Egypt: Alaa Abdelfattah to stop consuming all 100 calories 

British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdelfattah has announced he will escalate his hunger strike and stop consuming the daily 100 calories he has lived on since April.

Alaa has been surviving on a spoon of honey and a drop of milk in tea whilst detained in prison in Egypt.

He has been on hunger strike for over 200 days to protest his unfair detention after being handed a five-year sentence for broadcasting false news.

Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif is holding a sit-in outside the UK Foreign Office and has said she will not leave until the government takes action over her brother’s detention.

The prominent activist has been imprisoned in Egypt since late 2019 but has still not received a visit from the British consulate.

Sanaa is calling on the Foreign Secretary James Cleverly to urgently meet her family and explain what the government is doing to secure her brother’s release.

READ: Climate activist Greta Thunberg signs petition calling on Egypt to release political prisoners

Sanaa and her sister Mona have for months been campaigning to raise awareness of Alaa’s imprisonment and have asked the British government to put more pressure on their ally Egypt to release Alaa.

Earlier this week climate activist Greta Thunberg visited the sit-in and urged the government to intervene in Alaa’s case.

She had previously announced on Twitter that she had signed a petition calling on the Egyptian government to release political prisoners ahead of COP27.

Thunberg has said she will not attend the UN summit in Egypt’s Red Sea resort because the space for civil society is so limited and accused leaders and people in power of greenwashing.

Cop Civic Space, a coalition of Egyptian human rights groups, is helping ramp up the pressure on the Egyptian government to stop committing violations.

A key demand is the release of 60,000 political prisoners who are kept in dire conditions, systematically tortured, and denied adequate medical care.