Middle East Monitor / September 3, 2021
A senior official at Israel’s National Security Service and the coordinator for Palestinian lands affairs in the Israeli Ministry of Security, Ghassan Alayyan, arrived on Wednesday in the Egyptian capital city of Cairo to hold talks about the situation in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Official army radio, Galei Tzahal, reported that Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was due to hold talks with the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the coming weeks in Egypt’s eastern report city of Sharm al-Sheikh to discuss a number of topics, including the besieged enclave.
Kan11 recently reported that the meeting between Al-Sisi and Bennett would be “publically broadcasted.” It added that they would discuss a “prisoner exchange deal with Hamas.”
In recent days, Israeli occupation authorities have lifted some of the restrictions imposed on Gaza after the recent May attack on the Strip, including “expanding the fishing area from 12 to 15 nautical miles, reopening the Kerem Shalom crossing, and increasing the share of the enclave’s fresh water by 5 million cubic meters.”
The Israeli army has also allowed increasing the quota of Gazan merchants to pass through the Erez crossing by an “additional 5,000 merchants, provided that permits are issued only to those who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus.” The military pointed out that the measures would go under a “regular assessment.”
In a similar context, an Egyptian source told Al-Araby al-Jadeed that the upcoming meeting between the two leaders would discuss the “Israeli demands to tighten control over its borders with Gaza.”
