Minister of Health and Population Khaled Abdel Ghaffar ended on Wednesday, 21 October 2026, the contract with the private security company responsible for securing 6 October Central Hospital in Giza, after the assault on the journalist at the “Bisaraha” website Mohamed Faisal, on Tuesday, 20 October, while he was covering the hospital’s reception of the injured from a collision between a bus and a truck on the Cairo-Asyut Western Desert Road, which left dead and injured.
A circulating video clip showed a member of the administrative security staff assaulting Faisal and dragging him in front of the hospital. The Freedoms Committee of the Journalists’ Syndicate, headed by Eman Awf, said in a statement on Tuesday that about seven members of the hospital’s administrative security staff beat Faisal and dragged him in front of the reception and emergency department and then held him inside the hospital, according to what was published by the website he works for, and considered that assaulting a journalist doing his job covering events is “a crime punishable by law”.
For its part, the Giza Health Affairs Directorate said in a statement on Wednesday that an altercation broke out between a security guard of the private security company and the journalist and developed into friction, after journalists were asked to move away from the places where medical services are provided so that medical teams could work without obstruction, and pledged to cooperate with the competent authorities “without covering up any violation that proves the responsibility of its perpetrators”. The Ministry of Health said that the minister decided to end the contract based on the results of the preliminary investigations, and directed that Faisal be received in his office, while the head of the Journalists’ Syndicate, Khaled El-Balshy, thanked the minister for the “quick response”.
The Freedoms Committee returned, in a second statement on Wednesday, to praise the minister’s decision, and demanded issuing clear instructions to all bodies affiliated with the Ministry of Health to facilitate journalistic work, opening a comprehensive investigation to hold everyone involved in the assault accountable, and amending Article 12 of the Law on the Regulation of the Press and Media No. 180 of 2018, and considered that “the root of the crisis” lies in the absence of binding instructions for security personnel to facilitate journalists’ work. The committee had demanded in its first statement a review of this article, concerning the requirement to obtain prior permission.
Photo: Faris knight via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
