Hossam al-Hamalawy
The New Arab / January 28, 2026
Israel’s plan to impose US private firms at Rafah would entrench its control over Gaza while undermining Egypt’s sovereignty, warns Hossam al-Hamalawy.
The Rafah border gate between Egypt and Gaza has long been a political pressure valve, prone to closure whenever regional tensions spike. But in the latest twist, Israel is reportedly pushing to station private American security contractors at this nominally Egyptian Palestinian crossing – a startling outsourcing of border control that speaks volumes about the new balance of power.
Under a plan hashed out in Tel Aviv and Washington, companies like UG Solutions, staffed by ex-US military, would effectively police who and what passes through Rafah. Such an arrangement would be extraordinary: a national frontier managed by hired guards from half a world away.
It underscores how Israel, the occupying power, intends to tighten its grip on Gaza’s gateway to the world, even on Egyptian soil, and it reveals an audacious strategy aimed at reshaping Gaza’s demography under the banner of “security.”
Meanwhile, Cairo’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi – the putative sovereign on the other side of the gate – finds himself reduced to a bystander, watching his “sovereignty” seep away on the Sinai sands.
A border in name only
Israel’s insistence on US private security firms at Rafah is the latest chapter in a long saga of distrust and control. Ever since Hamas controlled Gaza in 2007, Israel has viewed the enclave’s borders as potential leak points for weapons and people it deems threats.
During the 2023–25 genocide, Israeli forces even took direct military control of the Palestinian side of Rafah, effectively planting their flag on the crossing. Now, after a hard-won ceasefire, Israel is loath to hand Rafah back to any authority it can’t dominate.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), which formally should help run the crossing, is viewed by Israeli officials as too weak, and European monitors are deemed too ineffective. So, Israel has turned to an à la carte solution: American private contractors, accountable to the Israeli military and Washington, not to Gaza’s people or Egypt’s government.
According to Haaretz, Netanyahu’s government asked the US to deploy these firms rather than allow a full PA return at Rafah.
The choice of UG Solutions as a candidate to manage Rafah raised eyebrows immediately. This security firm was lambasted internationally for its links to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – a US-Israeli-backed aid program whose operations in 2024–25 led to catastrophic outcomes.
That Israel would consider UG Solutions, of all companies, speaks to a certain brazenness. The proposal laid bare Israel’s determination to dictate terms at Rafah: rather than entrust the crossing to local Palestinian staff under international supervision, they prefer hand-picked foreign guards answerable to them.
Egypt’s role in all this has been painfully marginal. Sisi’s government was not the driver of these talks – US envoys (including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner) flew to Tel Aviv, not Cairo, to confer with Netanyahu about Rafah’s future. Only after Israeli media leaked the private-security scheme did Cairo scramble to respond.
Egyptian officials have since insisted they would only accept a “two-way” reopening – meaning Gazans must be allowed back in, not just out – pointedly citing the right of return for Palestinians enshrined in UN resolutions. “Egypt cannot accept unilateral steps that displace Palestinians or undermine their right of return,” one official told The New Arab.
But such statements are hollow. In practice, Israel has already built new infrastructure to constrain movement at Rafah – even planning an extra checkpoint nicknamed “Rafah 2” to conduct further screening of Palestinians who exit.
From Cairo’s perspective, this encroaches on sovereignty; from Israel’s perspective, it’s simply extending the Iron Wall a few kilometres south. The Rafah crossing may still fly Egyptian and Palestinian flags, but it will be a de facto Israeli checkpoint, outsourced to American contractors for a patina of deniability.
Ensuring Gaza’s exodus
Why is Israel so keen to micromanage Rafah’s reopening? The answer lies in a stark calculus that goes beyond security checks: depopulation.
Multiple sources confirm that Israel’s plan for Rafah is engineered to achieve a one-way flow of people. As Rafah reopens, the goal is a net exodus of Gazans. This policy was relayed in late January 2026 by three insiders familiar with the new border arrangements. It aligns perfectly with long-standing statements by Israeli strategists about encouraging Palestinian emigration from Gaza – always couched as “voluntary,” of course, to dodge the label of forcible transfer.
Indeed, the concept of “more out than in” has chilling precedent. In October 2023, amid the carnage of the war’s first weeks, an Israeli Intelligence Ministry document openly advocated the permanent expulsion of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents into Egypt’s Sinai. That secret plan, later leaked to the press, proposed that Israel seize the war moment to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai,” establish tent cities for them, and prevent their return permanently. It even urged creating a “sterile zone” inside Egypt to keep Palestinians far from the Israeli border.
Cairo in the wings
For Egypt, this moment is a sobering portrait of diminished regional influence. The country finds itself unable to assert even basic sovereignty over its border with Gaza, caught between Israel’s dictates and its own economic fragility. The Rafah saga is a diplomatic failure for Cairo: after months of high-profile mediation efforts, including hosting a major summit on Gaza’s future, Egypt must watch as Washington and Tel Aviv hammer out the crossing’s fate.
At that summit in early 2025, Sisi unveiled an ambitious Gaza reconstruction plan – only to find key Arab leaders absent or noncommittal, and Gulf monarchs like Saudi Arabia’s crown prince making Egypt sweat for every concession. In the end, Egypt had to water down its proposals and accept that no money would flow without Gulf approval. The subtext was plain: Cairo could no longer simply dictate outcomes; it needed consensus with wealthier patrons.
That economic dependency – on Saudi deposits, Emirati investments, US aid – translates into political caution. It is one reason Egypt has trodden carefully, even timidly, on Gaza.
Sisi’s government did help broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in January 2025, earning public thanks from US officials. But when a more decisive truce finally came in late 2025 to halt the bloodshed, it was branded a “US-brokered” deal, with Qatar and others also in the mix. Cairo was a supporting actor.
Now, on the Rafah reopening, Egypt again must react to an agenda set by others. Egyptian diplomats insist they are “in continuous contact” with the EU and UN to ensure any Rafah arrangement respects prior agreements. They point to the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, which limits foreign military activity in Sinai – hinting that Israel’s militarisation of the border, even via proxies, must not violate Egyptian sovereignty.
Yet reports have emerged that Israel’s surveillance and maybe even its munitions are creeping right up to (if not over) the line, as Israeli drones and sensors proliferated near Rafah. Cairo protested quietly; Tel Aviv largely ignored it. The unequal relationship was on full display.
The Egyptian leadership, despite its public posturing, could not alter the basic calculus: Israel will do what it deems necessary for its security (or political expediency), and Egypt, heavily indebted and internally strained, will swallow its objections in exchange for continued US and Gulf patronage.
Mercenaries and massacres: A cautionary tale
The involvement of US private firms in Gaza is not without bitter precedent. In fact, the very companies now being floated to guard Rafah have already left deep scars on Gaza’s recent history. It was only months ago that the GHF fiasco finally came to an end.
The GHF was established in early 2025 with US blessing and Israeli coordination, ostensibly to oversee aid distribution during the war when Israel had blocked UN relief operations. The idea was to bypass the UN and Hamas by setting up a new “independent” agency, but in truth, GHF was run by US contractors and guided by Israel’s military. Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), a private American company led by a former CIA officer, managed the operation, while UG Solutions provided on-the-ground security – the same UG Solutions now mooted for Rafah.
The results were disastrous. Instead of the hundreds of aid distribution sites the UN had operated, GHF set up just four “mega-sites”. Starving Palestinians from all over Gaza were funnelled into these few centres, where they often found next to nothing. GHF’s contract with Israel strictly limited food quantities, provided no water, and omitted essentials like baby formula and medicine.
It was a deliberate scheme of scarcity, designed not to feed Gaza, but to control it through hunger. And when the hungry crowds pressed forward, tragedy struck again and again. Israeli forces and some US contractors routinely opened fire on Palestinians desperate to reach the aid. Live bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades were used on unarmed civilians at the sites, day after day.
A US veteran who worked for UG Solutions, Anthony Aguilar, later testified that he had “never seen a scale of destruction and killing” like what he witnessed there. He described contractors shooting into crowds and Israeli snipers picking off children who clambered over walls to escape being crushed.
In one incident, Israeli tanks shelled an aid queue, killing at least 32 people on the spot. In another, panicked surges caused stampedes – “human slaughterhouses,” as Gaza officials angrily called the scenes. By the time GHF was suspended in October 2025, more than 2,000 Palestinians had died in or around its distribution centres, either shot or trampled while seeking food.
The GHF mission, ostensibly humanitarian, became a byword for botched privatisation and cruel mismanagement. GHF’s directors quietly shut down the project once a ceasefire took hold, leaving behind a trail of grieving families and a deeply tarnished reputation.
The view from the crossing
Meanwhile, Egypt stands at a painful crossroads. It can cooperate with the US-Israeli scheme, hoping to mitigate the harm and assert what little influence it has by insisting on two-way traffic and managing the optics. Or it can resist and risk angering its benefactors in Washington and Riyadh, a prospect Cairo’s cash-strapped rulers can ill afford.
So far, Egypt’s approach has been to publicly endorse the principle of reciprocity (entry as well as exit) and the “right of return” – essentially drawing a line in rhetorical sand. But having drawn it, can Egypt enforce it? The coming weeks will test whether Sisi can translate any of its will into reality at Rafah.
One might say the Rafah drama encapsulates the end of an era. The old narratives – of Egyptian Pan-Arab leadership, of the inviolability of national borders, of clear distinctions between occupier and sovereign – have eroded. In their place is a murkier tableau. Gaza’s border is nominally an Egyptian-Palestinian crossing, but it will be like an Israeli checkpoint; the guards speak English with an American twang, and behind them looms the spectre of an Israeli officer giving orders.
The critical stance one must take, looking at Rafah now, is to pierce that theatre. For all the talk of security arrangements, humanitarian phases, and innovative solutions involving private firms, the reality is as old as colonialism: an occupied people’s fate being decided by others, and a once-proud regional power unable to alter that fate.
The Rafah crossing – dusty, battered, and to be guarded by mercenaries – symbolises both Israel’s far-reaching hand and Egypt’s faltering grip. It stands as a concrete metaphor for the current Middle East: power privatised and borders subverted, all while politicians maintain the fiction that sovereignty is intact.
Rafah’s gate may open and close under Israeli terms for now, but the longing of Gazans to live free on their land is not so easily sealed. In the end, no amount of private security contracts or diplomatic theatre can extinguish that desire – and therein lies the quiet power that still eludes the occupier’s grasp.
Hossam al-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany
