This post was originally published on Truthout.org under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
Part of the Series
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
The Israeli occupation has inflicted collective starvation on 2 million displaced Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli military controls all border crossings into Gaza and does not allow aid to enter.
Exit and entry into Gaza by sea or air is entirely prohibited; Palestinians are not even allowed to fish along Gaza’s shore.
The consequences are appalling: “After four months of a near-total Israeli siege,” The Washington Post reported in July, “Gaza’s few remaining hospitals now have wards for the growing number of malnourished children whose tiny bodies are just the width of their bones.”
As Israel continues its siege, international observers have been closely watching Egypt, especially as hundreds of trucks full of aid remain at a standstill along its border with Gaza.
The Rafah crossing was effectively Gaza’s only direct outlet to the external world until Israel seized it in May 2024.
Egypt’s control of the border was gained through the 1979 treaty that came out of the Camp David Accords, which returned control of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and normalized the country’s relations with Israel.
But Israel stationed its forces along the Palestinian side of the Rafah borders in May 2024 when it seized the Philadelphi Corridor, established as a 100-meter buffer zone along the Gaza-Egypt border under the Accords.
By taking control of the corridor, the Israeli military has made Egypt’s control of the Rafah crossing meaningless while also violating the 1979 peace treaty.
Thanks to both its terrible human rights records and its authoritarianism, the Egyptian regime has been viewed with distrust by activists ever since it took power through a military coup in 2013.
The regime constantly detains Egyptian activists who protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza; it also detained and deported international solidarity activists who attempted in June to cross the border and end the siege on Gaza.
Because of this record, the good words of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi do not fool many people across the globe.
On July 29, 2025, in a speech that touched on Israel’s starvation of Gaza, as well as Egypt’s role in the ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Israeli and Hamas, Sisi defended Egypt’s position, arguing that only negotiations and a ceasefire will end the humanitarian crisis.
Egypt is doing its best to help, Sisi claimed, but it does not have the ability to let aid into Gaza while Israel controls the Rafah crossing from the other side.
On August 5, 2025 Sisi said, for the first time in two years, that the Israeli war on Gaza constitutes a genocide. Two days after this statement, the Egyptian regime signed a $35 billion deal to import natural gas from Israel.
Sisi has continued to plead with U.S. President Donald Trump to solve the Israeli-imposed humanitarian crisis.
Sisi could exercise Egypt’s own sovereign power over its borders, but it seems he values Trump’s blessing too much to take action for Palestinian rights.
What Can Egypt Do?
Egyptian state propaganda has claimed that any attempt to open the Rafah crossing will lead to hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians fleeing Gaza for Egypt, and presumably aid Israel in its goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza.
The Egyptian regime has frequently insisted that it will not take part in the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt.
The question of whether Palestinians should be able to leave ought to be answered by Palestinians themselves. It should not be for the Egyptian government to decide.
The hypocrisy is especially abhorrent coming from a regime that has already profited from Palestinian hunger in the past, by allowing the Organi Group, a private security company that has been working with the Egyptian state in Sinai, to receive huge sums for facilitating Palestinian border crossings.
It is important to note that Egypt is cited by Israel as a key actor in its future plans for the forced removal of much of the Palestinian population from Gaza.
Israel insists that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority be in charge of Gaza.
Ezzedine Fishere, a writer and former Egyptian diplomat who served in Israel, has suggested that Egypt take charge of Gaza temporarily, a move that would resemble the 1917 British Mandate, under which the British ruled Palestine for over three decades.
Despite state repression, Egypt’s civil society has been organizing and launching campaigns to end the famine in Gaza.
Out of desperation, activists have suggested launching hot air balloons with food, or putting grains in bottles that could float ashore to Gaza through the Mediterranean Sea.
Political parties, civil society groups and hundreds of intellectuals have pleaded to Sisi to allow groups to reach the border and deliver aid to Gaza’s population. This request has been met with silence.
There are some extreme positions about Egypt’s role in Gaza that are untenable. Blaming Egypt entirely for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza by claiming it is banning aid from passing the Rafah border crossing makes no sense when Israel is the key perpetrator of the genocide and famine in Gaza.
This position buys into Israel’s lies that Egypt has been the one preventing aid from entering. However, another extreme position is the Egyptian official state stance, which sticks to rhetorical solidarity with Palestinians while doing nothing to challenge Israel.
True Politics of Solidarity
It is crucial to pressure Egypt to take the right action, to leverage its power and stop its position of surrender to U.S. imperial politics and Israel’s genocide.
Amr Abdelrahman, an Egyptian political writer and organizer, laid some of those options out back in June.
It’s within Egypt’s power, for example, to sponsor delegations to travel to the Rafah crossing and see the hundreds of parked trucks filled with humanitarian aid — which would make it clear who is really denying the aid to Palestinians.
Egypt can also sponsor international meetings to put pressure on key actors, rather than just accepting the role of marginalized neutral negotiator. Sisi could also threaten to end the 2005 security protocol that determines how Egypt and Israel control the border, based on the fact that Israel has already violated it.
That protocol denies Israel the right to operate in the Philadelphi Corridor. Egypt could also permit civil society initiatives to travel to Rafah, which would require Egypt to exercise its power over its side of the border with Gaza, as well as to adhere to the democratic value of honoring civil society pressure, in addition to, above all, potentially helping Palestinians.
The Sisi regime believes that the blessings of Trump, Israel and rich conservative Gulf leaders, especially the UAE and Saudi regimes, are the key to the maintaining its own grip on power.
The U.S. government provides about $1.3 billion a year to the Egyptian military. Both the Saudi regime and the United Arab Emirates have given Sisi tens of billions of dollars in aid since his coup in 2013.
Palestinian rights are of little concern to Sisi, or the leaders of any of these regimes, as any advancement of the struggle for Palestinian liberation could inspire movements against authoritarian, antidemocratic governments in the region.
Solidarity activists should and must continue to pressure Egypt to do what is right while not losing sight of where the true problem lies.
The U.S. has been a key partner in the genocide, not just through the systemic denial of existing evidence, or through Security Council vetoes for more than two years, but also through military aid and weapons and actual intelligence support.
It has also targeted pro-Palestine activism on campuses. Germany also is not only denying but viciously targeting pro-Palestine activism within its borders. The governments of the U.K. and France, among others have been key supporters to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza by providing military and political assistance.
These regimes started to speak up only recently as famine took hold. But starvation and genocide are both of the same project, the goal of which is eliminating the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Other regimes in the region that accept the continuation of occupation and genocide — especially the United Arab Emirates and other Arab governments that embraced the complete normalization of Israel through the Abraham Accords, without recognizing Palestinian rights — are also complicit, even if they are not directly and physically aiding the genocide.
All regimes that are involved in the genocide need to pay a price for their contribution to the atrocities. Indeed, so many multinational corporations profit from the Gaza genocide as well, and should also face consequences.
True solidarity is based on people power and must, above all, be accountable to Palestinians. One must see recent announcements by both the French and British governments of their intention to recognize a Palestinian state as a product of this global solidarity.
Indeed, as Palestinian critics and their allies suggest, recognizing the Palestinian state without sanctioning Israel and committing to reparation remains only a symbolic act.
But even this gesture would not have occurred without solidarity actions and campaigns across the world.
Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide in Gaza will require the continuation and escalation of this solidarity across the globe.
