Prospects for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas dimmed on Sunday after the United States signaled it would veto a last-ditch push for a UN Security Council resolution and mediator Qatar acknowledged that truce talks had reached an impasse on another diplomatic front.
Efforts to end the four-month war came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Saturday to reject international appeals to spare Gaza’s southernmost town of Rafah, where an estimated 1.5 million people have sought refuge.
Israel’s relentless campaign to root out every Hamas battalion has moved closer to the city, with overnight attacks killing at least 10 Gazans there and in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
The war in Gaza began with a Hamas attack on October 7 that resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to AFP and Israeli official figures.
The militants also took about 250 people hostage, of whom 130 are still in Gaza, including 30 presumed dead, according to Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza killed at least 28,858 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry.
Neighboring Egypt has grown increasingly wary that an Israeli invasion of Rafah could force Gazans trapped across the border.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Saturday reiterated Egypt’s opposition to any forced resettlement in the Sinai desert.
Egypt totally denies reports from certain foreign media outlets about Cairo’s plans to build shelters for Palestinians in the vicinity of the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip in the event that they are forcibly displaced as a result of the bloody Israeli aggression against them in the Strip, announced Diaa Rashwan, head of state information service (SIS).
Rashwan stressed that Egypt’s decisive situation since the beginning of the aggression has been announced by the President of the Republic and all parties of the Egyptian state dozens of times, and stipulates the complete and irreversible rejection of any forced or voluntary displacement of Palestinian brothers from the Gaza Strip to outside it, especially to Egyptian lands, because this is a certain liquidation of the Palestinian issue, and a direct threat to Egyptian sovereignty and national security, which all Egyptian statements have made clear is a red line and that Cairo has the means to deal with it immediately and effectively.
Rashwan added that Egypt, with its declared and frank situation, can’t take any measures or movements on its territory that oppose with it, and give the impression – falsely promoted by some – that it is participating in the crime of displacement called for by some Israeli parties, as it is a grave war crime condemned by international humanitarian law. Egypt cannot be a party to it, on the contrary, as it will take everything that must be done to stop it and prevent those who seek to commit it from implementing it.
Head of SIS also pointed out that some international media reported what was described as Egypt starting to build a separation wall on its border with the Gaza Strip, explaining that Egypt already had, and since a long time before the outbreak of the current crisis, a buffer zone and fences in this region, and these are the procedures and measures taken by any country in the world to maintain the security of its borders and sovereignty over its territories.
