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Israa Abdel Fattah


Esraa Abdel Fatah (Arabic: إسراء عبد الفتاح‎‎, IPA: [ʔesˈɾˤɑːʔ ʕæbdelfætˈtæːħ, ˈʔesɾˤɑ-]; also called Facebook Girl); born 1978 is an Egyptian internet activist and blogger.

Esraa worked as a human resources administrator, when she co-founded April 6 Youth Movement Egypt in 2008, a group that was made to support the workers in El-Mahalla El-Kubra, an industrial town, who were planning to strike on April 6. This group gradually became a popular political movement.

She was arrested by Egyptian security in 2008. She drew the attention of few Egyptian newspapers challenging by this the state's censorship policy, turning her into an overnight symbol for resistance and resilience against corruption and injustice.

After two weeks in prison she was released. She made a brief public statement renouncing political activism for good.

Esraa Abdel Fattah reappeared again during the January 2011 nationwide protests in Egypt, that called for the end of Hosni Mubarak's regime. She was active on the internet, and also on the ground, updating Al Jazeera TV with the latest news related to the opposition.

When the state security buildings were attacked in early March, 2011, in the wake of signs of files there being destroyed, a file for Isra’a was found which contained ten pages of documents detailing three years of wiretaps and hacked e-mail, including some focused on her divorce. "The feeling of violation was indescribable," she said.

Her name was put forward for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

On October 31, 2011, she was named a Woman of the Year by "Glamour"


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