Egypt caught between Israel and Hamas as crisis deepens
Gaza refugees amass at the Rafah crossing while humanitarian supplies sit on the other side.
Egypt has a decisive role to play as the war between Israel and Hamas threatens to spiral into a regional crisis, since it controls the only crossing to or from Gaza not controlled by the Israeli government.
That link, Rafah, remains closed. Aid trucks with food and supplies for Gazans are stuck on the Egyptian side of the border. Palestinians with dual citizenship — including hundreds with U.S. passports — are trying to get out.
Negotiations are ongoing in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, where strongman President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this week. He was expected to meet with President Biden in Jordan on Wednesday, but the summit was called off after the destruction of a hospital in Gaza.
Like all Arab states, Egypt supports Palestinian statehood. But it also has a peace treaty with Israel — and receives $1.3 billion in American aid annually — making it a uniquely influential nation as the Middle East reaches a point of extreme tension.
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The rise of Hamas
Egypt ruled Gaza in the 1950s and ’60s until its forces were expelled by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, one of several conflicts in which Cairo helped lead an anti-Israel military coalition. Hamas, founded in the Gaza Strip in 1987, was based on the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group that had been operating in Egypt for decades. After a series of attacks on Israel — the intifadas — and rising prominence among Palestinian militant groups, Hamas became the effective ruler of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
The rise of Hamas led Israel and Egypt to impose a blockade of the densely populated enclave. In 2009, Egypt began to construct a wall along its 7-mile border with Gaza. To prevent the smuggling of goods and weapons into Gaza through Hamas-built tunnels, the barrier extended below the ground.
“They’re very wary of the Gaza Strip,” Middle East scholar Natan Sachs of the Brookings Institution told Yahoo News of the Egyptians. Sachs recalled how an Egyptian once described the way his countrymen saw Gaza: “We always demand every last grain of sand in the Sinai, and not one grain of sand in Gaza.”
Gaza, in other words, is everything about the Middle East that Egypt wants to leave behind: refugees, militants, poverty and war.
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Refugees stream toward Rafah
Ever since Israel said late last week that Palestinians should evacuate northern Gaza in preparation for an expected ground assault, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have streamed toward the Rafah gate. Some of them are simply Gazans fleeing Israeli bombs, but there are also hundreds of Americans and other foreigners trying to get home.
For now, they are not being allowed out.
The North Sinai — an enormous region of Egypt that includes vast swaths of desert and coastline — could serve as a temporary refuge for Gazans fleeing violence, but Egypt does not want to take them. Like the other Arab states in the region, Egypt has little interest in setting up new refugee camps for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the latest conflict.
Egypt needs to look no farther than Jordan, which first took in Palestinian refugees after Israel’s founding — and continues to host them to this day. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has joined el-Sissi in refusing any influx of Palestinians.
“There is nothing temporary in the Middle East,” says Dartmouth scholar Ezzedine Fishere, who has written extensively about Egypt. He describes el-Sissi’s thinking about the displaced Palestinians as relatively straightforward: "I don't want to have them on my territory."
“Their biggest worry is that Israel will push Gaza in their direction,” Sachs says of the Egyptians. Besides, there is little reason for Egypt to make things easier for Israel. “They’re not willing to be the safety valve for Israel,” he says.
For that matter, most Gazans do not want to leave home, refusing to trust that Israel will allow them to return. Many continue to long for the ancestral lands from which they were displaced 75 years ago to create Israel in the first place. “I am not going to be a refugee for the second time — not in the southern part of Gaza and not in the Sinai Desert," one woman in Gaza told the New York Times.
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Worries of terror
El-Sissi is a strongman who rose to power in 2014, after the Arab Spring protests, which did not lead to the spread of democracy across the Middle East that many had hoped to see.
For several years, Egypt has been trying to contain an Islamic State outfit in the North Sinai. An influx of refugees, including some sympathetic to Hamas, could give fundamentalists in the region greater sway.
“Sissi always has national and regime security at the front of his mind,” Daniel DePetris of the national security think tank Defense Priorities told Yahoo News. “It's the first thing he thinks about when he gets up and the last thing he thinks about when he goes to bed.”
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