In Issue 23 of “Deleted Lines,” we read what the numbers, verdicts, rights reports, and testimonies of those affected say about the state of rights and freedoms in Egypt during September 2026. The month that began with 13 UN experts demanding an investigation into mass graves in northern Sinai ended with the arrest of an entire editorial team in less than a day, and with the new Code of Criminal Procedure postponed by a full year hours before it was due to take effect. Between those two events: 32 death sentences in a single month, a decade of prosecution for a photojournalist, families facing eviction in Tura, Al-Marg, and Damietta, workers awaiting allowances delayed for ten years, and refugee children entering their third year outside schools.<\/p>\n
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On the evening of Monday, September 28, security forces raided the homes of journalists Mohamed Ashraf Abu Umaira and Abdullah Qadri, from the team of the “Matsda2sh” fact-checking platform, and confiscated their phones and computers. During the following hours the campaign widened: Islam Barakat from his home in Gharbia, Omar Hilal from Port Said, then Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel from a Cairo street, according to documentation<\/a> by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which handles the team’s legal representation. The Initiative called on Prosecutor General Counselor Mohamed Shawqi to open an urgent investigation to determine where they were being detained and held the Public Prosecution responsible for their safety. Six names are the platform’s entire journalistic team, with no official body announcing a single charge or acknowledging holding anyone.<\/p>\n As of the closing of this edition on September 30, none of the six had appeared before any investigating authority, according to what lawyer Nasser Amin told<\/a> Mada Masr, who expected them to be presented before the Supreme State Security Prosecution on charges drawn from the anti-terrorism law: spreading false news, joining a terrorist organization, and misusing social media. Islam Barakat’s family recounted that members of the security force blindfolded him, bound his hands, and told his relatives they would return him within fifteen minutes, prompting the family to send telegrams to the Prosecutor General, the Minister of Interior, and the First General Prosecutor of the State Security Prosecution to determine where he was being detained. The platform said the six journalists are “Egyptian journalists practicing their work openly.”<\/p>\n “Matsda2sh” is not an opinion platform. It began operating approximately eight years ago in fact-checking: a reporter takes a circulating claim, an official statement, or a widely shared image, matches it against documents and original data, and publishes the result with supporting evidence. The campaign came five weeks after Information Minister Dia Rashwan’s statement on August 20 under the heading “We Confront Rumors and Protect Freedom of Opinion Through the Law”<\/a>, in which he described his message to journalists as a “necessary chat”<\/a> and announced readiness for an annual media meeting in December in implementation of presidential directives to allow multiple viewpoints, and one week after his meeting on September 21 with editors-in-chief of licensed news websites, where he proposed a “unified entity”<\/a> for online outlets to join, a proposal to which the Journalists Syndicate responded by saying any parallel syndicate would violate Article 77 of the Constitution, and its deputy chair Mohamed Al-Jarhi demanded<\/a> that the minister be transferred to the list of non-practicing members, before the minister denied<\/a> what had been understood from his words.<\/p>\n \n On the night following the raids, the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists Syndicate issued a statement<\/a> declaring its full solidarity with Abdullah Qadri and Mohamed Ashraf, and described the arrest of the two and the search of one of their homes as “a violation of the law and the Constitution,” demanding the immediate release of the two and of all those detained in opinion and publishing cases. Committee head Iman Awf said that adding new journalists to the list of detainees “throws the law and the Constitution to the wind,” and summarized the Syndicate’s position while following complaints<\/a> about the arrest of six colleagues at the platform in one sentence: “There is no difference between a member and a non-member.”<\/p>\n Syndicate Chairman Khaled Al-Balshy submitted<\/a> a formal complaint to the Prosecutor General and an urgent complaint to Minister of Interior General Mahmoud Tawfiq, demanding the immediate release of the six journalists, the disclosure of the circumstances and reasons for their arrest and the locations of their detention, and stating that one of the six holds Syndicate membership and that their arrest occurred in violation of the guarantees in the Syndicate’s law and the Constitution. Al-Balshy tasked the legal department with following their situation “moment by moment.” This is the same position the Syndicate took with platform reporter Karim Asaad in August 2023, when a security force raided<\/a> his home at dawn in Al-Shorouk City and deleted from the platform’s accounts two posts about the identity of Egyptian passengers on a plane intercepted in Zambia carrying cash and gold, with the Syndicate’s intervention leading to his release within less than two days.<\/p>\n \nA Syndicate Shouting for Those Who Are Not Its Members<\/h4>\n