Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi revealed, in an interview to the CBS 60 Minutes program that security cooperation between Egypt and Israel was the closest and most in-depth it had ever been. President Sisi pointed to a fact in which, on occasion, the Egyptian air force had penetrated Israeli airspace to carry out actions in the Sinai Peninsula, an unprecedented revelation of the close ties between Cairo and Jerusalem. The Egyptian leader further underscored that security cooperation will continue to grow.
While Israeli-Egyptian relations continue to tighten, Cairo’s efforts to broker reconciliation among Palestinian factions has hit a new low. The Western-backed Palestinian Authority announced a decision by President Mahmoud Abbas to pull all of its employees from Gaza’s Rafah border-crossing with Egypt, effectively closing the main exit point form the Palestinian enclave. The decision to withdraw came after months of Egyptian-led attempts to force the rival Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, to negotiate on a viable solution to years of bloody-rivalry, in efforts to alleviate the humanitarian situation across the Gaza Strip. “This is a revengeful step by Mahmoud Abbas against our people in the Gaza Strip and the resistance. It’s a blow to all the Egyptian efforts to unite the internal Palestinian factions”, Hamas spokesman Fawazi Barhoum said.
According to a source in Ramallah, the decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip came in response to a series of operations by Hamas against the Palestinian Authority at the border crossing – which included the detaining of some of the Palestinian employees. It is important to note that unless Egypt agrees to alternative operators, the only border-crossing out of the Hamas-run territory is expected to remain closed.