It is difficult for Egyptian troops stationed at the Gaza–Egypt border to stand by and watch as Israel kills Palestinians and their own comrades
News Desk - The Cradle
MEE correspondent Shahenda Naguib interviewed several Egyptian soldiers in the city of Port Said, where soldiers serving in Sinai stop over to rest between deployments in Sinai.
“It is painful to know that you can help, but you are shackled and cannot help rescue your people from being slaughtered,” said Omar, 23, who has served as a patrolling officer in Egypt’s North Sinai, along the border with Gaza’s Rafah, over the past year.
“We’ve been watching and hearing how intense the Israeli bombing in Rafah is, and we see dozens of Palestinian families passing by the borders.”
Israel’s war on Gaza has so far killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
“We train day and night and repeat marching chants against the Zionist enemy, and we hear dedicated newsletters bragging about how ready the military is, but when this enemy is killing thousands of our brothers, we sit idle,” Omar told MEE.
Egypt has been a close ally of Israel since president Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace agreement with Israel under US auspices in 1979.
Egypt has played a crucial role in enforcing Israel’s siege on Gaza since Hamas took control of the enclave in 2007. Egypt has continued coordination with Israel since the start of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in October, despite widespread support for the Palestinian cause among Egyptians.
Until recently, a firm linked to the Egyptian government charged Palestinians $5,000 per person, a vast sum for most people in Gaza, to escape the war and travel to Egypt via the Rafah border crossing.
But in early May, the Israeli military took control of the Rafah crossing and closed it, preventing any Palestinians, including tens of thousands of injured who need treatment abroad, from leaving Gaza to Egypt.
On 27 May, Israeli forces killed two Egyptian soldiers, Abdallah Ramadan and Ibrahim Islam Abdelrazzaq, in clashes near the Rafah border.
Following interviews with Omar and four other Egyptian soldiers, MEE reported that many are upset with the way the government is dealing with the war in Gaza and with the killing of their comrades.
Omar, who serves in an elite unit, said the deaths of his two comrades had received little recognition from the Egyptian army, including its senior leadership and President Sisi.
The slain soldiers have not received a military funeral, and state-linked media have not reported on their deaths.
Omar said morale in his unit is low because of the killings.
“How come the martyr Ramadan was not honoured and his name was not mentioned, and there were no high ranks at his funeral?” asked Omar.
“When the lowest-ranking police conscript gets killed in a car accident, they get a military funeral, and Ramadan, who fought the Zionists, gets buried secretly. What a shame!” he added.
Because Egypt is a poor, heavily indebted country, it is difficult for Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi to take stances opposing Israel and its main backer, the US.
Syria-based journalist Vanessa Beeley reports that Egypt has been kept afloat economically for decades with multi-billion loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and US allies among the Gulf States.
Beeley notes that at the end of March 2024, the IMF approved Egypt’s loan program, which was duly expanded to $8 billion. Concurrently, the EU approved a 7.4 billion Euro “assistance” package to revive Egypt’s stagnating economy.
She adds that these aid packages have been linked to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.
In October 2023, shortly after the start of Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza, reports emerged of a potential deal between Cairo and Tel Aviv. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to arrange for the World Bank to write off Cairo’s massive debt load – which surpasses $160 billion, in exchange for President Sisi absorbing large numbers of Palestinians Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse from Gaza.
Reports of Egypt constructing an enclosure in the Sinai for Palestinian refugees have also been circulating since 7 October. In February 2024, satellite images showed an area of land just the other side of the Egyptian Rafah crossing being cleared for construction, potentially as a holding area for Palestinians when they are expelled from Gaza.
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