Egypt is preparing for a scenario in which an Israeli offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza, fulfills its worst omens and causes a massive forced displacement of Palestinians towards its territory.
In recent days, the authorities of the Arab country have accelerated works in the east of the Sinai Peninsula, next to the border with the Strip, aimed at establishing an isolated and walled area that could accommodate an eventual exodus of Gazans.
The work occurs while Cairo simultaneously reinforces its border with the Palestinian enclave and orders greater military deployment in the region.
Israel, on the one hand, insists that it has no intention of expelling Palestinian refugees to the neighboring country;
On the other hand, he affirms that he will coordinate his plans to move the population gathered in Rafah - the only city that has not yet been assaulted by land - with the Egyptian authorities so as not to harm that country.
This was explained this Friday by Foreign Minister Israel Katz.
“We will deal with Rafah after talking to Egypt.
We will coordinate it, we have a peace agreement with them and we will find a place [for the refugees] that will not harm the Egyptians,” Katz commented during his participation in the Munich Security Conference (Germany), Reuters reports.
In principle, the plans to combat Hamas involve trying to remove the million or so people who live there from Rafah, the majority coming from other parts of the Strip and forcibly displaced since the start of the bombings, on October 7. , after the massacre of the Islamist movement in Israel.
The head of Israeli diplomacy suggested locating them in the west of the enclave or in Khan Younis, a dozen kilometers to the north and the scene of intense attacks by his troops for weeks.
UN Secretary General António Guterres noted, also at that same conference, that the incursion planned by the Israeli army would be “devastating.”
Along the same lines, Filippo Grandi, head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told Reuters this Friday that the expulsion of Gazans to the Sinai would be “a disaster” for the Palestinians, for Egypt and for the future. peace.
The most radical members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet and some deputies have defended the expulsion of the Gazans and the reoccupation of the enclave, where there have been no Jewish settlements since 2005.
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Satellite images show a large area of land in northeastern Sinai, near Gaza's southern border, that has been cleared, leveled and fenced with a wall.
The works are intended to enable a high security area in preparation for the reception of Palestinians in case the Israeli military campaign ends up pushing tens of thousands of Gazans towards Egypt, according to the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, a local organization. , citing two contractors in the area.
The work, which began recently, is scheduled to be completed in a matter of days.
The space is being made available in a five-kilometer-wide border zone created in the last decade by the Egyptian authorities along the entire border between Sinai and Gaza as part of a broad anti-terrorist campaign in the north of the peninsula.
The place is located very far from other inhabited areas of Egypt, and will extend over a territory of about 13 square kilometers with the intention that it can accommodate more than 100,000 people, according to an Egyptian source told the American newspaper The
Wall Street Journal
.
Cairo has not yet officially commented on the works in the Sinai, and since the beginning of the Israeli military offensive it has categorically rejected a forced displacement of Gazans to its territory so as not to be perceived as complicit in an ethnic cleansing of Gaza. .
The works coincide with a greater Egyptian military deployment in the region, although within the limits set by the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and the reinforcement of at least one of the three walls that separate the Sinai from the Strip.
When Israel launched its military operation following the October 7 attacks, the North Sinai governorate said in a statement that it had ordered all provincial leaderships to prepare for the possible repercussions of the crisis.
He also called for identifying spaces suitable for hosting potential refugees.
According to the Sinai Foundation, the works have been commissioned by the engineering department of the Egyptian Armed Forces to a company owned by Ibrahim al Ergany, a businessman close to the highest levels of the State and founder of a federation of families and tribes of the northern Sinai that since 2017 has been collaborating with the Egyptian army and security forces in their anti-terrorist fight in the region.
The work is being carried out under a great security deployment.
Another company of the conglomerate controlled by this powerful businessman, Hala, is at the center of an opaque network of intermediaries that is facilitating the departure of Palestinians from Gaza in exchange for payments of thousands of dollars, as recently documented by EL PAÍS.
The travel agency and the company in charge of the works being carried out in East Sinai, Beni Sinai, which was already one of the main beneficiaries of the Gaza reconstruction plans after the Israeli military offensive of 2021, share headquarters in Cairo, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
The Sinai Foundation has also noted that the land being cleared is in one of the areas that were evacuated and largely demolished by the authorities during their anti-terrorism campaign over the last decade.
At the end of last year, hundreds of people from this region demonstrated to demand their right to return, partly motivated by fear that Gazans would be displaced to the area.
Control of the Rafah corridor
The Israeli plans have also created tension around the so-called Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip of land along the border between the Palestinian enclave and Egypt.
Although its status is regulated by the 1979 peace agreement, Israel has recently expressed its desire to control it.
It is a “great challenge” and the “most crucial issue” facing Israel, says Israeli security analyst Kobi Michael, referring to the corridor, which straddles both sides of the border.
It is a point that “Hamas uses to smuggle weapons and people” through the tunnels that connect one side to the other, says Michael, who is also a collaborator at the Institute for the Study of National Security (INSS, for its acronym). in English) and the Misgav Institute.
“Unfortunately, the Egyptians are not doing their job well there,” he laments.
However, he understands that the two countries, Israel and Egypt, must coordinate and reach an agreement in the border area.
The Egyptian authorities have warned that the mass expulsion of Palestinians to their territory and a possible occupation of the Philadelphi corridor constitute two red lines, but they have avoided specifying what measures they would take if Israel crosses them.
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