By suppressing an effort to break the Gaza siege, activists say Egypt has once again prioritized its alignment with Israel and the US over its stated commitments to Palestinian rights.

Emad Mekay, Jewish Currents, June 23, 2025

ON JUNE 10TH, activists affiliated with the International Coalition Against the Israeli Occupation, a broad alliance of trade unions, solidarity movements, and human rights groups, tried to organize the “Global March to Gaza.” At the event, participants from more than 50 countries—including Mexico, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Tunisia, and France—would arrive in Cairo, travel 200 miles to Al-Arish on the Mediterranean, and then walk approximately 33 miles to the Rafah border crossing to deliver aid and help alleviate the widespread starvation resulting from the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Like the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which planned to bring aid to Gaza by ship before Israeli forces detained and deported its crew, the Global March was conceivedas a “civilian response to global injustice,” with the goal of spotlighting Gaza’s starvation and demanding the opening of a humanitarian corridor for food, water, and medicine. 

Right from the start, however, the would-be marchers were met with Egyptian repression. In the days before June 15th, the date set for marchers’ arrival at Rafah, Egyptian authorities unleasheda torrent of online and media propaganda, deploying influencersand TV personalities to smear organizers as foreign tools of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group that has been a historical adversary of Egypt’s military establishment and that the country has designated as a terrorist organization. “There were these calls from the international terrorist organization of the Muslim Brotherhood to converge on Egypt to stir instability,” Egypt’s top TV anchor, Ahmed Moussa, said on the state-run Sada El-Balad TV. “There are different, intellectual currents that were involved in this, but they were all led by the wings of an international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.” The rhetoric soon fueled police action. “Before the march, we had always been met with support and encouragement when we spoke to authorities,” Carola Rackete, a German member of the European Parliament and a participant in the march, told Jewish Currents, “but everything was different on the ground.” Rackete said that Egyptian authorities began snatching newly arrived activists “from the streets, at night from the hotel, and at restaurants” in order to forcefully deport them. “Some got their phones destroyed or their passports confiscated,” she added. “Not even one peaceful meeting of everyone was possible.” Other activists posted on social media that they had to change hotels every night during their stay in Egypt, or otherwise be secretly hosted by Egyptian contacts, in order to avoid arrests. 

The crackdown continued as activists tried to make their way to Al-Arish. On June 13th, Melanie Johanna Schweizer, a German lawyer and spokesperson for the Global March to Gaza, told Jewish Currents that police and soldiers stopped the convoy she was traveling with between Cairo and Al-Arish. “We were held for five hours in the heat,” she said, adding that three activists subsequently collapsed and required hospitalization. Schweizer said that officers arrested some of the convoy’s participants and forced others to return to Cairo, seizing a number of people’s passports. Meanwhile, a separate contingent of 200 individuals reached Ismailia, a Suez Canal city 126 miles from Al-Arish. But by the time they arrived, the city had become an armed encampment, its streets and roads choked with checkpoints where military and police officers scrutinized identification papers and scrolled through social media feeds of suspected participants in the mass mobilization. As a result, all the activists who arrived in Ismailia were detained. In cases where campaigners refused to disperse, the authorities deployed plainclothes officers and individuals described by activists as “violent thugs in civilian clothes” to attack and remove them, a tactic seemingly intended to obscure the involvement of Egyptian police.

Egypt’s military rulers have framed this crackdown as a security issue, with the Foreign Ministry putting out a statement saying that Egypt was acting “to ensure the safety of visiting delegations due to the sensitive security conditions in this border area since the onset of the crisis in Gaza.” However, observers say that Cairo’s harsh suppression of pro-Palestine actions highlight a reality that its leaders have tried to obscure under public statements of sympathy: namely, that Egypt, which once mobilized armies for Palestine, is now working with Israel and the United States to mobilize police against Palestine’s sympathizers. “Egypt is a client state of the US, and by extension Israel,” said Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. “It is acting accordingly.” Indeed, Egypt’s crackdown on the Global March came after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that Israeli forces would stop the convoys themselves if Egyptian authorities failed to intercept them, a sequence that activists say clarifies Egypt’s role as an enforcer of Israeli policy in the region. So much so that when Egyptian security forces dragged activists waving Palestinian flags onto deportation flights at Cairo Airport, exiled opposition figure Mona el-Shazli offered a blistering articulation of this criticism: “This is no longer Cairo International Airport,” she said. “It’s Ben Gurion.”

EGYPT DID NOT always cooperate with Israel. Between 1948 and 1979, the two countries fought several wars, and even when there wasn’t fighting, Egypt refused full normalization with Israel and continued to be harshly critical of Israeli abuse of Palestinians. But this position, crafted under the leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, began to unravel after his successor, Anwar Sadat, signed a US sponsored settlement treaty with Israel in 1979. The agreement removed Egypt, the largest Arab military force, from the regional conflict, altering the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East in Israel’s favor over the coming decades. Many Palestinians considered the treaty a stab in the back, and local Islamists and pan-Arabists opposed it vehemently, but the country has continued to double down on its collaboration with Israel over time.

Behind Egypt’s compliance lurks a cold calculus. For a debt-burdened military dictatorship locked into strict International Monetary Fund austerity measures, the US’s $1.3 billion in annual military aid is critical. Egypt’s military also depends on American hardware to prop up its regime, with military insiders calling the bond between Egypt and the Pentagon among the region’s closest. Egypt’s ruling regime wants to keep these weapons flowing, and doing so often requires avoiding diplomatic and security disputes with Israel. “The current [Egyptian] regime is in full cooperation with Israel’s interests,” said Abdelhadi, summing up the dynamic, “and in return it receives continued military aid from the US.” These patterns have intensified since the rise of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime in the wake of the 2013 coup. “The shift began under Sadat with the Camp David Accords, but Sisi has taken normalization . . . to unprecedented levels,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, a Berlin-based Egyptian analyst. Specifically, Egypt under Sisi has significantly expanded its security cooperation with Israel, particularly in counterterrorism operations across the Sinai Peninsula. Sisi has permitted, for the first time, Israeli drone strikes in Sinai; he has also agreed to demands for military code-sharing with Washington at Tel Aviv’s behest, a measure previous Egyptian presidents reliably resisted. Economically, Egypt has emerged as a major importer of Israeli natural gas, despite longstanding public opposition to normalization with Israel: The country now gets 40% to 60% of its gas imports from Israel, which makes up 15% to 20% of consumption. 

The Gaza blockade has been a major prong of this collaboration. Egypt has played such an important role in controlling aid to Palestinians through the side of the Rafah crossing it controls that Human Rights Watch has accused the country of aiding the Israeli blockade. More recent developments build on this precedent: Despite its statements calling for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, Egypt has kept the Rafah crossing closed while insisting it is Israel that is blocking the aid from the other side. Further, after Israeli urgings, Egyptian authorities say they have dismantled hundreds of smuggling tunnels linking the Sinai to Gaza, disrupting a lifeline for Hamas but also exacerbating humanitarian conditions in the blockaded enclave since many Gazans relied on food and merchandise smuggling from the Sinai. Egypt has also resisteddomestic pressure to use its diplomatic clout and recall its ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza, underscoring Cairo’s prioritization of bilateral interests. “Today’s regime insists on demonstrating that the Palestinian question is not a priority and will not risk anything for it,” said Dima Al-sajdeya, a researcher at the Paris-based Collège de France. 

To maintain this position, Egypt has had to suppress pro-Palestine protests at home. The ruling generals see such political expression as a danger, risking a showdown with Israel as well as their regime’s own survival in the face of mounting public dissatisfaction. In this sense, el-Hamalawy said, “Sisi’s deference to Washington and Tel Aviv reflects both strategic calculation and regime insecurity.” Egypt’s rulers have used two tactics to guard against such instability: security crackdowns, and a media barrage to temper pro-Palestine sentiment. On the former front, Egyptian forces routinely sweep up dissenters, snuffing out protests before they ignite. The repression targets any form of public sympathy with Palestinians not sanctioned by the state. For instance, in May, authorities extended the detention of Abdelgawad Al-Sahlami, a low ranking police officer who had raised a Palestinian flag in downtown Alexandria. He now facesterrorism charges, which carry a possible death penalty. While this clampdown unfolds, state TV works to deflect blame from Israel. It pummels Hamas as a regional saboteur of diplomacy and redirects criticism. In April, for example, international scholars met in Turkey and issued a religious fatwa to frame the need to help Palestinians as an Islamic duty. Cairo responded with a calculated leak of a 1970 tape featuring Nasser saying that since other Arab nations were not sharing in the burden, Egypt wouldn’t fight another war against Israel alone. The message was plain: If even the pan-Arabist icon of the ’60s balked at solo confrontations against Israel, today’s Egyptians shouldn’t agitate for a posture from that era.

Ultimately, the regime’s ongoing management of dissent—alongside its systematic crushing of pro-Palestine forces such as pan-Arabism and political Islam—means that while many Egyptians sympathize with Palestine, street protests remain rare. “The Egyptian people I met are deeply disturbed by the war crimes that are being committed by Israel in their neighbouring country,” said Rackete. “However, [because] Egypt is a military dictatorship in which protests are being suppressed, the Egyptian people are not free to make their voices heard.” El-Hamalawy concurred with this assessment, adding that “the gap between state policy and popular sentiment, especially on Palestine, widens by the day. It’s unsustainable long-term.” The recent eruption of the Gaza solidarity march may serve to demonstrate this unsustainability. The Egyptian government quickly moved to quell the march, which it viewed as a potential spark to inflame pro-Palestine sentiment in the country. But despite the suppression, images disseminated by activists—depicting people being removed from hotels, detained, or forced onto flights amidst protests—have transformed Cairo’s actions into a public spectacle, and contributed toward march organizers’ goal of “highlight[ing] Egypt’s complicity in the ongoing siege and genocide in Gaza.” 

Activists have vowed to continue protest actions that highlight these contradictions. Global March to Gaza organizers, who include Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla, have said they will launch hunger strikes to continue their campaign. Meanwhile, a second, nine-bus “Solidarity Caravan,” comprising an estimated 2,000 volunteers from Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, sought to join the march by crossing into Egypt from Libya, although it was forced to return by forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, who Cairo trains and arms. A small convoy from Lebanon also announced plans to march to Gaza, but eventually turned back after the Syrian authorities refused to grant it permission. Meanwhile, Malaysian organizations have said they will plan a “Thousand Ship Flotilla” to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. While clampdowns may prevent some of these efforts, Global March participants say, they will still show that, in Rackete’s words, “hundreds of thousands . . . are ready to take to the streets and be active to stop the genocide of Palestinians.”

Emad Mekay is an independent journalist with extensive experience reporting from the Middle East and the United States. He has served as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg, and reported from the US for Inter Press Service (IPS). His recent work has appeared in outlets including Euronews and Global Insight, among others. Emad is a former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and previously worked with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley. He is fluent in both English and Arabic. @MEKAEUSA