Protests have occurred at Egyptian embassies around the world over the last nine days, with the demonstrators demanding that Cairo stop blocking Gazans from fleeing their war-torn enclave.

The first protest occurred on July 21, when a 27-year-old Egyptian resident of the Netherlands, Anas Habib, chained shut the gates of his embassy in The Hague with a simple bicycle lock.

He livestreamed his actions on social media, and when the newly barricaded embassy employees protested, he exclaimed sarcastically in Arabic, “Why are you upset now? It’s blocked on your side, not ours… Turns out the siege really hurts. It breaks your heart to be trapped.”

“Go on then, open the crossing,” he said in a deliberate play on words. “Now do you see how the blockade humiliates? How it crushes?”

Mentioning that children are dying in Gaza, he added, “We’ve been hearing their lies for two years straight. They say, ‘It’s closed from their side, not ours,’” referring to the false Egyptian claim that the IDF, which controls Rafah, would not allow Gazans to leave.

Those in the embassy, he said, “couldn’t handle a lie and a siege for one second. Imagine how everyone in Gaza is feeling hearing your lies every day for the past two years.”

The mocking phrase “It’s closed from their side, not ours” quickly trended on social media, with pro-Palestinian activists chanting it every time they chained the doors of another embassy.

Hundreds of protesters have since targeted Egyptian representations in such European capitals as Berlin, Helsinki, London, Madrid, and Oslo as well as in Arab countries such as Lebanon, Libya and Tunisia.

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