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Egypt building buffer zone to receive Palestinian refugees, rights group says

Local contractors say the fortified area is designed to receive people fleeing an expected Israeli assault on Gaza’s Rafah

The post Egypt building buffer zone to receive Palestinian refugees, rights group says appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

Construction is underway to create a security zone along Gaza's border with Egypt that could receive Palestinian refugees fleeing an expected Israeli assault on Rafah, according to an Egyptian rights group.

The Sinai Foundation for Human Rights spoke to local contractors, who said that the aim was to create an area in the Sinai peninsula that is surrounded by seven-metre-high walls.

The plan, detailed in a report published on Wednesday, would also pave over the destroyed homes of indigenous groups in the area.

Footage shared by the organisation showed officials in four-wheel-drive vehicles in the area, as well as a large number of equipment and bulldozers.

Earlier this month, Egyptian journalist Ahmed El-Madhoun posted a video online that showed workers strengthening the security wall separating Egypt and Gaza.

The report comes after the Israeli military has repeatedly threatened to launch a ground assault on Rafah, the southern Gaza town where at least 1.3 million people have been crammed after being displaced from other locations in the Palestinian enclave.

Since the war on Gaza began in October, there have been several Israeli proposals reported in the media detailing plans to push Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, which Cairo has rejected.

'Facilitating mass explusion'

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, the US policy fellow for al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, said that the buffer zone "symbolises the catastrophe and a repeat of 1948, but even worse".

Speaking to Middle East Eye, Kenney-Shawa said the zone "means that thousands, if not millions of Palestinians will either have to endure Israel's advance into Rafah, which is expected to be especially brutal, or be forced across the border into the Sinai, where they may never be allowed to return and will have to live in limbo for the foreseeable future".

According to Kenney-Shawa, if Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi does go ahead with the buffer zone plans, it will put Egyptians in a difficult position.

"His [Sisi's] name will be forever tarnished in the eyes of Palestinians and Arabs throughout the region as the one who facilitated the latest round of the mass expulsion of Palestinians."

He added that Egyptians are being forced to either "keep the borders closed and watch thousands be massacred by Israeli forces or open the borders and be complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza".

The post Egypt building buffer zone to receive Palestinian refugees, rights group says appeared first on Al-Shabaka.


This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Tariq Kenney-Shawa.


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