Cairo fears security threat if Israel goes ahead with Rafah incursion
If there is one thing that encapsulates Egypt’s predicament over the fallout from the Gaza war, it is the fate of Rafah, the coastal enclave’s southernmost city on the Egyptian border.
Rafah looks set to be the next stop in Israel’s military campaign to eradicate Hamas, as pleas from Egypt, the US, the UN and most of the international community not to launch a fullscale ground offensive in the city appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
At stake are the lives of about half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents who have sought shelter in Rafah, a city that is cut in half by the border separating Egypt from the strip.
The UN has bluntly warned that invading the city “could lead to a slaughter” that would significantly increase the death toll in the enclave since the onset of war, which already exceeds 29,400, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The war began on October 7, when Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages.
In a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron at the weekend, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi warned of “disastrous humanitarian consequences” for the Palestinians in Rafah if Israel launches a ground incursion into the city.
In a wider context, the fallout of a possible attack on Rafah has the potential to destabilise Egypt, a nation of 105 million, jeopardising its milestone 1979 peace treaty with Israel and creating a formidable hurdle to any future peace negotiations to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Among Cairo’s primary concerns is that Palestinians could be forced to try to cross Gaza’s 13km border with Egypt into the Sinai Peninsula, a rugged, mountainous and sparsely populated region sandwiched between the Mediterranean and Red Sea.
With Israel considered unlikely to allow the Palestinians to return to Gaza, their resettlement in Sinai would lead to the further “liquidation” of the Palestinian cause, or another Nakba, the Arabic word for calamity used widely to refer to the forced removal of about 700,000 Palestinians from their homes at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948.
It would also bring the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on to Egyptian territory. Mr El Sisi has voiced fears that militants could enter Egypt among the displaced Palestinians, and later launch cross-border attacks on Israel from their new base. That, he added, would give Israel licence to carry out retaliatory strikes against fighters on Egyptian soil.
The mass movement of Palestinians from Rafah into Sinai appears to be neither far-fetched, nor a figment of the imagination of Egyptian authorities.
Already, displaced Palestinians in Rafah are living in makeshift camps just metres from the border fence. Their children play on improvised swings using the fence’s metal poles.
Images and footage posted online show Palestinians conversing with Egyptian soldiers guarding the frontier. In some cases, children ask why they cannot be allowed to cross into Egypt.
If Israel makes good on its threat to send troops into Rafah, those images could be replaced by Palestinians jammed against the border fence, begging to be allowed through into Egypt to escape death or injury.
Not allowing them to do so would cast Egypt in a very negative light: a heartless country, indifferent to the plight of the very people – the Palestinians – whose cause it has long claimed to champion.
Egyptian authorities are reportedly working on what security sources describe as an “incubator” – a walled enclosure covering a 25 square kilometre stretch of land in Sinai, next to the Gaza border.
Sources told The National that the aim of the project is to enable Egypt to absorb Palestinians who might rush across the border fleeing an Israeli offensive.
It would also allow the containment of the Palestinians who arrive in Egypt in one place where authorities can exercise maximum control, the sources said. Cairo has officially denied it is building such a centre, and says satellite photos of the site released by monitoring groups show work to construct a logistics centre for organising the delivery of aid to Gaza.
The sources said this official denial was aimed to discourage suggestions that Egypt has resigned itself to allowing Palestinians to flee over the border, and to counter accusations that Cairo is indirectly aiding Israel’s war effort.
“It’s a legitimate precautionary measure by the armed forces to have this area as a first line of defence if the Palestinians storm across the border to escape Israeli fire in Rafah,” said one source.
Meanwhile, Egypt has been building a concrete wall 10 metres from the barbed wire and barriers along the border with Gaza, the sources added.
Construction began after an Israeli air strike on the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing in the early days of the war, they said.
Residents of the Egyptian side of Rafah were removed from the city between 2015 and 2017, when security forces were engaged in near daily battles against insurgents in north-eastern Sinai.
A government decree in 2021 enshrined the evacuation of Rafah – thought to have affected as many as 3,000 families – and offered residents monetary compensation and housing in nearby cities, towns and villages.
The area has since been placed under direct Egyptian military control.
The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty places severe restrictions on the number of troops who can be stationed in the border area. However, in recent weeks both countries have been ignoring the letter of the treaty’s security appendix, with Egypt increasing the number of its forces in the area and Israel amassing troops not far from the Gazan side of the border.
The presence of forces on either side could create a volatile situation if a major military operation is launched in Rafah, the sources said, as it may increase the risk of Israel inadvertently shelling Egyptian troops, or of bombardment near the border leading to death and injury on the Egyptian side.
One of the sources said: “The overarching command for our forces there is the exercise of extreme restraint.”
Egypt is reportedly building a 25 square kilometre enclosure near the border to hold fleeing Palestinians