Ten hours of investigation into Mohamed Ashraf Abu Umaira ended with his detention for 15 days on three charges, including joining a terrorist organization, while five Matsda2sh colleagues remain in an undisclosed location on day six as the Journalists Syndicate holds an emergency sit-in and solidarity reaches Congress and the European Parliament.
Six journalists whose lawyers and families have not known their whereabouts since the evening of September 28, a single security statement that produced within forty-eight hours a media narrative appearing to share uniform vocabulary, leaked phone calls, and a detention report that the prosecution never issued.
Issue 23 of Deleted Lines documents September 2026
“Matsda2sh” (Egyptian Arabic for “Don’t Believe It”): a fact-checking platform whose entire team was arrested within a single day.
Egypt paid off $6.1 billion in oil arrears to foreign partners in June 2026, but experts say fuel prices will not fall: pricing follows Brent crude and the dollar, not production levels, and the government has already cut the petroleum subsidy budget by 79%, while gas production continues to decline and the IMF flags EGPC’s heavy debt load despite the clearance.
Ibrahim, a Zawia3 journalist who spent years in print newspapers including three at a Syndicate-affiliated paper, left without dues or a press card. He traces the system that produced that outcome: a 1970 law still referencing a dissolved political organization, registration controlled by employers, an associate roll opened in 2024 and never implemented, and a ministerial proposal that creates a chamber for website owners while leaving their journalists with nothing
19 licensed building materials traders from Qalyubia have been held since December 2025 on terrorism charges, with lawyers and rights organizations saying the only link between them and the case is selling bricks, cement, and sand to Warraq Island residents. Four young men from the island were separately sentenced to ten years each on the same grounds
A seventy-year-old man paid 7,000 Egyptian pounds ($135.14) to an unlicensed practitioner who fitted his dentures on his home floor using a cup of water as sterilization, while another offered Zawia3 a tooth fitting for 600 pounds ($11.58) and home delivery. The Cairo Dentists Syndicate warns of tuberculosis and hepatitis transmission through unsterilized instruments
Egypt joined BRICS in January 2024 with a long list of promises. Two and a half years later, the data tells a more complicated story.
Egypt’s Civil Democratic Movement announced the abolition of its Board of Trustees and the appointment of Akram Ismail as General Coordinator, but the Constitution Party objected that the executive committee composition bypassed the General Secretariat, the Egyptian Social Democratic Party confirmed it will not return, and the Conservatives remain frozen and say they received no outreach about the restructuring
Tora Al-Balad residents protest against the surveying of their properties within a plan to develop 1,640 feddans along the Nile, aimed at converting prisons and factories into towers and hotels and offering 22 land plots to investors, amid two contradictory official accounts, with Cairo Governorate not responding to Zawia3’s questions before publication.
Egypt’s Foreign Minister declares that negotiations with Ethiopia over the GERD have “reached a dead end” and affirms the right to self-defense, as Ethiopia announces three new dams on the Blue Nile with a combined capacity of 5,700 megawatts and $10.5 billion in investments. Experts say Egypt has not yet exhausted its diplomatic, legal, and intelligence options
Egypt has 7 types of fee-charging government schools, with costs ranging from 2,400 Egyptian pounds ($49.69) for experimental schools to 65,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,345.75) for Nile schools, while education spending reaches only 1.5% of GDP and 68.4% of the budget goes to wages
Warraq Island residents’ “house for a house” proposal, demanding 300 feddans inside the island for private homes, received its first official signal of willingness to discuss it, but 94 government towers remain without utilities and no official approval has been issued as the ninth year of the crisis continues.
Egypt’s small farmers, who cultivate 84% of agricultural land, face guaranteed losses: 48% own less than one feddan, fertilizer support is cut to three bags per feddan instead of eight and rarely arrives in full, agricultural extension has been abolished, cooperatives have collapsed, and growing a feddan of wheat costs as much as it earns
In July 2026, GERD discharges dropped to less than a quarter of normal levels, shutting down Sudanese drinking water stations and exposing sandbars in the Nile, while experts warn the real threat is the absence of a binding agreement to coordinate dam operations during drought years.
A single day on Alexandria’s beaches consumes a third of a government employee’s monthly salary, while Egyptian families resort to Al-Qanater as a substitute for the sea, and others cancel their summer holidays entirely.
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Satellite imagery shows 30% of Al-Obour City’s green belt converted to malls and fuel stations in four years, as 500,000 residents petition the President and Prime Minister and the city authority refuses to respond
Since 2023, Egypt’s media reform file has passed through six official stages with 175 hours of committee discussions, yet the same demands for press freedom, information access laws, and journalists’ release remain unimplemented, as independent editors deny receiving any invitation to Rashwan’s latest consultation.
573 people killed in Egyptian security operations over 18 months,
The Real Estate Publicity Authority issued a circular freezing sales, purchases, and registration on more than 400,000 feddans in Damietta, Daqahlia, and Kafr El-Sheikh, based on a religious endowment deed the Awqaf Authority attributes to an Ottoman prince dating to the seventeenth century.
Warraq Island residents have demanded for nine years that 300 out of 1,500 feddans be allocated to build homes inside the island, but the government refuses while the only hospital has been demolished, three ferries closed, and construction materials blocked at security checkpoints.
In the early 1990s, university professor Salwa Mohamed Rushdi was dreaming of her family owning a summer unit on the
Egypt’s public business sector workforce fell 30% in eight years, from 827,000 in 2017 to 586,000 in 2025, amid a near-total hiring freeze, company liquidations, and mass dismissals under the drug-testing law
