BREAKING NEWS: Just as this article was about to be published, The Jewish Press learned that at least 24 Egyptian police officers were killed late Monday, Aug. 19, in an attack near the Rafah crossing. According to AFP, militants targeted the police, firing rocket-propelled grenades at two buses traveling from the town of Rafah on the Egyptian side of the border with Gaza. The crossing is again closed indefinitely. This attack in the north of the Sinai is the deadliest attack against Egyptian law enforcement in many years.
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Director General of the Gaza border crossings Maher Abu Sabha last week announced that Egyptians had informed Gazan officials the Rafah terminal border crossing would not operate according to its regular schedule and would be intermittently closed indefinitely in both directions due to the serious security conditions in Egypt.
The Egyptian military is unlikely to brook the kind of extreme provocation Israel has endured for years whenever it closes a border crossing into Gaza for security reasons. For that reason it is unlikely Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al Aksa Martyrs Brigade or any of the other Arab Palestinian defenders of the Gazan people will rise up and violently or verbally attack the Egyptian military for its decision.
A quick check on the non-Arab groups who support the right of the Gazans, including its terrorist inhabitants, to freely move in and out of Gaza did not disclose any public efforts to rally the troops and either denounce the Egyptian military or set sail for the Mediterranean in an effort to break Egypt’s blockade of Gaza.
Hard to believe, but there is no flotilla, nor even a flytilla, carrying aboard the likes of Alice Walker or George Galloway or any of the other people who like to show off their love for Gazans when the rule of law-bound Israelis are treating Gaza in a manner befitting terrorists, but who are nowhere to be found when their love might require that a hair on their head might be mussed.
However, one group has been openly rejoicing over the actions of the Egyptian military towards the supporters of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. And it isn’t the Israelis.
On Friday, Fatah staged a rally in Ramallah’s central square to support the Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and to protest the closing of the Al-Arabiya TV and Maan Agency offices in Gaza City.
The Fatah stalwarts chanted pro-coup slogans and called on to Sisi to crack down on Morsi’s supporters. They also called for granting Palestinian citizenship to al-Sisi, and accused the Muslim Brotherhood of trying to “drag Egypt into the furnace of the civil war,” according to the AlRay media agency.
Well, the Hamasniks are not going to suffer those insults quietly. The Hamas government’s media spokesman Ihab al-Ghusain claimed on his Facebook page that Fatah supported Egypt’s massacres and called for the elimination of Palestinian resistance. He also suggested that Abbas’s recent trip to Egypt and the Egyptian’s closing of the Rafah crossing was not a coincidence.
Shouldn’t be too long now before Hamas and Fatah are behaving towards each other the way their Egyptian role models do.