Activists lock Egyptian embassies abroad, families back home pay the price

In July, Egyptian-Dutch activist Anas Habib chained the gates of Egypt’s embassy in The Hague shut. The 27-year-old political exile filmed the act, posted it online, and within hours the video spread widely among Egyptian dissidents all around the world.

He might not have predicted that what he started would snowball into a wave of similar protests by Egyptians angered with what they see as their country's complicity with Israel's war on Gaza.

The protests have spread to different countries, and, along with it, an increasingly violent campaign of repression that has not limited itself to the exiled activists abroad, but to their families still in Egypt.

Inspired by Habib’s action, Nour Hossam, a 25-year-old journalist and political exile in Turkey who also goes by Onur Azad, walked up to the Egyptian consulate in Istanbul in early August with two colleagues who were filming him. 

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