding, “we have used up more days than we ever thought we had. We need Alaa released now.”