Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed reported on Monday that Egypt continues to resist the Israeli plan to export the Gaza Strip crisis to Cairo by settling refugees from Gaza in the Egyptian North Sinai. The London-based Arabic-language newspaper cites Egyptian government sources that revealed that “discussions recently took place with officials concerned with the crisis, and others in the American administration, regarding dealing with the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and what Cairo can do other than relief aid.”
According to those sources, “Egypt, in exchange for its rejection of the idea of displacing civilians from the Gaza Strip to the border area in North Sinai, proposed a solution that depends on dealing with the situation within its geographical scope.”
In other words, the source explained, “Egyptian officials offered the possibility of establishing camps in the Palestinian city of Rafah, 3 kilometers inside the Palestinian territories so that Egypt would supervise those camps and provide urgent relief services to the displaced from northern Gaza.”
The source pointed out that “one of the important functions of these camps will be to sort and review the cases of injured people and those with chronic diseases that need urgent intervention, to transfer them to Egyptian field hospitals that will be established on the Egyptian side, in addition to the difficult cases that will be transferred to specialized Egyptian hospitals.”
However, a different Egyptian source told to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that “Egypt, Qatar, and the United States have been coordinating on bringing into Gaza the aid that has accumulated in the Egyptian cities of Rafah and Al-Arish,” and “the process of entering the aid has become closely linked to the process of mediation negotiations that Qatar is carrying out between the Hamas movement and Israel regarding the release of civilian prisoners, the most recent of which was the release of two American hostages.”
The source pointed out that, “The American pressure on the Israeli side to bring in 20 aid trucks loaded with urgent medical supplies came within the framework of an agreement stipulating the release of 15 American civilians held by Hamas, through an organized process.”
The source said, “The initial agreement indicates the entry of about 100 aid trucks out of the approximately 200 trucks still inside Egyptian territory, in exchange for the release of the remaining American hostages,” stressing that “there is great Israeli resistance to this operation, because it may provoke anger among Israelis.”
The source explained that “About 100 trucks were scheduled to enter by the end of this week or the beginning of next week at the latest, but sudden Israeli intransigence regarding the agreement being coordinated between Washington, Cairo, and Doha may delay the completion of the agreement.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir declared on Sunday that, “Any agreement on ‘continuous aid to Gaza’ that does not include the release of all our abductees is a continuation of the concept that led us to where we are. Humanitarian aid only in exchange for the release of all the abductees!”
