Egypt, the only opening to the world of Gaza since Israel decreed a “complete siege” of the Palestinian enclave, is faced with a dilemma: open its border to the Palestinians, at the risk that Israel will never let them return, or leave them under Israeli bombs.
In the Gaza Strip, from where the ruling Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas launched its deadly attack against Israel on Saturday, triggering a war that has already left thousands dead, the question of exile is a raw wound. .
More than 80% of the 2.4 million inhabitants crowded there are refugees driven out at the creation of Israel in 1948 from towns sometimes very close to the enclave.
So the prospect of leaving Palestinian land again, with the possibility of it being taken by the Israeli army, does not appear to be an option.
“We will stay, we will not leave,” Jamal al-Masri told AFP on Thursday, whose house located in the Al-Shati camp, the largest in the Gaza Strip, had just been destroyed. by an Israeli plane.
“The Palestinian people went into exile once and they will not do it again, the departure for the Sinai is a beautiful illusion,” added Mohammed Dahlane, a Gazan politician based in the Gulf, on Arab television.
But if the inhabitants of Gaza do not flock to the Rafah border crossing – currently closed after three Israeli bombings – voices are calling on Egypt to welcome refugees.
The country has long prided itself on never setting up tent camps, arguing that the nine million Syrians, Iraqis and other Sudanese it hosts can in exchange work and study like Egyptian citizens.
“Export the crisis”
Above all, calling on Palestinians to leave their land would, for Egypt, break a taboo surely even greater than the recognition of Israel in 1979, the first of an Arab country.
If the residents of northern Gaza whom Israel ordered on Friday to move to the south of the enclave — more than a million people — left the Palestinian enclave, it would already be many more than the more than 750,000 refugees from the ” Nakba” of 1948, the “catastrophe” that the creation of Israel represented for the Palestinians.
On Friday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas already spoke of “a second Nakba” and Hamas rejected this order. The day before, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi had insisted that the inhabitants of Gaza must “stay on their land”.
The Palestinian question “is the cause of all Arabs and it is important that the people who embody it remain unshakeable”, he highlighted, after having insisted since the start of the conflict to be concerned “above all else of national security,” an allusion to the fact that Hamas fighters could slip through the refugees.
King Abdullah II of Jordan, another neighboring country, said on Friday he refused “the export of the crisis to neighboring countries and the aggravation of the question of Palestinian refugees”, of whom there are already nearly six million in the world, including one third party in Jordan.
The concern of Egypt and Jordan is therefore only to gather humanitarian aid for Gaza, state media repeat in these two countries.
For the Egyptian regime, the memory of January 2008 remains bitter, at the start of the Israeli blockade of the enclave.
Thousands of Palestinians then forced their way across the border, with Hamas militants bulldozing new breaches in the border wall with each Egyptian attempt to regain control.
“Die as a hero on your land”
Egypt has since redesignated the city of Rafah, where a large area was completely razed by the army, as part of its fight against jihadists in North Sinai.
Since these “counter-terrorism” operations, no one can travel in the region without showing their credentials at numerous checkpoints. And instead of the razed houses, the authorities built a “New Rafah”, which is still uninhabited today.
In North Sinai, some believe that these empty buildings could accommodate Palestinian refugees. But that would be playing into the hands of the Islamists, the hosts of the pro-regime talk shows object in unison.
If the army – with the man who was still Marshal Sissi at its head – overthrew Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, it was because the latter “wanted to give the Gazans part of the Sinai and displace them” , underlined again Wednesday evening the host Youssef al-Husseini.
Beyond the security question, the University of Al-Azhar, the highest institution of Sunni Islam, invited itself into the debate.
“It is better to die as a hero and a martyr on your land rather than abandon it to the colonialist usurpers,” she said in a statement, widely relayed on Palestinian social networks.
“If you leave your land, your cause and our cause will disappear forever,” she warned.