A hollow peace? Cairo facilitated weapons smuggling to Hamas
“It turns out that the Egyptians have been playing a double game.”
Egyptian soldiers at an outpost at the Rafah border crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip.
Israel has uncovered 180 tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor, Gaza’s strategic border with Sinai. Observers say those tunnels served as 24-hour weapons supply lines for Hamas, not just under the watchful eyes of Egypt, but with its willing assistance.
The revelation of Egyptian complicity raises troubling questions about Israel’s purported ally.
“The feeling in Jerusalem now is that Egypt is ungrateful,” Yoni Ben Menachem, Middle East intelligence analyst for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), said on Thursday.
Israel helped Egypt in its campaign against the Islamic State in Sinai. It allowed Cairo to double its forces in the peninsula, far more than was allowed by the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Israel even conducted bombing raids against the Islamic State at Egypt’s request. In 2014, Israel intervened on behalf of Egypt with the US to ensure American aid continued.
“Now it turns out that the Egyptians have been playing a double game,” Ben Menachem told JNS. “They’ve been letting Hamas smuggle weapons for many years, especially after [Egyptian President] Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi came to power 10 years ago,” he said.
Smuggling isn’t only through the tunnels, he added, but through the Rafah border crossing, thanks to bribing of senior Egyptian officials.
Smuggling is big business for the Egyptians, a multibillion-dollar industry. Mahmoud el-Sisi, the president’s son and deputy head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, is heavily involved, having partnered with businessman Ibrahim al-Organi. A Le Monde profile in May reported that al-Organi has controlled entries and exits across the border for a decade. He is nicknamed the “King of the Rafah crossing.”
Early in his regime, President El-Sisi fought smuggling. He viewed Hamas as a threat. The terrorist group, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is outlawed in Egypt, had targeted Egypt at the time, sending its members into Sinai to train Islamic State terrorists. It participated in terrorist attacks in Egypt—the most well-known being the assassination of Egypt’s chief prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, in 2015—a joint attack with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State, Ben Menachem said.
When current Hamas paramount leader Yahya Sinwar was elected the organization’s Gaza chief in 2017, Cairo saw an opportunity. Egyptian intelligence head Abbas Kamel visited Gaza and cut a deal with Hamas. The latter agreed to stop attacking Egypt in exchange for the opening of the Rafah crossing 24 hours a day. “Egypt opened the Arab world to them,” Ben Menachem said.
One of the reasons that the Egyptians are siding with Hamas over the group’s demand that Israel leave the Philadelphi Corridor is that they worry that Hamas will rejoin the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic State, he said.
‘Not even a mosquito’
“It just emphasizes that Israel can only rely on Israel and cannot rely on anybody else to secure the border,” IDF Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, co-founder and chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF), said on Thursday.
Avivi, who for two years commanded the Egyptian border from Gaza to Eilat, said he had to control a frontier with smuggling attempts taking place every night. The Gaza border is a relatively short segment of it at 14 kilometers (8.7 miles).
He said that today, with just the Caracal Battalion, a mixed infantry unit composed of men and women that had been under his command at the time, he could secure the Gaza border so that “even a mosquito wouldn’t get through.
“The Egyptians could have secured the Philadelphi Corridor relatively easily. But they don’t have the motivation to do so, quite the contrary,” he said. “The Egyptians know exactly what they are doing, the way they are weaponizing Hamas to basically undermine Israel’s security.”
More disturbing, Cairo is conducting war exercises whose clear purpose is to take on Israel. Egypt is also building a huge army, “the most powerful around us,” Avivi said.
Egypt is also constructing tunnels. They cross under the Suez Canal into Sinai. It’s also built 30 bridges spanning the canal. “The Egyptians already deploy a huge amount of tanks near the Gazan border, which is completely against the peace agreement,” Avivi said.
Ben Menachem agreed: “They can, in one night, change the whole deployment of the Egyptian army in Sinai and get ready for war with Israel so that they surprise Israel. This is very alarming.”
Facts on the ground
Both men agree that Israel needs to reassess its relationship with Egypt.
“Before the big surprise that we had on October 7 with Hamas, we lived with the conception that Hamas was deterred. Now we have to change our mind and not live with the conception that there is peace with Egypt and they’re not doing anything, because the facts on the ground indicate otherwise,” Ben Menachem said.
“We better wake up and understand that we might face a future challenge. We need to be alert and work on this relationship and prepare for a possible strategic change in the future,” Avivi said.
The Israel-Egypt peace agreement, signed between President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, never quite lived up to its billing. While it is true there has been an absence of war, the contents of some 50 side agreements have never been made public.
The Israel’s Foreign Minister has published the text of just eight of them. They went into great detail. In an agricultural agreement, Egypt and Israel promised to “undertake joint research projects in fields of major interest, including the exchange of scientists, joint seminars and symposia, and exchange of research information.”
A cultural agreement called for “contacts and exchange of visits of experts in the cultural, artistic, technical, scientific and medical fields.” This agreement was especially important in Israel’s eyes as it dealt with changing Egyptian attitudes.
There seemed to be movement in the right direction, up until Israel finished its three-year phased withdrawal from Sinai in April 1982. At that point, relations were frozen. King Hassan II of Morocco may have provided an insight into why. In 1984, he said that Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, had told him the treaty was empty of substance since “Cairo had obtained from it what it could.”
“The way many Israelis look at it, which to me is stupid, is that just by the fact that the Egyptians have declared peace with us, this is enough. We should be content with the fact that they’re not killing us. I say that we should demand a different level of relationship,” Avivi said.
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