Egypt’s Sinai construction supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing program in Gaza Strip

Israel has been clear about its plans to force Palestinians from Gaza, and Egypt is now reportedly building an area to receive them. Palestinians need a respite from Israel’s brutality, but mass displacement into the Sinai would be a catastrophe.

Egypt is building a six-meter high wall in the Sinai near the Gaza Strip that is reportedly intended to close off an area of eight square kilometers to receive Palestinians from Gaza in the event of a mass exodus, relocation, displacement or deportation.

While the construction implies a respite to the brutality of Israeli bombardment for Gazans, their mass displacement into the Sinai would be a human rights Armageddon.

Over the last four months, Israel has devastated Gaza claiming the lives of almost 29,000 people through bombardment and depriving its two-million-person population from access to food and medicine.

Protests in Cairo and elsewhere have called on Egypt to open the Rafah crossing, the only border of Gaza not controlled directly by Israel.

Egyptian authorities have long maintained the Israeli blockade of Gaza by closing the Rafah crossing more days than it was open, evicting and demolishing the homes and businesses of residents of the Sinai to create a buffer zone.

Israel also decided to flood tunnels that were a lifeline for Gaza’s residents.

The tunnels in Gaza initially had some basic characteristics in common with other excavation sites in Israel and elsewhere in the world, such as burial caves, mines, and hiding systems.

But each tunnel system is different and uniquely related to the geological, geographic and geopolitical conditions in place.

Clear records of tunneling operations extend back more than 4,000 years – Assyrian carvings show engineering units belonging to Sargon of Akkad (who reigned between 2,334 and 2,279 BCE) undermining the walls of enemy cities.

During Alexander the Great’s 332 BC siege of this Mediterranean city, then under Persian rule, Alexander expected quick victory. But the siege of Gaza involved 100 days of fruitless attacks and tunneling.

When Gaza finally fell, Alexander was infuriated and went on a vengeful rampage.

American troops attacking Al Qaeda positions and pursuing Osama bin Laden in 2002 discovered a massive tunnel complex connecting the natural Tora Bora cave formations in Afghanistan.

In more recent times, Palestinians subverted Israeli controls over travel, imports and exports to and from the Gaza Strip by digging tunnels to south, into Egypt.

Cars, cows, and cigarettes came through what were commonly called smuggling tunnels, although Hamas taxed what it could after it came to power 2006.

Cheap Egyptian gasoline kept Gaza going when Israel fuel was too expensive. Weapons and sometimes people traveled through those commercial tunnels too.

Hamas also used a tunnel from Gaza to enter Israel and kidnap an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2006. He was held for five years, until Israel agreed to free more than 1,000 kidnapped Palestinian prisoners.

The tunnels to Egypt have been largely shut down in the past year, following the ouster of Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood was sympathetic to Hamas.

Under the current Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt has bulldozed those tunnels, stifling the already weak Gazan economy.

The network of military tunnels snaking north and east into Israel were likely dug over several years. But they only began to be exposed in the past year or so, even as the commercial tunnels to Egypt were being shut down.

These militant tunnels are not mole holes. Some are tall enough to stand in, reinforced with concrete and equipped with electricity and phone lines in some cases.

It is without question that Gazans should, like all people in the world, have a right to safety from bombardment and freedom of mobility. The wall being built on the Egyptian border, however, promises neither.

News of the wall’s construction coincides with Netanyahu’s announcement of a ground offensive in Rafah, which currently hosts 1.1 million Palestinians who moved to this so-called safe zone after being given 24 hours to forcibly vacate Gaza’s north.

On October 13, during the same 24 hours as this directive, a document was drafted by Israel’s Interior Ministry describing an ultimate plan to displace Gaza’s two million residents into the Egyptian Sinai.

At the time, Netanyahu downplayed the document as a hypothetical concept paper.

Egyptian President Abdelfatah El-Sisi also vehemently denied that Egypt would comply with this strategy, while suggesting that Palestinians could instead be moved to the Negev desert till the militants are dealt with.

All the while there were reports that this displacement to the Sinai was a topic of backroom diplomacy.

We cannot know if Egypt is building the encampment to prepare to temporarily host refugees in the event of a spontaneous storming of the border for which there is a precedent.

Or whether it intends to comply with yet another Zionist directive at the expense of Palestinian lives. What we do know is that the border is heavily fortified and monitored and has not been breached for over a decade.

We also know that the intentions and protests of Egyptian authorities matter little in the face of Israeli decisions. After all, Egypt is vehemently against the ground offensive in Rafah.

It has increased its own military presence at the border, and is even threatening the (unlikely) action of suspending the Camp David Accords if Israel goes through with it.

Over the past four months, we have watched Israel systematically classify civilians unwilling or unable to vacate their homes, such as those who remained in Gaza’s North after the directive, as terrorists whose indiscriminate killing is substantiated.

Were some people to evacuate to the Egyptian Sinai, to be held in a penned enclosure at the border zone, there is no guarantee that anyone left behind who refuses to leave, or is unable to, would be spared the same fate.

And while it is almost certain that Egypt, beleaguered with its own financial crisis and issues in the Sinai does not intend, nor have the capacity, to permanently accept displaced Palestinians, Israel has consistently and vehemently denied Palestinians the right of return.

According to UNRWA there are at least 5.9 million Palestinian refugees globally, the descendants of those who were forced out of their homes between 1946 and 1948 through massacres and forced displacements at the hands of Zionist militias during what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or catastrophe.

In November, commenting on the forced displacement of Palestinians from Northern Gaza an Israeli minister was quoted boasting, We’re rolling out Nakba 2023. Now, the stability of Egypt, too, may be in the balance.

Despite high popularity in the years that followed his ascension to authority via a coup d’etat in 2013, it is reported that Egyptians are increasingly dissatisfied with President Abel-Fatah El Sisi, whose lavish spending on mega projects to keep the rank-and-file military and business elite happy has plunged the country into a severe economic crisis.

Many are angered by Sisi’s perceived complicity in the sequester of Gaza and the unwillingness to challenge the Zionist state or break its blockade. Being seen as participating in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians would not be well received.

We are four months into a military campaign that is among the most destructive in recent history. It is one that has seen brutal violence directed at civilians, rendering Gaza the most unsafe place in the world for children.

Governments globally, the Egyptian government included, must act immediately to ensure no more lives are lost. That not a single additional person is killed or displaced from their homes.

That Palestinians will have a right to self-determination as they rebuild, one that can only be protected by an end to the occupation. None of these objectives are achieved by the mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into a concrete encampment in the Egyptian Sinai.

Mondoweiss / ABC Flash Point News 2024.