Email received 29/12/09 from another student currently in Cairo.

Dear all

PLEASE DISSEMINATE WIDELY

1,300 international activists gathered in Cairo hoping to take part in a historic march in Gaza to break the Israeli siege have been prevented from leaving Cairo to reach the Rafah border. The Egyptian government, having previously agreed to allow the delegation, which is taking aid to the impoverished Gaza strip, to cross the border, is now showing its true colours and cracking down on the peaceful attempts by activists to raise attention to the plight of Gazans and to demand that they be allowed to enter Gaza. Egyptian state security and police have been beating international demonstrators as they gather outside their respective embassies to appeal for help, and arresting Egyptian journalists trying to report on the actions.

Meanwhile, the Viva Palestina convoy, which is carrying desperately needed medical aid to the strip, was kept waiting at the port of Aqaba in Jordan for five days, its cargo rapidly spoiling in the heat, due to the Egyptian government's refusal to allow them entrance to Egypt through the port of Nuweiba (the fastest route to the Rafah border crossing). The convoy have now agreed to return to Syria where they will sail from Latakia to the port of Al-Arish on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, where Egypt says it will grant them entry and passage to Gaza.

Meanwhile Egyptian state security are continuing their repression of Egyptian pro-Palestinian activists, who marked the anniversary of the attacks on Gaza last year with a peaceful candlelit vigil in Downtown Cairo on the 27th. Protesters, many of them women and young people, were beaten by police and even senior security officials, and their cameras stolen.

Egypt's complicity in the Israeli siege on Gaza is becoming harder and harder for the Mubarak regime to hide. Whilst loudly declaiming their solidarity with their Palestinian 'brothers' and clinging to their reputation in the West as a 'moderate' Arab regime, the Egyptian government has begun construction of a wall on its border with Gaza which will destroy the tunnels used to bring food and other vital necessities into the impoverished strip, and is consistently clamping down violently on all grassroots Egyptian support for the Palestinians.

Egypt must stop colluding in Israel's crippling siege of innocent Gazan citizens, and the US must stop funding the corrupt and repressive Mubarak regime.

Please write to your representatives, foreign offices etc, and to the Egyptian embassy in your country to express your disgust at their cooperation in this bloody affair.