Egypt

Egypt maintains a near-total prohibition on gambling rooted in the 1937 Penal Code (Articles 271 and 352) and the Civil Code (Article 739 voiding gambling contracts), with a narrow foreigner-only hotel-casino exception permitted under Law No. 8 of 2022 Article 24. This cycle marks the first primary-legislation movement specifically targeting online gambling: a drafted Digital Anti-Gambling bill from Parliament's Communications and Information Technology Committee, mid-2026 Cybercrime Law amendments introducing life imprisonment for serious-case online offences, and an active platform-blocking campaign against offshore betting sites and apps running since February 2026. The underlying prohibition is unchanged and durable, but enforcement posture and legislative attention on the online vector are both intensifying materially this cycle.

There is no private-operator gambling licensing framework in Egypt. Land-based casino approvals are issued administratively by the Ministry of Tourism for specific international hotels under Law 8/2022 Art. 24, exclusively for non-Egyptian patrons and operating in foreign currency — this is not a public licensing process and is inaccessible to private operators seeking market entry. Online gambling is prohibited without exception for residents. No sports-betting, lottery, or B2B-supplier licensing pathway exists for private operators; the National Lottery and horse racing are state/derogation carve-outs, not open licence classes.

There is no legal market-entry path for private gambling operators in Egypt. Constitutional, legal, and political barriers are among the highest in the MENA region, with Sharia entrenchment foreclosing liberalisation and active blocking and payment-interdiction infrastructure raising operational risk for any grey-market approach.

All gambling marketing directed at Egyptian residents is prohibited. The NTRA holds powers to order blocking of gambling advertising content, and the Cybercrime Law provides a legal basis for content takedown. Grey-market gambling promotion in Arabic circulates on social platforms, but enforcement is inconsistent; major ad platforms apply Egyptian-law restrictions for gambling advertising. The Feb 2026 draft framework contemplates penalties for entities that promote betting.

Technical compliance in Egypt is defined this cycle not by certification standards for licensed operators, none of which exist for the online segment, but by the growing technical capacity of the state itself. The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and the Supreme Council for Media Regulation have relied on joint technical reports, prepared together with the parliamentary committee, to identify and block unlicensed betting applications at scale, reportedly reaching approximately 80 percent of online betting applications. This represents an incremental but material development in regulator technical capability, built on the precedent of the 2024 removal of 1xBet from Google Play and the Apple App Store. The trend suggests that the state's operational reach in identifying and disabling unlicensed betting distribution is advancing ahead of, and building the evidentiary case for, the pending statutory criminalisation of online betting.

Distribution-platform enforcement intensified this cycle. Following the 2024 removal of 1xBet from Google Play and the App Store, Egyptian authorities and platform operators targeted MelBet in a further takedown campaign, an uncertain-confidence, single-source finding that nonetheless corroborates a sustained pattern of app-store-level action against offshore-licensed betting operators serving Egyptian users. This distribution-platform pressure runs alongside the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and Supreme Council for Media Regulation's technical-blocking campaign, which reported blocking approximately 80 percent of online betting applications as of February 2026, suggesting that platform delisting and network-level blocking are being pursued as complementary enforcement tracks against the same population of offshore operators. The accessory-liability basis for these actions is inferred from the general gambling-related liability provisions of Law No. 371/1956, as no explicit hosting or DNS-specific statute was identified in the evidence reviewed this cycle.