Faced with thousands on Tahrir Square, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces turned to tactics that look very much like they have been copied straight from Hosni Mubarak’s playbook. In the course of his rambling, self-justifying, calm-down-we-are-pretending-to-promise-concessions speech last night, Tantawi evoked, as his former boss once did, the spectre of foreign forces at work, agitating Egyptians in the service of their own agendas. “Some powers,” he warned ominously, vaguely, “are trying to bring down the trust between the Armed Forces and the people of Egypt, and they are targeting the fall of the Egyptian State.” A hangover from the Mubarak era is a suspicion that any foreigner could be an Israeli or a spy, especially if he or she is carrying a camera. On the square over the past couple of days, I have been increasingly stopped and questioned by protesters. Who is she? they ask my translator. What is she doing here? Get her out of here! There are foreigners creating trouble here! We stop and remonstrate and reason and usually they end up apologizing: They were only making sure—did we hear the report on state TV that three foreigners were arrested in Mohamed Mahmoud Street? We should take care! The three were foreign American University of Cairo students, and they were released, but their presence on state TV news and in the rumor mill, in these tense times, ratcheted up the xenophobia.

As Tantawi spoke, the battle for Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which runs between Tahrir and the Interior Ministry, continued to rage. This afternoon, a brief truce revealed a line of Army armored personnel carriers and a stretch of charred and pitted city block. By dusk, the tear gas was being volleyed again; the crowd, tired and surly, ran back, surged forward. As I write, I am watching (from a nearby balcony) vast clouds of tear gas bloom at the intersection between Mohamed Mahmoud Street and Tahrir. The ambulances rush back and forth with twinkling blue lights; yellow fires illuminate the smoked gloom, lit as defense against the tear gas. In the past hour, it has been reported on Twitter that a friend of mine, the Egyptian-American documentary maker Jehane Noujaim, has been arrested. The Omar Makram Mosque on Tahrir, turned into a field hospital for these past days, is calling for people to reinforce the square from its speakers. People are lining up to donate blood. The square is full; the chants go up: “We’re not leaving; he’s leaving! Allahu Akbar!’

Members of the cabinet, including the Interior Minister, have resigned, but their resignations will not technically be accepted until a new government can be formed, and nobody wants to be Prime Minister. In the meantime it is not at all clear who is running the Interior Ministry and ordering the continuing police violence—astonishing quantities of tear gas, regular shotgun blasts, and sometimes several cracks of gunfire, which may be rubber bullets or may be live ammunition. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued its Facebook Communique No. 83, denying that the Army had fired tear gas at protesters. Rumors circle the square that General Fengary, one of the members of S.C.A.F., has essentially taken over the Interior Ministry; the Army points at the police, the police point at the Army. But for the protesters on the square, this is academic: the Supreme Council is responsible.

Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.