June 23, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
Israel and the U.S. Need to Get Tough on Egypt
Cairo has turned a blind eye to Hamas’s tunneling and shipments of weapons over and under its border.
June 23, 2024 | The Wall Street Journal
Israel and the U.S. Need to Get Tough on Egypt
Cairo has turned a blind eye to Hamas’s tunneling and shipments of weapons over and under its border.
Excerpt
Antony Blinken has visited Cairo again. The U.S. secretary of state met with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on June 10 to talk about Israel, Hamas, hostages and the future of the Gaza Strip.
The Egyptian military, like Iran and Qatar, knows Hamas’s leadership well. This surely isn’t only because of proximity. Although neither Washington nor Jerusalem wants to say so, the Oct. 7 attack on Israel couldn’t have happened without the Egyptian army’s turning a blind eye to the shipment of arms and other materiel over and under the Egypt-Gaza border. Greed and anti-Zionist sympathies likely fed trade and ties between senior Egyptian officers and Hamas commanders.
Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and member of the bipartisan Egypt Working Group.