Israel’s plan to force Palestinians to flee to southern Gaza ahead of an offensive in the northern part of the enclave has raised tensions with neighboring Egypt, which is concerned that Israel will try to push Gazans into its territory.
Egyptian and Israeli officials have traded criticisms over the past few days about Israel’s preparations for a major attack on Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says the city, in northern Gaza, is one of the last strongholds of Hamas, which led the 2023 attack on Israel that set off the war.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said that 100,000 Palestinians had already fled the city after Israeli orders to leave. Ahead of a large-scale assault, Israel has also been bombing high-rise buildings in Gaza City that it says were used by Hamas, accusations which the group denies.
Mr. Netanyahu has called on Egypt to accept more Palestinian refugees from Gaza, without saying whether Israel would allow them to return after the war. He argued that Israel would not forcibly expel them, but rather wanted to allow whoever wanted to leave Gaza to do so.
“The Egyptian foreign ministry prefers to imprison residents in Gaza who would prefer to leave the war zone against their will,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Friday.
Israeli officials have said in the past that Gazans should be permitted to “voluntarily migrate” from the enclave after nearly two years of war, hunger and fear. But leaving is not an option for most at this point, and many Gazans fear that Israel would never allow them to come back if they do find a way to depart.
The Israeli military has ordered Palestinians remaining in Gaza City, many of whom have already been displaced multiple times during the war, to flee to a designated “humanitarian area” of southern Gaza closer to the enclave’s border with Egypt.
On Saturday, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty of Egypt criticized Israel, saying it aimed “to push the residents out of their land.”
“It is absurd to call this voluntary migration,” he said at a news conference in Cyprus.
Aid groups say Gaza has been so battered by the war that there is nowhere safe for residents to shelter. And some Palestinians fear that Israel is seeking to make life in Gaza so miserable that people agree to leave in any possible way.
At peace for decades, Israel and Egypt have become strategic allies who coordinate closely on security. But they have sparred diplomatically over the Gaza war and particularly over any suggestion that Gazans should be displaced to Egyptian territory.
In the early weeks of the war, Israel quietly urged its allies to pressure Egypt to take in Gazans en masse — raising fears that their expulsion would quickly become permanent. Egypt protested and the Biden administration ultimately quashed the proposal.
Most Gazans have been trapped in the enclave to face Israel’s deadly assault. For the first several months of the war, Egypt allowed tens of thousands of Palestinians to leave for Egyptian territory through a southern border crossing. But that ended after Israel invaded the southern Gazan city of Rafah, leading Egypt to shut down its side of the border in protest.
Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.
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