The Rafah crossing remains a tool in Cairo’s hands. Its closure and opening reflect the extent to which its relationship with Hamas has improved or deteriorated (Reuters)
A research paper entitled “Egypt and Gaza: Before and After October 7” believes that the current war on Gaza has weakened the Egyptian role and raised many questions about Cairo’s position on the new situation, most of which remain unanswered.
The paper prepared by Egyptian researcher Naglaa Makkawi says that Cairo is required to reevaluate its vision and relationship with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) if it wants to maintain its influence in any future regional arrangements.
Makkawi identifies the main issues in Egypt’s relationship with Gaza, in light of the current war, in the closure and opening of the Rafah crossing and the danger of deporting Gazans to Sinai, and in the relationship with Hamas on the one hand and the relationship between Egypt and Israel on the other hand, in addition to Egyptian mediation between Hamas and Israel and Cairo’s position in regional arrangements. Which emerged after the October 7 attack.
The research paper issued by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies monitors the development of the relationship up and down under three Egyptian presidents, until it achieved relative stability despite mutual suspicion.
The paper recalls that the borders of Egypt and Gaza are the internationally recognized borders between Palestine and Egypt from the era of the British Mandate, and that while the Gaza Strip did not appear in its current form until after the 1948 war, the borders of the Gaza Strip and Israel were not determined by a political agreement, but rather by the Israeli-Egyptian wars and the subsequent ceasefire agreements. fire.
The border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip is 14 kilometers long, making Egypt the only Arab country bordering it and its only outlet to the world.
Major influencer
The researcher notes that Egypt did not annex Gaza and did not claim sovereignty over it, and entrusted its administration to an Egyptian general until its Israeli occupation in 1967, noting that local geopolitical factors, security considerations, and the system of alliances of Arab countries in the region made Cairo the main influence in the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian context.
To understand the questions related to the relationship between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, the researcher suggests returning to three main events that shaped Cairo’s policy in Gaza and the Palestinian issue in general, which are:
The 1956 War:
When Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, which was then under Egyptian control, one of the pretexts was the activity of the guerrillas inside Israeli territory, noting that the guerrilla units were established on an Egyptian initiative and under the control of Egyptian intelligence officer Mustafa Hafez.
The 1967 War:
which removed Gaza from Egyptian control and created a new reality. Before 1967, the Nasserist regime treated Palestine as a part of the Arab nation that was important to the Egyptian nation. In this context, it played a fundamental role in the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964.
The 1978 Camp David Agreement:
which took Egypt out of the circle of confrontation with Israel and shaped the features of its foreign policy, linking it to American and Israeli interests and strategies, so that the Palestinian issue was reduced from that date to a mere sector and the West Bank, and the ambition was limited to declaring a state on the borders occupied in 1967.
According to the author, the PLO integrated into the new Arab order and actively sought peace arrangements similar to the Egyptian-Israeli agreement, which was the Oslo Accords.
But what was applicable to Egypt does not apply to the Palestinian file. Israel sought to remove Egypt from the circle of confrontation in order to isolate the Palestinians and grant them self-rule without sovereignty over the land, so that the organization fell into the trap and paved the way for Arab countries to sign normalization agreements, the engine of which accelerated until the October 7 attack. First past.
Mubarak and Gaza
According to the study, Egypt under Mubarak’s rule maintained its position as a major force guaranteeing stability in the region, which made achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement at the heart of its foreign policy, when the PLO was the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
Even after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007 and the internal Palestinian conflict deteriorated, Egypt was keen to maintain its influence on many issues, especially Palestinian reconciliation, and although it supported the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, it kept channels of communication open with the resistance factions led by Hamas.
Egypt also maintained for years two pressure cards in managing the relationship with Gaza and the controlling forces there, namely:
Rafah crossing:
which remained a tool in the hands of Cairo. Its closure and opening reflects the extent of the improvement or deterioration of its relationship with Hamas, and it also remains a tool for pressure on the movement to accept a settlement or stop the escalation, to the satisfaction of Israel, which was effectively imposing its will and controlling the crossing.
Tunnels:
Egypt allowed the Palestinians to dig them between the Palestinian Rafah and the Egyptian Rafah under the eyes of the intelligence services led by the former head of the Egyptian Intelligence Service, Omar Suleiman. Although the tunnels were mainly used to bring goods and supplies to the residents of Gaza, they were also used to smuggle weapons to the resistance factions with the knowledge of the Egyptian authorities.
Gaza and the January 2011 revolution
The research paper points out that Egypt's turning a blind eye to tunnel activity was not evidence of support for the factions or a security failure, but rather for reasons including easing the pressure of the siege on the Strip so that it would not have to deal with an explosive situation that would harm its security.
In addition, it allows arms smuggling to remain under the watchful eye of its intelligence services and gives it an additional pressure tool against Hamas in a way that serves its national security in the context of its role as defined by the Camp David Accords, a role that was severely shaken after the January 2011 revolution.
The revolution had a great positive role on the sector, which began to breathe freely and its doors were opened to the outside world.
In the first Israeli attack on it after the revolution, Egypt also played a mediating role and successfully sponsored a ceasefire, with a transition from hostility to Hamas to fair mediation.
The Sisi regime and the clash with Hamas
With the advent of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Egyptian authorities considered the Hamas movement an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood movement and were hostile to it.
The clash reached its peak in the period between 2014-2015, when the Egyptian state harnessed all its tools to demonize Hamas, which was portrayed as involved in the Brotherhood’s internal conflict with the regime in Egypt, and the demonization reached the point of declaring it a terrorist organization.
Two overlapping decisions were taken within the military and operational framework, the first of which was to establish a buffer zone on the border with the Gaza Strip, and the second to destroy the tunnels used to transport goods to the residents of the besieged Gaza Strip.
The Egyptian campaign to destroy the tunnels began in August 2012, as part of Operation Saqr 2 against “terrorist organizations in Sinai” after the killing of 16 Egyptian soldiers in an attack in Rafah. It intensified in 2014, with the aim of completely destroying them, and one of the means of achieving this was flooding them with water. Sea and sewerage.
Thus, by the end of 2015, the Egyptian army destroyed more than two thousand tunnels, in a campaign that was accompanied by the evacuation of Rafah residents to other areas under the pretext of preventing weapons smuggling and the crossing of militants into Sinai, and was also accompanied by a reduction in the working days and hours of the crossing (which, for example, was closed for 344 days in 2015) and the cancellation of facilitating measures approved therein. after the Revolution.
Israel in Sinai
However, despite this, Egypt continued to insist on being the only mediator between Israel and Hamas, as demonstrated by the 2014 war, and Egyptian-Israeli cooperation had intensified on security matters, especially around Sinai, and the source of this was Israel’s support for Sisi, whose regime received military and intelligence aid, which had continued to intensify since 2013. During and after the war on the tunnels.
The study notes that Al-Sisi publicly acknowledged this security cooperation in 2019 and classified it under the category of “war on terrorism,” describing it as the closest of its kind since the establishment of Israel. Even its Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said explicitly that Al-Sisi flooded the tunnels in 2016 “at our request and because of the pressure we exerted.” .
The writer confirmed that Egypt knew with certainty that weapons entered Gaza and did not leave it and that there was no cooperation between Hamas and the Islamic State against it, and that the claim of the existence of this relationship was used to justify the regime’s policy against the Gaza Strip and Hamas.
Another stage
However, the researcher believes that the Sisi regime, after its success in defeating its opponents, including the Brotherhood, was forced to rearrange the relationship with Hamas, under the influence of Egyptian national security considerations, to begin another stage.
Although mutual suspicion ruled this new phase, Hamas did its best to improve the relationship and avoid a conflict that would harm the interest of the movement, whose representatives intensified visits to Egypt beginning in March 2016, culminating in the “confidence-building steps” that Hamas took in the following month. That year, when it installed - at Egyptian request - 60 military sites on the border with Egypt, and strengthened its security deployment to enhance monitoring of infiltrators.
Egypt after October 7
The relatively calm relationship continued until the October 7 operation, which surprised Egypt, just as it was surprised by the violence of the Israeli aggression, to find itself facing dilemmas, the first of which was the Rafah crossing and its management.
Although the Egyptian side of the crossing was supposed to be under Egyptian sovereignty, its management was completely transferred to the control of Israel, which also controls the quality and quantity of humanitarian aid entering the Strip.
Egypt surrendered to Israel in the crossing issue, even if it tried to justify its laxity with its legal and international obligations, thereby losing - according to the author - a pressure and negotiation card that it had used against Hamas in the past.
The second dilemma is the Israeli proposal to deport the Gazans to Sinai. American and Israeli pressure appeared on the Egyptian president from the beginning to open Sinai to the Gazans.
The author believes that the Egyptian position on this issue is not decisive enough despite the declared positions of President Sisi and his regime, but she also believes that the Egyptian army strongly rejects this proposal, because it believes that it will plunge the country into conflict with Israel and threaten the peace agreement with it.
The fluctuation of Egyptian positions can be understood in the context of the Camp David Accords, which since the 1970s has governed Cairo’s policy in the Palestinian file and the development of this policy in the Gaza Strip within the framework of American positions and interests and the regional partnership with Israel. Based on this, its positions in the current war are mainly governed by the consideration of maintaining relations with Israel. Israel and the United States.
The study concludes that the war on Gaza revealed the weakness of the Egyptian regime in terms of the erosion of its regional influence after it dropped many pressure cards from its hands in light of an unprecedented internal economic and political crisis, which further complicated its calculations, threatened its position in future arrangements, and even put its future at stake.
Source: Al Jazeera + websites