Israeli and Egyptian Forces Exchange Fire on Border Amid Air Strikes on Rafah Refugee Camp
Middle East
Israeli and Egyptian forces exchanged fire across their border on May 26, in what appears to be an isolated incident that has caused an unknown number of casualties. The Egyptian Armed Forces have confirmed they are conducting an investigation into the incident, with the country having taken a neutral position in the ongoing conflict between Israel and various Palestinian militia groups. A number of sources have speculated that Egyptian forces mistook Israeli units for Palestinian militiamen, or else that Egyptian personnel on the ground opened fire without orders. Popular sentiment in Egypt has been strongly supportive of the Palestinian cause in spite of the state’s official neutrality. The incident follows an operation by an Egyptian police officer in June to infiltrate Israel, killing three Israeli soldiers, and comes after repeated warnings from Cairo that it will not tolerate moves by Tel Aviv to displace the Palestinian population of Gaza into the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.
Egypt and Israel historically fought multiple wars from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s, before a new Egyptian administration under President Anwar Sadat realigned the country's foreign policy towards the Western Bloc and into a security partnership with Tel Aviv. Cairo would subsequently provide significant support to Israel’s war effort against its former ally Syria. After the death of President Sadat in 1981 relations cooled considerably, with the following decades widely described in Isreal as a period of “Cold Peace.” The perceived threat of Israeli military operations seeking to force the Gazan population onto Egyptian territory has threatened to again raise tensions between the two states. With the Egyptian Armed Forces today relying overwhelmingly on Western rather than Soviet equipment, however, they remain highly vulnerable to arms embargoes from Israel’s security partners. Western equipment acquired over the past 45 years has also been very heavily downgraded to guarantee an Israeli advantage.
The exchange of fire at the border closely coincided with the beginning of Israeli air strikes on the Rafah refugee camp near the Egyptian border, with one overnight attack that drew particular attention reported to have caused well over 100 civilian casualties. Fires that spread quickly through tents and makeshift accommodation caused significant damage, overwhelming a nearby Red Cross field hospital. Eyewitnesses described an “unreal” fire and “children who were in pieces,” with the tremendous population density as more than 85% of Gazans sheltered in Rafah resulting in a particularly high death toll. Eyewitnesses have reported the bombing severing limbs and heads, drawing considerable international condemnation. Israeli authorities subsequently stated that the fallout from the air strike was not intentional.
Some individual Egyptian troops , or even entire units possibly decided to defy the Egyptian Government's official non-involvement in the conflict.
ReplyDelete