Tahrir Square on July 29 2011. Photo: wiki commons.

JNS.org – Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered around Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Sunday to urge Islamist President Mohamed Morsi to step down.

“It’s the same politics as Mubarak but we are in a worse situation,” said Sameh al-Masri, one of the organizers on the main stage of Sunday’s protest, Al-Jazeera reported. “Poverty is increasing, inflation is increasing. It’s much worse than Mubarak.”

The protests—part of an anti-Morsi campaign started last month known as Tamarod, which has gathered more than 22 million signatures on a petition calling for Morsi’s resignation—began in Alexandria on Friday afternoon and then spread to other cities around Egypt. Several of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Freedom and Justice Party’s headquarters were torched by protestors, the Egypt Independent reported.

Pro-Morsi Islamists also held counter-protests. Security officials fear that clashes between pro-Morsi and anti-Morsi groups could grow more violent, forcing the military to step in to restore law and order like it did during the February 2011 revolt against former President Hosni Mubarak.

Andrew Pochter, a 21-year-old American Jewish student from Kenyon College in Ohio, was randomly stabbed to death during protests in Alexandria on Friday, his family said in a statement, according to Israel Hayom.

Pochter was in Egypt as part of the non-profit organization Amideast because he “cared profoundly about the Middle East, and he planned to live and work there in the pursuit of peace and understanding,” his family’s statement said.