(Ottawa) The situation is so fluid that it is better to use the conditional: a contingent of 80 Canadian nationals and their relatives are about to cross the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt at the Rafah border crossing, Tuesday.
At the time when the Canadian ambassador to Egypt, Louis Dumas, made the announcement, three buses were about to arrive at the crossing, after a journey of several hours which was lengthened by a thick sheet of fog.
“Knock on wood. We had problems along the road because there was a lot of fog this morning on the Mediterranean coast, but we are about to arrive in Rafah,” he explains in an interview with his Cairo offices, Tuesday afternoon, local time.
“We are allowed 80 today, so there are 80 on the list. But we saw in light of the other countries which went to the border last week that it is difficult to have everyone. But we expect to have the maximum,” explains Mr. Dumas.
The evacuation of this first group composed of Canadian citizens and permanent residents and their relatives will not have been easy.
They had been on alert for weeks, even more so in the past few days, as the Rafah border crossing opened and closed unpredictably.
Negotiations between Israel and Egypt have been, and remain, very difficult.
This is because Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi opposed a massive movement of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt, seeing it as a risk for the Palestinian cause.
“The world must never tolerate the use of human suffering to force people to move,” he said at the Cairo Peace Summit on October 21, according to a transcript of his speech.
The forced displacement of Palestinians and their transfer to Egyptian lands would be a new step in the “liquidation of the Palestinian cause and would shatter the dream of an independent Palestinian state,” he argued.