Egypt's Mohamed Morsi faces mass protests: live updates

It's still a festive mood outside the presidential palace in Heliopolis, north-east Cairo. Around 4,000 anti-Morsi protesters are waving flags and bobbing lightly to the sound of patriotic tunes played from a first-floor balcony. Nearby, a teenager does a wheelie on his motorbike. A few hundred metres away, a crowd pelts a vast, helpfully-placed picture of Morsi with stones.

Elsewhere, there are big flags saying "Irhal!", or "Leave!", while someone has stretched a super-long, anti-Muslim Brotherhood banner along the makeshift walls erected to protect the palace in recent days.

"Morsi got elected in a democratic way," says one Morsi critic, businessman Hassan Shanab, sitting in a wheelchair. "But since he took over, everything's been polarised. All of a sudden we see ourselves part of an Islamic regime like Iran."

Most of the anti-Morsi crowds are still at Tahrir square, which I'm told is close to capacity, despite the heat. But later the focus will shift here, as protesters march from Tahrir – and there are fears of fighting. If attempts are made to break inside the palace, it's possible that the Islamists nearby in Nasr City will come to protect it.

Tahrir Doctors, who tend to the injured at most Cairo protests, have set up three field hospitals, staffed by 30-odd medics. "If we get any injured from any side, we will treat them equally," says Dr Amr Shebaita, the group's head.

It's worth noting that Morsi's opponents are split between those who want to see the army take over, and those who remember the army's repressive interim government, following the fall of Mubarak, with bitterness. Those in the former camp have been perched outside the Defence Ministry in recent days, demanding army intervention.

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