Egypt's Culture Minister Gihane Zaki resigned after the Court of Cassation upheld a ruling that she plagiarized about half of a rival author's book

Egypt's Court of Cassation upheld an Economic Court ruling that Culture Minister Gihane Zaki infringed writer Soheir Abdel-Hamid's intellectual property rights, after a tripartite panel of experts found roughly half of Zaki's 2024 book on Kout El Kouloub verbatim-plagiarized Abdel-Hamid's 2022 biography of the same historical figure. The court ordered Zaki to pay 100,000 Egyptian pounds in damages and withdraw her book from sale; Zaki, appointed minister in February 2026, submitted her resignation to Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on July 7-8, 2026, saying she was stepping down out of respect for the judiciary.