Egypt has begun building an enclosed area ringed with high concrete walls along its border with Gaza that appears intended to house Palestinians fleeing a threatened Israeli assault on the southern city of Rafah.
Photos and videos released by the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights (SFHR), a monitoring group, show workers using heavy machinery erecting concrete barriers and security towers around a strip of land on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing.
The videos, dated 15 February, gave little indication of authorities installing water or other infrastructure. Satellite imagery released by Planet Labs on the same day shows cleared strips of land adjacent to the Gaza border.
SFHR said on social media that the videos showed efforts to “establish an isolated area surrounded by walls on the border with the Gaza Strip, with the aim of receiving refugees in the event of a mass exodus”.
Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza since Hamas’s 7 October attacks have displaced an estimated 1.7 million people internally, according to the UN, most of them pushed south in recent weeks, with more than a million in Rafah, vastly swelling its prewar population of 280,000.
Egyptian officials have repeatedly expressed alarm that Israel’s actions could force millions of Palestinians to attempt to flee across the border and into the Sinai, amid concern that those displaced may never be able to return. Egypt has pushed back against any suggestion, including from Israeli ministers, that Palestinians could flee into northern Sinai. The president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, and the foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, rejected what they called “the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land”.
In a call late on Thursday, the US president, Joe Biden, again cautioned the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, against moving forward with a military operation in Rafah without a “credible and executable plan” to protect civilians. However, Netanyahu vowed early on Friday to reject “international dictates” on a long-term resolution of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.
Speaking at the Munich security conference, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, said there were no plans to deport Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and Israel would coordinate its plans for hundreds of thousands of refugees in the city of Rafah with Egypt.
When asked where the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the city would go, Katz suggested that once Gaza’s second city, Khan Younis, had been cleared of Hamas fighters, they could return there or to the west of the enclave.
Katz said: “We will deal [with] Rafah after we speak with Egypt about it. We’ll coordinate it, we have a peace accord with them and we will find a place which will not harm the Egyptians. We will coordinate everything and not harm their interests.”
Egyptian officials have threatened to withdraw from Egypt’s landmark 1978 peace treaty with Israel in the event of an Israeli ground assault on Rafah. Airstrikes launched on Rafah on Monday in an Israeli operation to free two hostages killed at least 67 Palestinians, health authorities said.
Egypt has extensively reinforced its border with Gaza using barbed wire and deployed 40 tanks and armoured personnel carriers to northern Sinai.
Mohannad Sabry, an expert and author on the Sinai peninsula, said: “Egypt wants to portray this construction as a contingency, ready for an influx of Palestinians if that happens, but they have also reinforced the border fence over the past month making it unbreachable unless it is blown up or opened deliberately. If we look at how every refugee or prison camp has been built in the world, it’s exactly like this. If it looks like a prison [or] refugee camp then it probably is.”
The north Sinai governor, Mohamed Abdel-Fadil Shousha, told the Saudi-owned TV news channel Al Arabiya that the border construction was intended to catalogue homes destroyed as part of the Egyptian military’s fight against jihadist militants and the decade-long operation in northern Sinai.
He added: “Egypt is prepared for all scenarios in the event that Israel carries out military operations in the Palestinian border governorate.”
Meanwhile, those with ties to the Egyptian state have profited from Palestinians desperately looking to flee. Palestinians have described paying $10,000 (£7,941) each to a network connected to the Egyptian authorities in order to leave Gaza by the Rafah crossing.
Elsewhere, a gunman killed two people on Friday at a bus stop in southern Israel, authorities said, prompting Netanyahu to warn that the entire country was a frontline in the war.
Four others were wounded in the shooting near the southern town of Kiryat Malakhi, Israeli police said.
“We have raised a national level alert,” Israel’s police chief, Kobi Shabtai, told reporters at the site. He did not provide details on the attacker.
Netanyahu said in a statement: “The murderers, who come not only from Gaza, want to kill us all. We will continue to fight until total victory, with all our might, on every front, everywhere, until we restore the security and quiet for all citizens of Israel.”
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