Social activists who arrived in Egypt determined to start their march toward Rafah to protest what they describe as a “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza were instead met with passport confiscations, beatings, heat stroke, and international humiliation at the hands of Egyptian authorities and civilians who blocked their entry.

Videos posted on social media showed thousands of frustrated social activists from 80 countries — including Canada and the United Kingdom — who showed up for the Global March for Gaza determined to march to the Rafah crossing to “lift Israel’s illegal starvation of the Palestinian people.” Instead, they were met with stiff and often brutal rejection by Egyptian security forces and civilians. 

“This is a genocide of a Muslim people by Zionists… You are my brother. In Islam, you are my brother,” pleaded one man, a Welsh nurse in a pageboy haircut, standing in front of a line of Egyptian security members dressed in full riot gear impeding his progress.

“They can’t hear you,” another protester tells the man.

“Please, I stand for Islam. I stand for the people of Islam,” the man says while being filmed. The line of security guards appears unmoved by his entreaties in the video. 

Like the “Freedom Flotilla,”  a ship carrying social justice darling Greta Thunberg, those partaking in the March for Gaza documented much of their journey to deliver symbolic aid to Gaza on their social media accounts.

Last week, Ms. Thunberg and the others from the “selfie yacht,” as Israeli officials derisively referred to it, were intercepted by the Israeli navy in the Mediterranean. Photos showed Israeli armed forces members handing Ms. Thunberg and others sandwiches and water.

Ms. Thunberg and her group were brought to the port of Ashdod, where she refused to watch footage of the savagery displayed during Hamas’ October 7th attacks. She was deported on a plane to Sweden shortly thereafter.

Ms. Thunberg and her crew were treated with relative kid gloves by Israeli authorities. March for Gaza hopefuls like the former State Department employee Hala Rharrit, who resigned in 2024 to protest the Biden administration’s support of Israel, received a rude awakening when they arrived at Egypt. 

“I was detained, passport taken, and interrogated after my arrival to Cairo yesterday. I was thankfully released. Others continue to be detained and deported,” Ms. Rharrit said on her Instagram. 

Last week, the group of protesters started the Global March for Gaza by traveling 1,500 miles from Tunisia to Cairo, where the convoy planned to meet with marchers from 80 countries to start their march to Rafah.

However, several protesters were instead stopped at checkpoints by Egyptian authorities and deported back to where they came from. Others had their passports confiscated and were forced to wait in makeshift pens. Videos showed the protesters being manhandled, slapped, dragged around, or thrown into buses by the Egyptian authorities.

The protesters, many of them sweaty and visibly shaken by Egypt’s rude reception, posted videos on social media showing them sequestered in pens, while hordes of angry Egyptian men surrounded them, throwing bottles at them, flogging them, or dragging them into buses.

“You have to release the people!” said one protester as she was being held in an ambulance. “They hold our passports, the people had heat disease. We are saving lives. We saved two lives,” said the woman. Her video ends with the caption, “It’s not ego, but moral responsibility that is driving people to action.”

“I’m missing a really good meeting with Jeremy Corbyn in Liverpool,” said one woman, who complained about being “sat for four hours in the traffic” without being allowed to sightsee Egypt. 

“We did not break any law. And all of a sudden, several people stormed in, and they started to push people and drag them violently outside. They have beaten people. I have seen one woman that (sic) was beaten in her face in front of me,” said another protester in a video. 

Yipeng Ge, an activist from Canada, said he and other “delegates” had been forced to wait at checkpoints for hours with “limited access” to food and water. “We’re risking dehydration and heat stroke for a lot of folks that are out here waiting under the sun for the retrieval of their passports,” Mr. Ge said in his video. 

“We were stopped at a checkpoint. They took our passports. They have detained us… They put us in a barrier like animals,” the Jordanian-Canadian standup comedian, Nour Hadidi, said in a video on social media. 

Another protester, Amy Lam, from Yellowknife, a city of over 20,000 people in Canada’s Northwest Territories, appeared stunned by the unfriendly response from the Egyptian nationals. “We were protesting peacefully, chanting, but they were definitely using aggressive tactics on us,” Ms. Lam says in her selfie video on Instagram.

“We continue to urge the Egyptian government to permit this peaceful march, which aligns with Egypt’s own stated commitment to restoring stability at its border and addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” the Global March for Gaza said in a statement. 

The majority of people who have been detained by Egyptian authorities have been released, according to the Global March to Gaza organizer Saif Abukeshek. “Some people were deported, and we have received news from their emergency contacts that they are okay and in high spirits, on their way back,” said Mr. Abukeshek.

If members continue to be detained and not have their passports returned, march leaders said they will start a hunger strike, “refusing food as a form of peaceful resistance.”