Comment by ceejayoz
1 day ago
To be fair, part of the peace deal between Egypt and Israel gave Israel some control over the crossing, and they seized it entirely during the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing
> The Rafah crossing was opened by Israel after the 1979 peace treaty and remained under Israeli control until 2005...
> Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt controls the crossing but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval.
This is to a large part to give Egypt plausible deniability. They don’t want to deal with Gaza, refugees, or a humanitarian crisis, but also don’t want the political fallout of taking action like the Israelis do.
Eh, 50/50. Israel would not respond positively to Egypt throwing the gates wide open.
On the contrary, I believe Israel would be delighted. It would lessen the humanitarian burden on them, and force Egypt to deal with the Hamas problem more directly. It will never happen, though. No Arab country will "throw the gates wide open" for Palestinians. They have done so before, several times, and it went very badly.
The Israeli openly proposed for the Gaza Palestinians to move to Egypt (effectively ethnic cleansing Gaza, their obvious goal), not that long after 7.10.
Egypt said 'HELL NO', first, because they don't want to deal with Palestinians (both political and economic nightmare), and second because it would have been viewed as ceding to Israelis and helping them cleanse Gaza, which would be highly unpopular among their population.
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That is very reductive of the whole situation. The Egyptians are not singularly focused on helping Palestinians; it is far more nuanced than that.
Bottom line, Egyptians are not interested in supporting millions of refugees inside their border. So the border stays closed to mass immigration.
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At the same time, neither would Egypt. Refugee crisises are messy.
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