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Il Torino esce sconfitto all'esordio in campionato contro il Milan, ma lo fa "a testa alta" "Il cuore granata c'è", e anche i tifosi sugli spalti, soprattutto la Maratona con un unico striscione appeso, un'enorme scritta VATTENE, messaggio chiaramente rivolto alla sfortuna Nel giorni scorsi vi avevamo parlato di Italtoro e Toro Made in Italy, e così è stato, con ben 5 italiani sui 16 utilizzati da Abate. Numeri da record, un vero e proprio blocco di calciatori nostrani Oristanio, che secondo Urbano Cairo (inchino) "ha un potenziale incredibile e farà un'annata spettacolare", è al secondo non entrato su 2 partite ufficiali. Perché il Presidente è uno che di calcio ne capisce, sono anni che lo dimostra Molto bene il subentrato Abouklhal, che ha sfiorato il gol colpendo di callo e tirando fuori a un metro dalla porta Abate comunque ci crede, il Torino ieri sera ha vinto laddove conta per davvero: nei palloni recuperati, 46 e 44 e nel possesso palla, però solo del secondo tempo (57,9%). Nel primo tempo il Milan ha avuto il 73% ma non è un dato che ci interessa riportare Da segnalare infine un corteo di tifosi granata all'esterno dello stadio nelle ore precedenti l'inizio della partita, per protestare contro la riforma della legge elettorale #TorinoFC #SerieA #Calcio

Rabaa: The Hour the World’s Conscience Stood Still On the anniversary of one of the largest single-day killings of protesters in modern history, one question remains unanswered: who will be held accountable? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands On 14 August, the anniversary returns of a day unlike any other in modern Egyptian history. Not simply because it was the bloodiest Egypt has known wars and massacres before and since ,but because it was the day a state chose to open fire on its own people in broad daylight, in front of the world’s cameras, and then let thirteen years pass without a single officer ever being held accountable. This article will not be a cold recitation of statistics, though the statistics exist, are documented, and are horrifying. It is an attempt to understand something deeper: how a square in the heart of Cairo, filled with tents, children, and worshippers, became the site of the largest mass killing the Arab world has witnessed in the past decade and why the echo of that day still reverberates in every Egyptian prison cell today. I. A Morning That Began Like Any Other For readers unfamiliar with the background: in July 2013, the Egyptian military, led by then-General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, removed Mohamed Morsy Egypt’s first freely elected civilian president, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who had taken office in 2012 following the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak. In response, tens of thousands of Morsy’s supporters staged an open-ended sit-in demanding his reinstatement. By 14 August 2013, more than twenty thousand people had spent weeks camped out at two Cairo squares, Rab’a al-Adawiya and al-Nahda, in a peaceful sit-in. They were not an army, nor a uniform bloc; they were entire families men, women, and children, some affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, many simply ordinary citizens who saw the restoration of elected legitimacy as a cause worth the risk. There were tents for sleeping, communal kitchens feeding the demonstrators, speaking platforms, and a small field clinic that no one imagined would, within hours, become one of the most terrifying places in modern Egyptian history. In the early hours of that morning, Central Security Forces and army units, under the command of then-General Sisi, began what was officially described as a "dispersal" operation targeting both sit-ins simultaneously. It was not a dispersal in any ordinary sense of the word. According to a year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch, it was a pre-planned operation that anticipated, from the outset, thousands of deaths. II. The Numbers the Regime Refuses to Speak The Egyptian government, to this day, cites a death toll of "over 600" for that single day a figure that, even at its official lowest, is horrifying enough to warrant an independent international investigation. But the field investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch, drawing on field hospital records, survivor testimony, and analysis of video footage from dozens of angles, arrived at a far more disturbing figure: at least 817 people killed at Rab’a Square alone, with the true toll likely exceeding 1,000, plus another 87 killed at the nearby al-Nahda Square. When the deaths from the weeks surrounding 14 August are added from the dispersal of the Republican Guard sit-in on 8 July, through the Mansoura Street killings, to the dispersal of an October 6 march the combined total reaches at least 1,150 deaths in just six weeks, according to Human Rights Watch’s meticulous documentation. This figure led the organisation to use a term not deployed lightly in international law: crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch described the Rab’a killings as "one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history." Not in Egyptian history alone in modern history as a whole. What happened at Rab’a is cited in international reporting alongside China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This is the true scale of what the Egyptian state has spent thirteen years trying to minimise, justify, and reduce to a mere "security incident" in a news bulletin. III. "All According to Plan" When Mass Killing Becomes Administration, Not Chaos The title Human Rights Watch chose for its detailed report on the massacre deserves lingering on: "All According to Plan." This is not an emotive headline; it is a precise legal conclusion built on field evidence. According to the investigation, what happened at Rab’a was not a dispersal operation that spiralled out of control amid chaos or panic, as the regime later tried to portray it. It was a carefully planned operation that assumed, in advance, massive casualties. Then-Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim admitted, in a televised interview broadcast on 31 August 2013 just weeks after the massacre that his ministry had anticipated losses of "10 percent of the people" present at the sit-in, acknowledging that the number of demonstrators exceeded twenty thousand. By simple arithmetic, this is an official admission that the state anticipated, in advance, the deaths of roughly two thousand people and proceeded with the operation regardless. This is the true horror at the heart of the Rab’a story: it was not a security operation that spun out of control, but a conscious administrative decision, made in an air-conditioned room, with advance calculations, by men who knew precisely how many human beings would die under their fire and who proceeded anyway, or perhaps because of it. According to Human Rights Watch’s analysis, the objective was to send an unambiguous message: whoever challenges the new state will pay an irreversible price. IV. Snipers, Women, and Children The Faces the Reports Do Not Tell Behind every number in the Human Rights Watch reports lies a full human story, deliberately omitted from the state’s official narrative. The investigation documented how security forces opened fire from multiple angles, and how snipers positioned themselves atop buildings surrounding the square, targeting according to survivor testimony and analysed video footage any movement in the square, regardless of whether it was an armed combatant or a nurse trying to reach a wounded person. According to documented testimony, entire families had their tents burn over their heads as fire swept through the sit-in. Doctors and paramedics were killed while trying to pull the wounded from the line of fire. Most damningly of all, the documentation shows deliberate targeting of ambulances and field medical points meaning that wounded people who survived the first bullet then faced death by bleeding out, because anyone attempting to save them was themselves a target. This detail the targeting of medics is what elevates the event from "excessive violent repression" to what human rights organisations have described as a systematic crime. When security forces target those trying to save the wounded, they are not merely dispersing a sit-in; they are preventing witnesses from surviving to tell what happened. V. Thirteen Years of Total Impunity The most painful part of the Rab’a story is not only what happened that day, but what has not happened in the years since. From 14 August 2013 to today, not a single officer, of any rank, has been held accountable for the deaths of hundreds, or thousands, of Egyptians. Quite the opposite: the state has moved to entrench impunity through the force of law itself. Egypt issued legislation granting senior military officers immunity from questioning over any violations that may have occurred following Morsy’s removal a law specifically designed to close the door on any future judicial accountability, regardless of how political circumstances might change. Even the fact-finding committee established by then-interim President Adly Mansour to investigate the June and July events concluded, in its report issued more than a year after the events, that the sit-in’s leaders bore responsibility for the deaths, on the grounds that they had allowed weapons into the square even as the same report admitted, in a glaring contradiction, that security forces had failed to target only armed individuals, meaning they had fired indiscriminately on everyone: armed and unarmed, man and woman, adult and child. This is the pattern that has repeated for over a decade: as each anniversary approaches, official statements re-narrate the events and shift blame onto the victims, while the actual perpetrators — those who planned the operation, gave the orders, and pulled the trigger — remain free. Some now occupy the highest offices of the state. VI. Why This Anniversary, Why Now? A reader might ask: why revisit this story after all these years? Has the world not moved on to newer crises? The answer lies in the very nature of impunity. When a state is never held accountable for the largest massacre of protesters in its modern history, it does not simply "forget" the crime it sets a precedent, telling every future ruler and every future security apparatus: mass killing is possible, politically profitable, and free of cost. This poisonous lesson does not remain confined within Egyptian borders; its echo reaches every Arab capital contemplating how to handle its own opposition. More dangerously, this system of impunity did not stop at Rab’a’s edges; it is the foundation on which Egypt’s entire subsequent decade of repression was built: thousands of political prisoners, grossly unfair mass trials that produced death sentences for dozens of defendants in cases linked directly to the Rab’a events themselves, laws criminalising peaceful protest, a muzzled press, and a civil society hollowed of substance. All of it traces back to the morning of 14 August 2013, when the state learned that overwhelming force succeeds, and that the world will condemn for a few days, then move on. VII. Delayed Justice Is Not Forgotten Justice Despite more than a decade of official silence and impunity, the Rab’a case remains alive in international legal memory. Human rights organisations, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, continue to renew their annual calls for an independent international investigation, grounded in the legal principle that crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitation: delayed justice is not forgotten justice. The victims who fell in that square were not numbers in a statistical report. They were fathers who left behind children too young, that day, to understand why their father would never return. They were mothers who, thirteen years later, are still searching for a clearly marked grave to which they can carry flowers, and young people who had decades of life ahead of them that they never got to live. Their memory does not fade with time; it grows with their children, who carry with them the same question their parents asked before they were killed: when will justice come? Conclusion: What Does This Anniversary Demand of Us? Every year, as the anniversary of 14 August returns, the same question resurfaces one the Egyptian state refuses to answer: who gave the order? Who planned the operation? Who decided that twenty thousand human beings deserved to be shot with live ammunition because they staged a peaceful sit-in? This anniversary is not a call for vengeance, nor an invocation of the past for its own sake. It is a reminder that justice, however delayed, remains a debt still owed. And that every instance of international silence over a massacre of this scale opens the door to the next one, elsewhere, under a different pretext, carrying the same lethal conviction: that the world will condemn for a week, then forget. We will not forget. And we will not stop asking the question that unsettles everyone who took part in that crime, regardless of the office they hold today: where is the accountability? Rab’a is no longer merely the name of a square in Cairo. In the conscience of everyone who believes in justice, it has become a test of the world’s conscience itself a test the world has not yet passed.

Una volta chiuso #Mora, la priorità dell’#ASRoma è il vice #Wesley. Fredda, al momento, la pista che porta a #Udogie del #Tottenham. Resta in piedi l’idea #Cacciamani nonostante le richieste elevate di #Cairo. Sul taccuino di D’Amico anche altri nomi. 🤝@Ale_Sbarbati @inforoma24 #ASRoma #Calciomercato #Wesley

A delegation of Hamas, led by Khalil al-Hayya, is in Cairo for peace talks regarding a ceasefire in Gaza, meeting with Egyptian officials in the context of complicated negotiations, while Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rejects a version of Trump's peace plan that aims to withdraw Israeli forces without disarming Hamas. (translated)

A Crown Instead of the Barracks: An Idea From Outside the Box Could Egypt’s exiled opposition use constitutional monarchy to dismantle the legitimacy of the 1952 coup? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands To understand what follows, a reader unfamiliar with Egypt needs one basic fact: since 1952, Egypt has never been governed by anyone who did not first wear a military uniform. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and today Abdel Fattah el-Sisi four men, four eras, one common origin. All rose through the armed forces. All inherited a state built by a coup that year, when a group of officers calling themselves the "Free Officers" overthrew King Farouk I and, within a year, abolished the monarchy altogether and declared a republic. For seventy-three years, the underlying equation has not changed: the army rules, power passes from one officer to the next, and legitimacy is drawn from the barrel of a gun rather than the ballot box. Every conceivable form of opposition has been tried legal parties and banned ones, Islamist movements, liberal and leftist coalitions, the 2011 popular uprising, and the 2013 elections whose result was overturned by force within a year. All of them hit the same wall: a military institution that reproduces itself under different names, while the core of the system remains untouched. So what if the problem, all along, has not simply been who rules, but the constitutional framework that makes military rule possible in the first place? And what if the answer lies not in swapping one president for another, but in dismantling the underlying equation itself, through a framework Egyptian opposition movements have never seriously tried: a purely ceremonial constitutional monarchy, on the model of Belgium, the Netherlands, or Spain where the head of state becomes a symbol above the political fray, while the army is permanently expelled from politics and returned to its barracks. This is not a call to revive a particular family, nor nostalgia for a golden age that never quite existed. It is a proposal for a political and strategic tool that has not yet been used in the intellectual arsenal of Egypt’s opposition in exile a tool that deserves serious discussion, regardless of whether it is ever literally realised or simply serves to expand the boundaries of what is politically thinkable. I. Why 1952, Not 2013 or 2011, Is the Root The strategic error made by most Egyptian opposition movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to the April 6 Youth Movement to the various civil opposition parties has been treating each political crisis as an isolated case: Mubarak was corrupt and had to be toppled; Sisi staged a coup that must be condemned; the interim military council was a transitional phase to be endured. This piecemeal approach treats the symptoms while leaving the original illness untouched. That original illness is the very structure of legitimacy established by the coup of 23 July 1952. The Egyptian republican system, from Nasser to today, has never built its legitimacy on a genuine democratic social contract. Instead, it has rested on a fixed trinity: the rhetoric of "revolution against feudalism and colonialism," charismatic individual leadership, and military protection of the regime framed as the guarantor of stability. This trinity has repeated itself from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak to Sisi, with only cosmetic variations. Each new president was never a break from the system he was its continuation. When the opposition says "let us return to the constitutional framework that preceded the coup," it is not criticising a particular policy. It is declaring that the legal foundation of everything that came after 1952 was illegitimate from the start. Here lies the rhetorical power of "returning to the pre-1952 order": it does not merely demand swapping one ruler for another. It withdraws historical legitimacy from the entire republican military system including today’s regime, which draws its own declared legitimacy from that same "1952 legacy." II. Why a "Ceremonial Crown," Not "the Return of a Ruling Family" Here is the most important distinction anyone advocating this idea seriously must grasp: the project does not rest on restoring any particular individual from the Muhammad Ali dynasty, nor on nostalgia for King Farouk or his ancestors. The real power of the idea lies in the constitutional form, not in the person who happens to sit on the throne. Three successful European democracies illustrate the model clearly. Belgium, where King Philippe is a purely constitutional symbol with no real executive power, while the state is run through an elected parliament and a complex coalition government reflecting the country’s linguistic and political diversity. The Netherlands, where King Willem-Alexander formally opens the parliamentary year and signs laws, but where actual decision-making rests with the prime minister and the elected parliament. And Spain, where the king represents symbolic continuity of the state above party politics, while the military and security services answer entirely to civilian authority a transition achieved after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, when King Juan Carlos I voluntarily relinquished the extensive executive powers he had inherited and backed free elections, most dramatically in February 1981, when he personally ordered the armed forces to remain loyal to the constitution during an attempted military coup, causing it to collapse within hours. The common thread across these three models is not "the presence of an ancient royal family." It is the principle of separating symbol from power. The monarch in these countries does not rule; he represents. He issues no political decisions; he provides the continuity and symbolic stability that allows party political competition to revolve beneath him, without every transfer of power becoming an existential crisis of legitimacy. This is precisely what Egypt’s military republican system lacks: a neutral mechanism for guaranteeing state continuity that does not depend on the person of the ruler or his security apparatus. When Egypt’s military-republican president is absent, it is always the army that fills the vacuum, because it is the only institution built to be the "guarantor of stability." Under a ceremonial monarchical model, by contrast, it is the king not the army who represents that symbolic guarantee, genuinely opening the door to removing the military institution from the political equation altogether. III. Egypt’s Standing Under the Monarchy: An Honest Reckoning, Not Blind Nostalgia For a Western reader with little prior knowledge of Egypt’s monarchical period (1922–1952), it helps to know this: Egypt was nominally independent under its own king from 1922, but Britain retained enormous informal control over the country’s foreign policy, military bases, and the Suez Canal throughout the period a reality that shaped everything that follows. Any honest invocation of "Egypt’s standing under the monarchy" must avoid the trap of mythologised nostalgia that many advocates of this idea fall into. Egypt in that era was no lost paradise, and any honest article must say so plainly. The Egyptian pound, for instance, often invoked as a symbol of "national currency strength" in that period, was not strong because of independent Egyptian monetary policy. It was pegged to the British pound sterling as part of Egypt’s complete colonial financial dependency until 1947, with Egypt exercising no independent oversight of its own currency whatsoever. The pound’s strength, in other words, was not a sovereign Egyptian achievement it was a reflection of British imperial power ruling Egypt from behind the throne. But this does not mean Egypt lacked a genuine regional standing worth studying. Cairo, in the 1930s and 1940s, was the undisputed cultural capital of the entire Arab world: the Egyptian film industry produced more than half of all Arabic-language cinema; its theatre scene, led by figures like Youssef Wahbi and Naguib al-Rihani, and its music, with Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab, set the standard across the region; Cairo University was the first modern university in the Arab world; and the Egyptian press was the reference point for Arab public opinion from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Cairo was, quite simply, to the Arab world what Paris was to Francophone Europe: an unrivalled centre of cultural and intellectual gravity. This standing was not necessarily a product of monarchy itself, so much as a product of a relative space of political and press pluralism that allowed Egyptian civil society to flourish, despite all the flaws of the political system and the interference of both palace and occupier. The lesson here is not "bring back the king and the standing will return." It is: when even a limited margin of civic freedom exists, Egypt flourishes culturally and intellectually almost by its own nature. And that margin is precisely what has been entirely absent across the past seven decades of unchallenged military rule. IV. What Reform Would Actually Require Not Repeating the Old Mistakes Any serious advocacy of this model must include, even briefly, a clear vision for avoiding the flaws of the old monarchical system itself otherwise the proposal collapses into simply replacing one form of authoritarianism with another wearing a different crown. First, the armed forces would need to be placed fully under a civilian ministry of defence, with its budget subject to transparent parliamentary oversight the exact opposite of its current status as a state-within-a-state, and equally opposed to its role under the monarchy, when it often served as an instrument of British influence. Second, a judiciary fully independent of both palace and government alike, unlike the old model, which saw direct royal interference in political life as when King Fuad I dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Saad Zaghloul’s successor, Mustafa al-Nahhas, in 1928, in one of the clearest "constitutional coups" in modern Egyptian history. Third, a parliament that genuinely represents the people rather than landowners and the aristocracy, as was the case before 1952, when membership in the Senate was effectively conditional on the ability to pay land taxes meaning political representation was, by law, restricted to the wealthy. Fourth, genuine economic sovereignty, with a truly independent national currency rather than one pegged to a foreign power’s currency, unlike the historical dependency of the Egyptian pound on sterling. These four principles are enough to clarify that the project on offer is not a literal "return to the past," but a borrowing of the constitutional form (symbolic monarchy) combined with an explicit rejection of its old substance (colonial dependency, palace interference, parliamentary feudalism). V. The Role of Egyptian Movements in Exile: Between Goal and Instrument This raises the most practical question of all: how might Egypt’s opposition abroad actually adopt this idea, and in what capacity? The honest answer is that the power of this proposal does not necessarily lie in its literal fulfilment, but in its dual strategic function. On one hand, it can be advanced as a genuine political goal adopted by broad coalitions of Egyptian movements coalitions that might include Islamists, liberals, leftists, and traditional monarchists, united around a single shared premise: rejecting the legitimacy of the 1952 order and everything that followed from it, even if they later disagree over the precise final shape of the state. On the other hand and this matters more in practice the idea can be deployed as a rhetorical instrument of pressure to widen a Egyptian political debate currently trapped between two false choices: "continued military rule" or "no alternative, chaos awaits." When the opposition puts forward a clearly defined third model a European-style constitutional monarchy it breaks this false binary and opens new intellectual space in Egyptian public discourse, even if the project is never realised in its literal form. This kind of "leverage idea" is common in the history of political movements worldwide: it is not necessarily proposed to be fulfilled immediately in full, but to redraw the boundaries of the politically possible, and to force the existing regime to defend its legitimacy rather than simply assume it. Conclusion: An Invitation to Debate, Not a Ready-Made Prescription This article does not claim that restoring a monarchical form would magically resolve Egypt’s chronic crisis of legitimacy, nor does it ignore the immense difficulties facing any transformative project under a military institution as economically and securitywise entrenched as Egypt’s is today. But it raises a question that deserves serious debate among Egypt’s opposition in exile, rather than automatic dismissal simply for being unfamiliar: Has the Egyptian opposition exhausted every available tool for dismantling the legitimacy of 1952, or has it remained trapped in the same old binary swapping one ruler for another while the framework that makes military rule possible remains untouched? The idea is on the table now, not as a finished solution, but as an overdue invitation to think outside the box.

More and more countries, including Japan, Indonesia, and Egypt, are seeking new capitals due to threats such as earthquakes and overpopulation, with Japan considering a reserve capital in case of a natural disaster in Tokyo, while Indonesia is relocating its capital from Jakarta to a new site in Borneo and Egypt is building a new administrative capital near Cairo. (translated)

Trofeo Mamma e Papà Cairo, Inter travolgente nel derby: 4-0 al Milan con la doppietta di Grisoni, il gol di Vukoje e il sigillo su rigore di Sorino. Tanta, tantissima qualità a disposizione di Bigica, è una Primavera con tanti piedi buoni. Tra i protagonisti anche il portiere Galliera con grandi parate ma le ripartenze interiste sono state a tratti spettacolari #Inter #Derby #Primavera

L’#ASRoma continua a dialogare con il #Torino per Alessio #Cacciamani. È il presidente Cairo in prima persona che si sta occupando della trattativa che potrebbe aiutare il Toro a finanziare il mercato. Granata partiti da una richiesta iniziale superiore ai 15 milioni di euro. #ASRoma #Torino #Calciomercato

#Cairo: “Il #Como ha investito €400M in 3 anni, io non li ho: devo essere crocefisso per questo? Se questa sarà la mia ultima stagione al #Torino, voglio farla alla grandissima e lasciare un gruppo forte a chi arriverà. Magari così si dirà che il mio Toro non è così male…” https://t.co/GDI05xoEQH #Calcio #Torino #SerieA

Urbano #Cairo contro Paolo #Maldini: “Parla di rifondazione della #FIGC in 8-10 anni? Devono accelerare! 8-10 anni neanche in Unione Sovietica! Servono le scelte giuste nei primi 100 giorni per dare la direzione. Prendano esempio da #Tavecchio che scelse il ct giusto (Conte, ndr). La scelta dell’allenatore peserà sulla presidenza Malagò, anche se lui con Maldini deciderà collegialmente” #Cairo #FIGC #Maldini

Il Cairo ospita una vasta comunità di rifugiati sudanesi, provenienti dalla peggiore crisi umanitaria in corso al mondo, che si riuniscono nel Centro per i rifugiati sudanesi, gestito dai missionari comboniani, per pregare e ricostruire la loro vita, mentre l'Egitto affronta le difficoltà di integrazione e il governo cerca di facilitare i rimpatri in un contesto di crescente tensione e necessità di aiuti internazionali. #RifugiatiSudanesi #CrisiUmanitaria #Integrazione

| JULY 2026 | The Guard State How the largest Arab nation became a security contractor at the gates of its own people By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands In June 2025, hundreds of activists from forty countries landed at Cairo airport. Doctors from France, lawyers from Australia, students from the United States, pensioners from the Netherlands. They carried no weapons and no banned slogans; they carried backpacks, walking shoes, and a single intention: to march from Arish to the Rafah crossing — entirely on Egyptian soil — to demand that food be allowed through to a people starving behind the gate. Not one of them reached Rafah. More than two hundred were detained before the march could begin. Around five hundred foreign nationals were deported from airports, hotels, and checkpoints. Passports were confiscated, activists were pulled out of downtown Cairo cafés, and the Global March to Gaza was cancelled on 16 June without taking its first step. And the world watched. This was no secret operation in a dark basement; it happened in the open, documented by the deportees’ own phone cameras, carried by every international news agency. The world watched an Arab state arrest Europeans, Americans, and Africans for wanting to walk towards Palestine. A state guarding the gate of a siege — from the side that was supposed to be the side of rescue. Hold that image, because it is the key to everything that follows. This was not an aberration in Egyptian policy, nor an isolated security decision. It is the function — the complete function around which the Egyptian state has been redefined over the past decade, and which it is time to call by its proper name: the Guard State. I. The Name — What Do We Mean by the Guard State? Political economy has long described states that live off the rent of their location rather than the production of their people. But what has crystallised in Egypt over the past decade goes beyond traditional geographic rent — the Suez Canal, say — into something far graver: the conversion of sovereignty itself into a commodity for hire. The Guard State does not sell its location; it sells its function. It collects its wages not for what it produces, but for what it prevents: it prevents the refugee from reaching Europe, the activist from reaching Gaza, its own people from reaching politics, and the resistance’s weapons from reaching their destination. Four gates, guarded by a single machine, whose wages are paid in loans, deposits, and perpetually renewed rescue packages. This is not a rhetorical metaphor; it is an economic structure with numbers attached. When the Egyptian economy collapsed in 2024, it was rescued not by productive reform but by a single deal whose subject was location: Ras el-Hekma — thirty-five billion dollars for a stretch of coastline. And whenever negotiations with the IMF stall, the tranches are unlocked by explicit European pressure whose subject is migration: nine billion euros from the European Union in the 2024 “Strategic Partnership,” whose own documents place “migration management” at its core. Europe does not pay Egypt to prosper. It pays Egypt to guard. Thus the model is complete: income in exchange for prevention, external legitimacy in exchange for guarding, and international silence about domestic tyranny in exchange for keeping the gates controlled. To see how the model works on the ground, consider the bloodiest gate of all: the gate of Gaza. II. The Gaza Gate — The Guard Who Is Himself Searched The first paradox must be nailed down with facts: Egypt is not a sovereign guard of its own crossing; it is a searched guard. Egyptian relief trucks — ninety-two thousand food parcels in a single convoy this month — are subject to Israeli inspection before entering the Strip: from Egyptian soil, through a crossing that bears an Egyptian name. The state that guards the gate does not hold its key. It owns the threshold, but not the door. Then the October 2025 truce added a new layer to the function. Under the fifteen-point roadmap sponsored by the international envoy together with the “guarantor states” — Egypt foremost among them — Cairo is to train the civilian police force that will replace Hamas in administering the Strip, under the slogan of “one authority, one law, one weapon.” Let us call things by their names: the state that could not — or would not — deliver a loaf of bread without Israeli permission is now qualifying to graduate the security apparatus that will oversee the disarming of the resistance. From guarding the siege to administering what comes after the siege — a promotion within the same project. And meanwhile, what is happening behind the guarded gate? Since the truce, more than one thousand one hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire — the latest, just two days ago, a ten-year-old boy named Motaz Abu Shaar, carried to his grave in Khan Younis by his mother, Warda. A United Nations commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel is “deliberately targeting children in an ongoing genocide.” This is what the guarantors’ official language calls a “ceasefire.” What meaning is left in the word “guarantor”? A guarantor that the gate stays firmly shut — however high the dead pile up behind it. III. The Mediterranean Gate — The Guard Europe Pays For The second gate faces north. Since 2016, Cairo has boasted — through its officials at every European forum — that “not a single irregular migration boat has departed from Egyptian shores.” This is very nearly true. But the forbidden question is: at what political price has this “efficiency” become an instrument of mutual blackmail? Europe — which condemns Egypt’s human rights record in its parliamentary resolutions — is the same Europe that signed the nine-billion-euro partnership, and the same Europe that stays silent about sixty thousand political prisoners because the alternative, in its calculations, is boats that never stop. And Cairo understands the game and has mastered it: whenever human rights pressure intensifies, the official discourse turns up the volume on “Egypt hosts millions of refugees” and “the last line of defence.” The result is a perfect structure of mutual blackmail: Europe buys its conscience’s silence, the regime sells its location, and the people — Egyptian and refugee alike — are the commodity in the transaction. The democracies that lecture on values are financing the guard who keeps the victims from knocking on their doors. This is not passing hypocrisy; it is a structural partnership in the Guard State model — one that makes Brussels and Berlin shareholders in everything this state produces, from domestic repression to external siege. IV. The Interior Gate — Guarding the People Against Politics But the most dangerous gate is not on any border; it is inside. The Guard State cannot perform its external function unless it first guards an internal gate: the people’s gate to politics. The function requires a people that does not ask: why are we guarding the siege of our brothers? Why are our trucks searched on our own soil? Why are guests deported for coming to walk in peace? To guarantee the question is never asked, the largest silencing machine in the country’s history was built: sixty thousand prisoners of opinion, a press ranked 166th out of 180 worldwide, and a state security case number waiting for anyone who writes. I write these lines from experience, not from reading reports. When I continued writing from my Dutch exile, the machine reached me across continents: accounts shut down by coordinated mass-reporting campaigns, documented threats, a family harassed inside Egypt as leverage — and my name entered into Case 1282 of 2024, not for any act I committed, but for opinions written from free European soil. This is not a personal complaint; it is a job description: the Guard State guards even beyond its borders, because the free word — wherever it is written — threatens the entire contract of guardianship. The logic is perfectly self-consistent: a regime that sells “stability” abroad cannot tolerate a voice revealing that the stability on offer is the stillness of graveyards. This is why the arrest of the foreign activists in June 2025 was inevitable, not incidental: a peaceful march reaching Rafah would have revealed, before the world’s cameras, that the gate opens when it is wanted open — and that the one keeping it shut is a partner, not a mediator. V. What Has Egypt Lost? — The Guard’s Bill An apologist might argue: what is the harm? A state monetising its location as Norway monetises its oil. The answer lies in the essential difference: Norway sells a resource; Egypt leases its will. And the difference between the two is the difference between trade and bondage. Let us tally what Egypt has paid for this model, in bare facts. It lost its water sovereignty: the Renaissance Dam was completed and filled without the state — owner of “the largest defence headquarters in the world” — daring anything beyond statements of concern; for the guard does not make trouble for the international order that employs him. It lost its regional standing: in the Iran–America war halted just weeks ago, Cairo was neither party nor mediator nor even consultant — Pakistan brokered the deal, while Egypt absorbed the economic shrapnel of Hormuz’s closure like a bystander caught in a battle whose parties it does not know. It lost its place in the conscience of its nation: the state that liberated its land in 1973 and led the Arab world for a century has become, in the eyes of the Arab street from the Atlantic to the Gulf, the gatekeeper of the siege. This loss, specifically, no loan or deposit can repay — because it is the only capital that cannot be printed. And it lost — here is the crux — the very national security in whose name the guarding is justified. The model proved its fragility at the moment of testing: when Israel feared an Iranian response last year, it cut off Egypt’s gas by unilateral decision within hours. The guard who believed himself a partner discovered he was merely a hireling whose wages stop the moment danger arrives. VI. The Alternative Is Not a Slogan — It Is the Recovery of the Original Function I will not close with an essay on “the solution lies in Arab unity”; worn-out words kill more surely than silence. The alternative is specific, and it begins with redefining the function. The state is not a guard; the state is the agent of its people’s will. Every foreign policy not derived from that will is — by definition — functional servitude, however it is wrapped in the language of wisdom and moderation. And the Egyptian will is known and needs no referendum: no people in this region accepts that its country serve as warden of the siege of Gaza, or as Europe’s border post. Practically, the recovery begins with three measurable steps. Open the Rafah crossing fully and sovereignly, by purely Egyptian decision — that alone would overturn the equation of the siege. Break the negotiating bondage by linking any cooperation on migration to concrete European positions on Palestine, not statements of concern. And open the interior gate — release the prisoners and lift the hand from the written word — because a state that fears an article will never dare face an occupier. I know the current regime will do none of this; guarding is its founding contract and its financial artery. But this article is not written for the regime. It is written for memory, and for the generation that will inherit the gates — so that it knows that what is presented to it today as “the fate of geography” is no fate at all. It is an employment contract, signed by a regime without a mandate from its people. And contracts, however long they run, end when one of their parties does. And the world — I return to where I began — is a witness that requires no further proof. It watched the deportees at Cairo airport; it watched the searched trucks; it watched Warda Abu Shaar carry her son to his grave behind a firmly guarded gate. The question is no longer: what is happening? The only question left is: who dares to name it? This article is a naming. Adham Hasanin is an Egyptian journalist and political writer based in the Netherlands, covering Arab and European political affairs.