CAIRO: A quadrupling of the price of subsidized bread has made it harder than ever for Gamal Ahmad and millions of other Egyptians to get by.
The 64-year-old pensioner was struggling to make ends meet even before Eqypt’s government, facing a rising wheat import bill, increased the price of subsidized small loaves of flatbread for the first time in decades on June 1.
The loaves are available to more than 70 million people and are vital for the poorest. Even though they are still heavily discounted, the increase to 20 piasters ($0.0042) per loaf from five piasters is one that many households can ill afford.
“We can’t handle any more [price increases],” said Gamal, who is also worried about cuts to subsidized utilities that the government has announced.
“There’s still gas, electricity and water bills. All prices are rising,” he said.
The impact of the price increase will be felt by millions because the subsidized loaves are a staple for much of the population of about 106 million.
“Of course, the price hike impacts me,” pensioner Mohamed Abdelaziz said as he shopped for subsidized bread in central Cairo. “We are barely getting by.”
He said he had to keep on working to supplement his 2,000-pound ($42.46) monthly state pension and take care of three unmarried children.
Increasing the price of the subsidized bread was a politically sensitive decision that had been put off for years in a country where cheap bread is important for many because poverty is widespread.
The price had been kept steady since the 1980s despite repeated rounds of austerity reforms, with the government wary of facing a public backlash. An attempt to change the subsidy system sparked riots in 1977.
Instead of increasing the price, the government had previously tried to restrict eligibility and reduced the weight of the loaves.
About two-thirds of the population benefit from bread subsidies, which are based on income and include an allowance of five loaves per day.
The monthly bill for a family of four could now rise to 120 pounds from 30 pounds in a country where the minimum monthly wage is 6,000 pounds following a 50 percent rise in March.
HIGH INFLATION
The government acted now with annual inflation running at 32.5 percent in April after hitting 38 percent last September. Egypt also faces a large debt servicing bill and allowed a sharp currency devaluation in March, when it shifted to a flexible exchange rate system.
Egypt is often the world’s largest importer of wheat, and traders say the price change is not expected to change the quantity of state purchases in the short term. The collapsing currency and rampant inflation have caused the cost to the government of procuring wheat from abroad to surge.
Supply Minister Ali Moselhy says the new price represents just 16 percent of the cost of making the bread, which has been driven up by the weakening of Egypt’s currency and rising global wheat prices.
The government is allocating about 125 billion Egyptian pounds ($2.65 billion) for bread subsidies in its 2024/25 state budget, up from 91 billion last year, according to Moselhy.
Moselhy said the ministry had not received any complaints from citizens following the price increase.
The government says it is expanding the social safety net, but some of its critics question cuts to bread subsidies after the government has spent heavily on mega-projects, incurring more debt.
The state should instead prioritize cutting exemptions for military-owned companies that have long enjoyed financial privileges, said Timothy Kaldas, deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
The subsidized bread price increase will be “a significant hit for poor households,” he said.
Even if the move does not spur people to stage demonstrations following a crackdown on dissent and a ban on most public protests, it could fuel popular frustration over the economy, he said.
On Saturday, local TV host Lamis El Hadidy asked Moselhy why debt repayments took up 62 percent of budget spending while subsidies accounted for 11.5 percent.
Egypt had to repay its debts and “we are talking about our current reality and what to do tomorrow,” Moselhy replied.
Egyptians struggle with first bread subsidy cut in decades
https://arab.news/g4ww8
Egyptians struggle with first bread subsidy cut in decades
- The increase to 20 piasters per loaf from five piasters is one that many households can ill afford
- Increasing the price of the subsidized bread was a politically sensitive decision that had been put off for years
Israel UN envoy warns Houthis risk sharing same fate as Hamas, Hezbollah
- Houthis have repeatedly fired drones and missiles toward Israel in what they describe as acts of solidarity with Palestinians
NEW YORK: Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations issued on Monday what he called a final warning to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants to halt their missile attacks on Israel, saying they otherwise risked the same “miserable fate” as Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria’s Bashar Assad if they persisted.
He also warned Tehran that Israel has the ability to strike any target in the Middle East, including in Iran, adding that Israel would not tolerate attacks by Iranian proxies.
Houthis have repeatedly fired drones and missiles toward Israel in what they describe as acts of solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli fire in Gaza.
“To the Houthis, perhaps you have not been paying attention to what has happened to the Middle East over the past year. Well, allow me to remind you what has happened to Hamas, to Hezbollah, to Assad, to all those who have attempted to destroy us. Let this be your final warning. This is not a threat. It is a promise. You will share the same miserable fate,” Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon told the UN Security Council.
Speaking before the meeting, Danon told reporters: “Israel will defend its people. If 2,000 kilometers is not enough to separate our children from the terror, let me assure you, it will not be enough to protect their terror from our strengths.”
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Houthis that Israel was “just getting started” following Israeli strikes on multiple Houthi-linked targets in Yemen, including Sanaa airport, ports on the country’s west coast and two power plants.
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was about to board a plane at the airport when it came under attack by Israel. A crew member on the plane was injured, he said.
Israel’s elimination of the top leaders of the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah and the destruction of their military structure along with Assad’s collapse represent a succession of monumental wins for Netanyahu.
Briefing the Security Council meeting, Assistant UN Secretary General for the Middle East Khaled Khiari reiterated grave concern about the escalation in violence, calling on the Houthis to halt attacks on Israel and for international and humanitarian law to be respected.
“Further military escalation could jeopardize regional stability with adverse political, security, economic and humanitarian repercussions,” Khiari said.
“Millions in Yemen, Israel and throughout the region, would continue to bear the brunt of escalation with no end.”
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, while condemning Houthi missile attacks on Israel, also criticized Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Yemen, as well those by what he called the “Anglo-Saxon coalition” of US and British warships in the Red Sea, saying they were “clearly not proportional.”
Syria appoints Maysaa Sabrine as first woman to lead central bank, official says
Sabrine, a longtime central bank official mostly focused on oversight of the country’s banking sector, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
She replaces Mohammed Issam Hazime who was appointed governor in 2021 by then-President Bashar Assad and remained on after Assad was ousted by a lightning rebel offensive on Dec. 8.
Since the rebel takeover, the bank has taken steps to liberalize an economy that was heavily controlled by the state, including by canceling the need for pre-approvals for imports and exports and tight controls on the use of foreign currency.
But Syria and the bank itself remain under strict US sanctions.
The bank has also taken stock of the country’s assets after Assad’s fall and a brief spate of looting that saw Syrian currency stolen but the main vaults left unbreached, Reuters reported.
The vault holds nearly 26 tons of gold, the same amount it had at the start of its civil war in 2011, sources told Reuters, but foreign currency reserves had dwindled from around $18 billion before the war to around $200 million, they said.
Lebanon receives thousands of expatriates amid Israeli aggression
- Country faces realities while getting ready to welcome the new year
BEIRUT: Fadi Al-Hassan, director-general of Lebanon’s civil aviation authority, said on Monday that “Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport welcomed 11,700 visitors in one day,” and that “the total number of arrivals to date in December has reached about 220,000.”
Al-Hassan described the figures as “an important achievement compared with the previous years.”
Lebanon is trying to recover from an expanded, destructive Israeli war that started last October against Hezbollah and ended about a month ago under a conditional agreement that provides for the Lebanese army’s deployment in southern Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the Israeli forces, which must completely withdraw from the areas they invaded in the south within a period of 60 days pursuant to the agreement, continue to detonate and bulldoze houses, evacuating only a few areas.
The Israeli army carried out a huge demolition operation in Taybeh, Marjayoun, after bulldozing houses in Taybeh, Mays Al-Jabal, Khiam, Kfarkila and Chamaa.
Most of the arrivals in Lebanon are expatriates who came to spend the holidays with their families, as well as Syrians using Beirut’s airport to return to Syria.
Lebanon is preparing to welcome the new year, while living two separate realities.
In Beirut’s southern suburbs, littered with the rubble of flattened buildings, dozens of “for sale” signs are displayed on the balconies of several buildings that survived the war.
Nisrine, who came back from Germany to check on her mother in Burj Al-Barajneh, told Arab News: “What we saw on the screen is different than reality. The destruction here is scary. The suburb is gloomy and no longer looks like itself.
“Nights are horrific,” she added. “People are tired and worried, the cost of rebuilding what was destroyed is huge, and non-Hezbollah partisans complain of the absence of financial aid to help fix the broken windows at least.”
On the other hand, the areas not affected by war face increased road traffic, with holiday decorations taking over the streets, restaurants and shops.
Therese, who runs a pub with her children in Badaro, hoped “that the situation would get better in the coming new year, and that the 2024 war would be the country’s last.”
She said that “the whole country was affected by what happened in the southern suburbs, the south, and Bekaa. People want to go on with their lives, and we try to be a beacon of hope for them to reduce the weight of the days they went through.”
Security agencies are taking precautions, covering all expected tourist spots in Lebanon.
Minister of Interior Bassam Malawi, and the director-general of the internal security forces, Maj. Gen. Imad Othman, will personally supervise the launch of security patrols, with the event to be broadcast live on TV channels.
Civil aviation’s Al-Hassan said that “Emirati, French, and German airlines, as well as other companies that have suspended flights to Lebanon during the war, could possibly resume their flight schedule to Lebanon in the next 10 days,” adding that “other companies have already resumed their activity with a limited number of flights to Lebanon.”
He expected “the organization of flights to be further improved next month.”
In other news, a parliamentary session is expected to take place on Jan. 9 to elect a president — a position that has been vacant for 26 months due to political disputes between Hezbollah and its allies on one hand, and its opponents on the other, as to the president’s identity.
With nine days remaining until the session, the identity of the candidate with the highest chances of winning is still unknown. It is also unclear whether the quorum will be met, or whether any political party would be willing to compromise.
Despite Hezbollah’s struggle with the rubble removal, compensation and reconstruction file, the party considered, according to its head of Arab and International Relations, Ammar Moussawi, that “some fools and idiots think that the resistance was defeated and written off.”
He added: “We tell them that as long as our hearts are beating, the resistance will remain. Dreaming of a Lebanon without the resistance is wishful thinking.”
Hezbollah parliament MP Hassan Fadlallah said that “the resistance’s firmness, and the political effort led by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, in full coordination with Hezbollah’s leadership, are what led to the ceasefire agreement, which in turn forced the enemy to withdraw within a 60-day period from the border area.”
He added that “the agreement didn’t allow the enemy to carry out any violations and hostilities on Lebanese territory and in the southern area and border villages.”
Fadlallah believed that “besides the internal political divisions and conflicts, confronting the Israeli hostilities against our country should be part of a responsible national stance, where every party assumes its responsibilities, be it the state, the official authorities or the political forces.”
He continued: “This cause must concern all the Lebanese. The south is part of our country, and everyone should be involved in defending and protecting the country’s sovereignty. This requires a national stance.”
He emphasized that “the only way to confront this enemy is through the resistance’s weapons and the people-army-resistance equation.”
On the Israeli side, Israel’s Minister of Defense Israel Katz said that “every dollar denied to Hezbollah is a step closer toward weakening this organization. We will block Hezbollah’s attempts to recover.”
Katz said: “The long arm of Israel will act in every way to ensure the safety of our citizens, and we are working on all fronts to dry up Hezbollah’s sources of funding as it attempts to rebuild its capabilities.”
Palestinian Authority says five more Gazans die in Israeli detention
RAMALLAH: The Palestinian Authority’s ministry for detainees and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club announced on Monday that they had received reports of the deaths of five Gazans in Israeli detention.
Amani Sarahna, a spokesperson for the Prisoners’ Club, confirmed to AFP that two of the five died on Sunday, while the remaining three died earlier.
The club said the five prisoners were arrested during the Israel-Hamas war, some of them while fleeing from the north of the Gaza Strip southwards.
According to the two organizations, 54 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war in Gaza, which was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Thirty-five of the dead have been from the Gaza Strip, with the rest from the occupied West Bank.
The detainees ministry is an arm of the Palestinian Authority responsible for the welfare of Palestinians in Israeli jails and their families.
The two organizations named four of the dead prisoners as Mohammad Rashid Okka, 44, Samir Mahmoud Al-Kahlout, 52, Zuhair Omar Al-Sharif, 58, and Mohammad Anwar Labad, 57.
An additional prisoner, Ashraf Mohammad Abu Warda, 51, died in Israel’s Soroka Hospital on Sunday, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said.
They did not provide details of how the prisoners died.
In a joint statement, the two organizations accused Israel of “liquidation operations against prisoners and detainees.”
They said the number of prisoners killed in Israeli jails was at a historic high, calling it “the most bloody phase.” According to the statement, 291 Palestinian prisoners have died in custody since 1967, when Israel began occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Currently, more than 10,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails, including 89 women, at least 345 children and 3,428 administrative detainees who are held without trial.
The Israel Prisons Service did not immediately respond to an AFP request for confirmation of the deaths.
For the first time, Syrians ‘not afraid’ to talk politics
- For over 50 years, the Assads maintained their vice grip on society, in large part through the countless informants that walked among the population
DAMASCUS: For decades, any Syrian daring to broach political topics got used to speaking in hushed tones and with a watchful eye trained for a listener among the crowd.
“There were spies everywhere,” Mohannad Al-Katee said in Al-Rawda cafe in Damascus, adding almost in disbelief: “It’s the first time that I sit in a cafe and I can talk about politics.
“It was a dream for Syrians,” said Katee, 42, a researcher in political and social history.
Until now, he like thousands of others had grown accustomed to watching for the proverbial flies on the walls of Damascus’s renowned cafes.
Today, those same cafes are alive and buzzing with the voices of patrons speaking freely about their country for the first time.
Such discussions “were banned under the previous regime, then there was a relative opening during the Damascus Spring,” Katee said.
He was referring to the year 2000, when Bashar Assad took over from his late father Hafez and slightly loosened the reins on political life in Syria.
Initially, the young Assad had opened up an unprecedented space, allowing for political salons to flourish alongside calls for reform in a country that had long grown accustomed to fear and silence.
“But it didn’t last,” said Katee.
A few months after his succession, Assad rolled back those gains, putting an end to the short-lived “Damascus Spring.”
In the subsequent years, according to Katee, informants were ubiquitous, from “the hookah waiter to the man at the till, it could have been anyone.”
“Political life consisted of secret meetings,” he said. “We were always taught that the walls have ears.”
Today, “Syrians can never go back to obscurantism and dictatorship, to accepting single-party rule,” he said.
A little further on, in the Havana cafe once known as a meeting point for intellectuals and activists in a distant past, Fuad Obeid is chatting with a friend.
Himself a former owner of a cafe he had to shut down, the 64-year-old said: “The intelligence services spent their time at my place. They drank for free as though they owned the place.”
For over 50 years, the Assads maintained their vice grip on society, in large part through the countless informants that walked among the population.
On Saturday, Syria’s new intelligence chief, Anas Khattab, announced that the service’s various branches would be dissolved.
Obeid said: “I used to keep a low profile so they wouldn’t know I was the owner. I told customers not to talk politics for fear of reprisals.”
Now, he noted, in Havana cafe as in others, the difference is like “night and day.”
Back in Al-Rawda, discussions are in full swing over hookahs and games of backgammon.
The owner Ahmad Kozorosh still can’t believe his eyes, having himself witnessed numerous arrests in his own cafe over the years.
“I am now seeing almost exclusively new faces,” he said. “People who had been sentenced to death, imprisoned.”
To celebrate the new era, he is holding weekly symposiums in the cafe, and will even launch a new political party to be named after it.
Real estate agent Nesrine Shouban, 42, had spent three years in prison for carrying US dollars, a punishable offense in Assad’s Syria.
Alongside thousands of others who found freedom when the doors of prisons were flung open, she was released on December 8 from the notorious Adra prison.
“They had dangled in front of us the possibility of an amnesty” from Assad’s administration, she said. “Thankfully, the amnesty came from God.”
“At cafes, we didn’t dare say anything. We were even afraid that our phones were bugged,” she said.
Now, for the first time, she said she felt “truly free.”
Despite concerns over the extremist background of Syria’s new rulers, a breath of freedom has washed over the country for the first time, with public demonstrations being organized — an unthinkable prospect just one month earlier.
“We are not afraid anymore,” said Shouban. “If Jolani makes mistakes, we will denounce them,” she added, referring to Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani.
“In all cases, it can’t be worse than Bashar Assad.”
