President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s meeting yesterday with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Berlin is getting a lot of attention in the foreign press. Pompeo “expressed outrage” to the Egyptian president over the death of US citizen Mostafa Kassem in Egyptian custody, a State Department spokesperson said. The secretary of state brought up the subject during a meeting on the sidelines of the Libyan peace conference in Berlin yesterday. Kassem’s death after a hunger strike has caused tensions with the US, with several senators calling for sanctions on Egypt and Washington’s top Middle East diplomat describing his death as “needless, tragic and avoidable” (AP | AFP | Reuters | CNN). Meanwhile, another opinion piece in the Washington Post argues that Kassem’s death proves the ineffectiveness of hunger strikes to pressure some governments.

Egypt’s human rights record came under scrutiny in Human Rights Watch’s annual World Report 2020, which criticized last year’s constitutional amendments that extended presidential terms to six years, among other things. The report also pointed to rights violations by Daesh in North Sinai, saying some of them “amount to war crimes.”