Hamas Urges Egypt To Reopen Gaza Border With Sinai

Waiting To Cross: Gaza women stand with their belongs outside of the Rafah border crossing in August, waiting for the checkpoint to be reopened. Image by getty images
Palestinian Islamist group Hamas urged Egypt on Wednesday to reopen the border crossing with the Gaza Strip that was closed after a suspected militant attack on Egyptian policemen near the frontier earlier this week.
Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has ruled Gaza since 2007 and has an uneasy relationship with Egypt’s new army-backed leadership, which toppled elected President Mohamed Mursi, a Hamas ally, last month.
Cairo has accused Hamas of interfering in Egyptian affairs and suggested that Palestinians might be helping Islamist militants active in the Sinai peninsula, where 25 policemen were killed in an ambush on Monday.
The Egyptian army, which has long been suspicious of Hamas, has also clamped down on smuggling tunnels that run underneath the desert border between Egypt and Gaza.
“The Palestinian people, the people of Gaza, must not pay the price for any problems or differences inside Egypt,” said Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister of the Hamas-run government in the territory.
Mursi’s ouster was seen as a major blow to Hamas, especially as the group’s ties with traditional allies Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah party have also suffered because it sided with the rebels in the uprising against their one-time friend, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Thousands of Palestinians, including students and patients seeking medical treatment, have been unable to travel to Egypt since the Rafah border crossing was shut.
Hundreds of Palestinians have also been stranded outside the Gaza Strip by the upheaval that has shaken Egypt since the military ousted elected President Mohamed Mursi on July 3 after mass protests against the Muslim Brotherhood leader’s rule.
“Gaza people have enough problems. This crossing should be named the crossing of humiliation and not Rafah,” said Mai Jarada, a business student in Tunisia who attended a wedding in Gaza and now cannot leave the Palestinian enclave.
Some 1,200 Gaza residents used to enter Egypt daily before Mursi’s ouster, but the figure has dropped to only 300 since he was deposed.
At Rafah, the main window to the world for the 1.7 million Palestinians in the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip, several dozen people waited in vain on Wednesday to cross the border into Egypt’s Sinai.
Citing security concerns, Israel allows only a limited number of people to travel through its own passenger crossing with the Gaza Strip.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Hamad rejected accusations by some Egyptian officials that Hamas, an Islamist group that is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, had intervened on Mursi’s behalf during violence in Egypt.
At least 900 people, including 100 soldiers and police, have been killed in a crackdown on Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood in the past week, the bloodiest civil unrest in Egypt’s modern history.
In a sign of concern over any spillover of anti-Islamist activity into the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister in the Hamas government, made reference at a public event to a YouTube video that urged Palestinians in the territory to rebel against Hamas’s leadership on Nov. 11.
The video showed four masked men, who identified themselves as members of the “Tamarud (Rebellion) of Palestine”. One of the men said Palestinians’ “patience has run out” and Hamas “will not govern us after November 11”.
Haniyeh, in his public remarks, said: “I support rebellion against the Zionist enemy. Such a language must not be used among us.”
Hamas, which won a general election in 2006, seized the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement in 2007. Egyptian-brokered unity talks have failed to lead to reconciliation between the two groups.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion The dangerous Nazi legend behind Trump’s ruthless grab for power
- 2
Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
- 3
Culture Did this Jewish literary titan have the right idea about Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling after all?
- 4
Opinion I first met Netanyahu in 1988. Here’s how he became the most destructive leader in Israel’s history.
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown has ‘gone way too far’
-
Fast Forward 5 Jewish senators accuse Trump of using antisemitism as ‘guise’ to attack universities
-
Fast Forward Jewish Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky reportedly to retire after 26 years in office
-
Culture In Germany, a Jewish family is reunited with a treasured family object — but also a sense of exile
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.