Gazans need not be bullied by Egypt

“I fear that, some day soon, I might turn on the TV to shocking live images of Egyptian warplanes raiding targets in the Gaza Strip, amid the noise of ambulance sirens as dozens of casualties are rushed to the few hospitals of the Strip, which have been kept medicine-deprived under the strangling Israeli siege,” wrote Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the recently launched news website, Rai Al Youm, in a column on Thursday.

Dark prospects, however, have started to emerge recently with statements from some Egyptian army officials who have been using excessive rhetoric when talking about the security threat that the Gaza Strip has come to represent for Egypt, the author said.

Last week, speaking to the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Rai, Maj Gen Ahmed Wasfi, the Second Army Commander of the Egyptian army, threatened to invade the Gaza Strip, using “a language that we used to only hear from Israeli officials”, Atwan wrote.

Gen Wasfi said the following: “I say to those jihadist elements in the Gaza Strip that we will not allow you to repeat your criminal acts in Sinai again, and we will cut off any head that tries to threaten Egypt’s peace and security,” Atwan quoted him as saying.

The Egyptian army “initiates aggression against no one … but if anyone tries to lay their hand on our country, we will know how to straighten them out good,” the official reportedly said.

Egypt has every right to defend itself against whatever threat, the author noted. But how big is this Gaza threat anyway? Note that, in its months-long crackdown on jihadist groups in Sinai, the Egyptian army has not arrested a single Palestinian, the author argued.

“I don’t really understand the scope of the threat that a food-deprived Gaza Strip really poses to Egypt or its gigantic army, which is equipped with super-modern US-made weapons and warplanes,” observed Atwan, who was born in a camp in Gaza and spent his childhood there. “In fact, forget the army, just the number of staff at the Egyptian central security apparatus would easily outnumber all the residents of the Gaza Strip.”

The Egyptian army is a regional superpower that could occupy the Gaza Strip “in five minutes” and there would be no one to fire a single bullet in resistance, Atwan went on, “because Gazans see the Egyptian army as their own army, and see Egypt as their own mother and the Egyptian people as their own siblings.”