Egypt warily eyes Gaza as war builds pressure on its border
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Displaced Palestinians preparing food as they sheltered at the border with Egypt in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Feb 10.
PHOTO: REUTERS
CAIRO – The pressure on Egypt is building.
More than half of the Gaza Strip’s population is squeezed into miserable tent cities in Rafah, a small city along Egypt’s border, left with nowhere else to go by Israel’s military campaign.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has threatened to overrun the area,
But it is not clear where those people could go.
Rather than opening its border to give Palestinians a refuge from the onslaught, as it has done for people fleeing other conflicts in the region, Egypt has reinforced its frontier with Gaza.
It has also warned Israel that any move that would send Palestinians from Gaza spilling into its territory could jeopardise the decades-old Israel-Egypt peace treaty, an anchor of Middle East stability since 1979.
Israel’s next steps in the war could force such a breaking point.
During past conflicts in the region, Egypt has taken in refugees from Syria, Yemen and neighbouring Sudan. But in this war, it has reacted very differently to the plight of its Arab neighbours, spurred by a mix of alarm over its own security and fear that the displacement could become permanent and undermine Palestinian aspirations for statehood.
Egyptian leaders are also wary of the Islamist Hamas stoking militancy and spreading influence in their country, as Egypt has spent years trying to quash Islamists and an insurgency at home.
A Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct 7
Egyptian officials have urged their Western counterparts to tell Israel that they see any move to force Palestinians from Gaza to cross into Sinai as a violation that would effectively suspend the 1979 peace treaty, according to a senior Western diplomat in Cairo.
Another senior Western official, a US official and an Israeli official said the message was even more direct, with Egypt threatening to suspend the treaty if the Israeli military pushed Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt.
The Egyptian government repeated that warning to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Feb 7, when Mr Blinken was in Cairo to meet with President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, the Israeli official said.
The US official said Egypt had made clear it was prepared to militarise its border, perhaps with tanks, if Palestinians begin to be pushed into Sinai.
A picture taken from Rafah showing smoke billowing during Israeli bombardment over Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Feb 10.
PHOTO: AFP
While Egyptians have never warmed to Israel in more than four decades of peace, their treaty has been one of the few stable constants in a turbulent region. Egypt has benefited from the security cooperation and from the generous American support – including more than US$1 billion (S$1.3 billion) in annual aid – that it brought.
And despite the rising tensions, Egyptian and Israeli officials are still communicating with each other.
The Israeli official said that military officers from both countries, who have a long-established relationship of trust born of security cooperation around the border, are also speaking privately about Israel’s likely incursion into Rafah. In those discussions, the Egyptians asked Israel to limit the operation’s scale, this official said.
The two countries, which have jointly enforced a crippling blockade on Gaza since Hamas took control in 2007, are also discussing giving Israel a greater role in securing the narrow buffer zone that runs along the approximately 14km border between Egypt and Gaza, according to regional and Western officials.
But state-owned Egyptian media outlets have published anonymous denials by Egyptian officials about any agreement, signalling the Cairo government’s reluctance for its population to see any hint of cooperation with Israel. And Israel’s talk of controlling the zone has only added to strains in the relationship.
Egypt is Gaza’s only neighbour other than Israel, and since Israel invaded the territory in October, Egypt has helped about 1,700 gravely wounded Palestinians leave Gaza for treatment in Egyptian hospitals.
But Cairo categorically rejects any larger influx of Palestinian refugees onto Egyptian soil.
“There is a difference between hosting refugees and agreeing on forced displacement of a people,” Mr Hani Labib, a pro-government commentator in Egypt, said on Feb 6 on an evening talk show.
The sensitivity dates to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in the war surrounding Israel’s creation, never to return.
Many Palestinians and other Arabs refer to this chapter in history as the “nakba”, Arabic for “catastrophe”, and the permanent displacements of 1948 have reverberated in the Arab world’s memory as an injustice never remedied.
To many people in Egypt and across the Middle East, Israel forcing Gaza residents to leave their homes during this war, and perhaps flee Gaza altogether, would amount to a second nakba.
Early in the war, Israel pushed in diplomatic discussions for Palestinians to move from Gaza to Sinai, but Israeli officials have stopped formally advocating this since November.
Still, comments by hardline Israeli government ministers endorsing the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and open calls from some Israelis to rebuild Jewish settlements in the enclave have fed Arab fears that, after the war, Palestinians who leave Gaza would be unable to return – further undermining hopes for a future Palestinian state.
Those worries also set Palestinians apart from refugees in other crises.
Although some Palestinians in Gaza have said in interviews with The New York Times that they hope to escape to Egypt as the war has intensified, many, motivated by a bone-deep commitment to the dream of statehood, reject any suggestion of abandoning their homeland.
“Egypt is not an option for me to run to,” said Mr Fathi Abu Snema, 45, who has been sheltering in a Rafah school for four months. “I prefer to die here.”
Mr al-Sisi has sworn repeatedly to reject what he calls the “liquidation of the Palestinian cause”, winning applause even from Egyptians frustrated with him on other grounds.
But perhaps more important, Cairo also dreads what Palestinian refugees in Sinai would mean for Egypt’s security. Restive, embittered refugees could launch attacks at Israel from Egyptian soil, inviting Israeli retaliation, or be recruited into the local insurgency in Sinai that Egypt has battled for years.
With its military outmatched by Israel’s and its economy mired in a deep crisis, Egypt has few options for bending Israel to its will. And its mountain of debt and desperation for foreign currency have raised questions over whether Israel’s Western allies could offer rich enough financial incentives to persuade Egypt to resettle Palestinians from Gaza in Sinai.
But so far, Western leaders, fearing instability in Egypt, have instead pressed Israel to refrain from displacing Palestinians to Egypt. NYTIMES
