More Fuel For The Fire
Gaza’s Hamas is clashing with Egypt at their border, and 36 Egyptian security officers had been hospitalized, some in critical condition, after confrontations with Palestinians. This naturally angers the Egyptians, who have been allowing the Palestinians to shop for supplies and return home. In a thinly veiled rebuke to the militant group Hamas, which runs Gaza, the Egyptian minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said in Cairo that Egypt would show restraint but not at the cost of Egyptian lives.
The Egyptians have been trying to establish some level of control over the mass influx as they don’t want the Palestinians to end up staying in Egypt and burdening Egypts support system instead of remaining a burden on Israel. Egyptian riot police have been using armored vehicles to try to restrict Gazans from taking their cars into Egypt.
Traffic over the border remained heavy on Saturday, but Egyptians in Rafah and El Arish reported severe shortages of supplies and a growing fatigue with the Palestinian influx.
In El Arish, Said Aghlaby, a 48-year-old taxi driver, said: “It’s getting tiring. We can’t take all these people. They’re sleeping in the streets.” He said he had to wait in line seven hours for gasoline, and could not get a full tank. “I’ve never seen so much garbage,” he said, “and I’m used to seeing garbage, I’ve lived in Cairo.”
At the same time in Gaza, Egyptian cars and trucks were also seen, delivering supplies to stores and supermarkets as well as sightseeing.
All this may soon come to a head. Egypt knows it will have to close the border again, not just to keep out a flood of permanent resident refugees but because the U.S. gives them $billions annually and the U.S. supports Israel. Beyond that, Egypt has a treaty with Israel.
Most likely the clashes that injured the Egyptian police were with Hamas people trying to smuggle in explosives and weapons, and the wall was knocked down to facilitate this armament transit, not for the benefit of the Gazans, which Hamas could care less about. So when the wall is back up again, no doubt Hamas will attack it again, since their plan to use a mob of people as cover for smuggling was so successful.
This could result in military confrontation between Hamas and Egypt, and pull Egypt more to the side of Israel in this conflict, which ultimately would be a defeat for Hamas. That they’re already clashing with the Egyptian police on an obviously large scale shows their lack of discipline and in-depth planning.
All this is adding more tinder to the increasingly great fire danger in the Mid-East. Something has to give soon.
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