Saleh Salem
The New Arab / August 13, 2026
Egyptian anger at the construction or the expansion of Israeli military sites in Gaza near the Sinai border comes at a time of major tension with Israel.
Cairo – Egyptians are reacting angrily to recent reports about Israel’s construction of a military base in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, only a few kilometres away from the Egyptian border.
An Israeli military base in this part of Gaza and that close to the Palestinian territory’s border with Sinai, the north-eastern Egyptian territory that shares borders with both Gaza and Israel, is a clear violation of political and security understandings between Cairo and Tel Aviv, Egyptian observers argue.
“This is particularly a violation of the Philadelphi Accord of 2005,” Egyptian political researcher Islam Mansi said.
Speaking to The New Arab, he hoped that Egypt would submit an official complaint at the Multinational Force and Observers, which was established via a 1981 protocol to oversee the implementation of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, to prove the Israeli violation and end it.
Southern Gaza has been home to wide ranging activities by the Israeli military, including earthworks, berms, trenches, roads, and outpost fortifications, according to multiple media reports.
Some of these reports refer to Israeli engineering work continuing even as civilian rubble clearance and reconstruction in parts of the southern Gaza city of Rafah have stalled.
These activities are most probably related to the expansion of Israeli military outposts in the area, not to the construction of new bases, some observers note.
They add, however, that the same expansion works attest to the presence of a plan in Tel Aviv for permanent military presence in Gaza on the Egyptian border.
Constraints
Egypt has yet to officially comment on reports about the construction of new Israeli military bases or the expansion of outposts already present in Rafah.
Concern among observers in the populous Arab country is mainly focused on agreements and political and security understandings regulating military activity and deployments in areas along the Egyptian-Gaza border.
Signed on 1 September 2005 upon Israel’s self-proclaimed “unilateral disengagement” from Gaza, the Philadelphi Accord delegated policing Gaza’s border with Sinai as a mission to the Palestinian Authority.
It stipulated the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of roughly 100 metres wide and about 14 kilometres long along the entire Gaza-Egypt border.
The accord came to add to constraints to military activity and presence along the Egypt-Israel border, ones enshrined in the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the first between an Arab country and the self-proclaimed Jewish state.
Signed almost six years after Egypt’s war for the liberation of Sinai from Israeli occupation, the treaty established demilitarized zones along the Egyptian-Israeli border and set force limits on both sides of the border.
Some Egyptian analysts argue that Israeli military presence in the Philadelphi Corridor also violates the spirit or the terms of those security arrangements and the peace treaty’s emphasis on inviolable borders.
Mutual accusations
Israel took control of the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s border with Egypt in May 2024, almost eight months after it unleashed its brutal genocidal war on Gaza.
At the time, the Israeli government claimed that the move aimed to block Hamas rearmament through tunnels along the Gaza-Sinai border.
Egypt condemned, however, the same move as a “dangerous escalation” and warned through diplomatic channels that the operation put its peace treaty with Israel at risk.
Such an exchange came as some Israeli officials and experts criticised what they described as Egypt’s military build-up in Sinai, especially in the demilitarized border area, accusing Egypt of violating the peace treaty.
The most notable such criticism reportedly came during a meeting in Jerusalem between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in September 2025.
During the meeting, the Israeli premier called on the US secretary of state to put pressure on Egypt to remove military infrastructure and installations implemented in Sinai in recent years.
Israel’s Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter also raised the same issue last year, by warning that Egyptian military bases in Sinai could be used for offensive operations.
Egyptian security analysts say, however, that their country has to beef up security in Sinai to prevent fallout from the chaos in Gaza and protect a territory that straddles one of the world’s most crucial maritime chokepoints, namely the Suez Canal.
“Such measures are vital for Sinai’s security which is inseparable from Egypt’s national security,” retired Egyptian army general Mohamed al-Ghabari told TNA.
Egypt, he added, acts under fears from the infiltration of terrorists from Gaza and also Israel’s plan to displace Gaza’s population into Sinai.
Ceasefire strains
Egyptian anger at the construction or the expansion of Israeli military sites in Gaza near the Sinai border comes at a time of major tension between Cairo and Tel Aviv, observers said.
Together with the other mediators, the US, Qatar and Turkey, Egypt helped broker the current Gaza ceasefire deal in October last year.
The deal, which ended major Israeli military operations in Gaza, stipulates a phased Israeli withdrawal from the war-ravaged territory to pave the way for its reconstruction and recovery.
Nevertheless, throughout all the past months, Israel refused to downsize its military deployments in the Palestinian territory, having already occupied over 70% of its pace, before Hamas decommissions its weapons.
Last month, truce mediators and the Board of Peace, the body formed by US President Donald Trump to oversee the implementation of the Gaza ceasefire plan, convinced Hamas and other factions to disarm.
This did not, however, reason the Israeli government out of its plan to maintain presence in Gaza, which further strains relations with Cairo, analysts said.
Mansi said Israel wants Hamas to be fully disarmed before it makes any troop withdrawal.
Israel, he added, uses its tightening military grip on Gaza as a political pressure card to ensure that its own conditions are met.
“This is why it keeps widening the scope of its military presence in the strip, including through the construction of new bases and the expansion of ones already present,” he added.
Saleh Salem is an Egyptian journalist
