Egypt, Israel and Palestinian Displacement

Earlier this week, US President Trump announced a new proposed ceasefire plan for Gaza, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side in the White House. Previous pauses in fighting never developed into a full ceasefire; offramps that return to even more intense violence also exist within this plan. One key condition for any type of success – within this plan and many others – relies on the relationship between Egypt and Israel. And it is a relationship that has seen tremendous pressure in recent times.

Only a couple of weeks ago, Haaretz, among others, reported that Netanyahu asked Trump to intervene with Egypt over concerns about Cairo’s military posture in the Sinai Peninsula – only the latest sign that nearly five decades after Camp David, the Egypt–Israel peace treaty faces its most serious test. Cairo and Tel Aviv are deeply divided over the Gaza war, Israeli strikes on Qatar, and the renewed circulation of proposals to forcibly displace Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The latest Trump plan does not uphold those proposals, although the earlier ‘Riviera Plan’ did; but the saliency of support for such displacement in Israel will continue to profoundly concern Cairo. Moreover, the suggested role of Egypt within the Trump plan, both in terms of reconstruction and stabilisation, makes the relationship between Tel Aviv and Cairo ever more relevant to critically assess.

Israel’s aspirational security framework suggests offensive realist strategies aimed at establishing regional paramountcy, via localised hegemony. The desire reflects the continuation of classical Israeli doctrines, which emphasise military preponderance and pre-emptive freedom of action. Rather than embracing regional integration, Israel is prioritising qualitative military superiority and strategic autonomy.

For Egypt’s rulers, such a strategy threatens national security, risks complicity in genocide in Gaza, and unsettles the region’s security architecture in favour of a ‘New Middle East’, where Israel’s hegemonic paramountcy structures regional order around its own security imperatives. The gap between the two states has not been so large in decades.

The deterioration in relations is stark, driven by the increasingly dire situation in the Gaza Strip. Since 7 October 2023, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 65,000 Palestinians have been killed, and around 163,000 injured with Israeli military data indicating a civilian death rate of 83%. The UN also notes that around 90% of Gaza’s population have been displaced during the war, many multiple times. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, chaired by the former ICC judge Navi Pillay, issued a September 2025 report concluding that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide, citing explicit statements by Israeli leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, evidencing genocidal intent. The findings deepen a binding legal dimension to Cairo’s calculations, particularly as Egyptian public opinion is so impacted by what is happening in Gaza. Israel has rejected this determination, while Egypt has publicly endorsed it, with Cairo announcing last year it would intervene in support for South Africa’s case of genocide at the International Court of Justice, and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi describing Israel’s actions as a ‘systematic genocide to eradicate the Palestinian cause’.

Displacement Proposals and Egyptian Rejection

In this context, reports of Egyptian openness to Palestinian displacement – denied swiftly by Cairo – triggered crisis diplomacy, with Cairo viewing such rhetoric about relocating Palestinians into Sinai as not merely inflammatory, but diametrically opposed to Cairo’s declared positions on Gaza. Indeed, at the recent Arab-Islamic Summit in Doha, Egypt’s president, Abdal Fattah al-Sisi, not only repeated Cairo’s rejection of any plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, but also noted, referring to Israel, ‘our actions must change the enemy's perception of us, demonstrating that the Arab world extends from the Atlantic to the Gulf, encompassing all Muslim states and peace-loving nations’. Such language, unusually sharp for Cairo, indicates the depth of Egyptian concerns.

The idea of relocating Palestinians to Sinai is not new. In 2008, Israeli General Giora Eiland’s ‘General’s Plan’ proposed a territorial exchange in which Egypt would cede parts of Sinai to absorb Palestinians – a concept Cairo dismissed as destabilising. In 2010, then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu floated to then-President Hosni Mubarak the notion of Gaza’s ‘population transfer’ under the guise of security guarantees – an approach that Mubarak rebuffed. In 2017, Likud politician Ayoob Kara advocated for creating a ‘Palestinian state’ in Sinai, framing it as a solution to the conflict, but effectively dissolving Palestinian claims to Palestinian territories. The Trump administration’s aforementioned 2025 ‘Riviera Plan’ recycled these notions, proposing a Gazan mini-state with economic projects along Sinai’s coast, a scheme widely critiqued as strategically and politically unworkable, although it now appears to have been overridden by the recent 21-point plan announced on Monday.

For Cairo, these proposals around ‘transfer’ represent not innovative diplomacy, but attempts to undermine the Palestinian cause, and present Egypt with a fait accompli at Cairo’s expense. The persistence of the notion in Israeli political and policy circles – and their re-emergence against the backdrop of an Israeli campaign on Gaza widely described as disproportionate and, by many of the world’s leading experts, as genocidal, has strained bilateral relations.

From Israel’s perspective, displacement is no longer just a fringe notion but has become a recurring theme in mainstream political debate, driven in large part by extremist ministers and their allies within the governing coalition. These figures present Palestinian displacement in Gaza as a security solution – claiming it would safeguard Israeli security. Although these ideas lack international legitimacy and remain firmly rejected by Egypt, their growing resonance in Israeli politics helps explain why they now surface not only in rhetoric but in policy discussions.

Sinai as a Security Red Line

The Sinai Peninsula remains one of Egypt’s most sensitive security theatres. Over the past 10 years, Egyptian forces have waged successive large-scale campaigns – such as Operation Martyr’s Right and the 2018 Comprehensive Operation Sinai – that dismantled militant networks, reduced cross-border smuggling, and curtailed the reach of ISIS-Sinai, bringing a measure of stability to the region.

A mass influx of Palestinians fleeing active conflict in Gaza risks destabilising those gains and creating significant spill-over effects. Cairo is acutely aware that displaced populations would likely remain targets of Israeli military action, given Israel’s established record of cross-border strikes in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere. The historical precedent is equally troubling: Israel has never permitted Palestinians to return to areas from which they were expelled, making any ‘temporary’ relocation highly unlikely to be reversed.

Haaretz has noted that in its search for new battlefronts, Israel has increasingly cast Egypt as an adversary, particularly after Prime Minister Netanyahu suggested opening Gaza’s Rafah crossing in ways that Cairo viewed as a breach of international law and a possible precursor to large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians into Sinai. Indeed, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt recently noted on condition of anonymity to Israeli media, 'I sense a wave of anti-Egyptian sentiment, likely fuelled by anger over Egypt not opening its borders, something some Israelis assumed would happen. There are several actors, not necessarily official ones, who seem intent on spreading reports of Egypt's military build-up in Sinai.'

Against this backdrop, it seems far more plausible that Egyptian military preparations in the peninsula are not designed to intervene in Gaza directly, but to manage Egyptian security, and the potential consequences of forced displacement – as well as to deter any Israeli encroachment onto Egyptian soil. For its own part, Cairo responded to the recent media discussions around build-up in the Sinai with an official statement that included the assertion, ‘The forces present in Sinai primarily aim to secure the Egyptian borders against all risks, including terrorism and smuggling, and this is carried out within prior coordination with the parties to the peace treaty’. The statement went on to note, ‘Egypt reiterates its absolute rejection of expanding military operations in Gaza and the displacement of Palestinians from their land’, implicitly establishing a link between the force build-up in Sinai and a rejection of Palestinian displacement.

Should Israel press the issue, it would risk pushing Sinai toward full remilitarisation, thereby placing the foundations of the Camp David Accords in jeopardy, which have already been under stress as a result of Israeli violations along the Gaza/Egypt border.

Regional Stakes, International Law, and Contradictions

The regional stakes extend beyond Gaza. Israel’s September strike on Doha – and Netanyahu’s refusal to rule out similar actions in Egypt – has heightened Cairo’s anxieties. Regional rulers perceive the ‘New Middle East’ that Netanyahu speaks of as a region where regional integration is rejected by Israel, in favour of Israeli paramountcy – where Israel reserves the right to unilaterally intervene militarily where it sees fit, as it has done on Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni, Iranian, Tunisian, and Qatari territories. The Arab-Islamic Summit in Doha reflected broad regional rejection of such unilateralism, with Egypt aligning itself firmly with Qatar, using the language of defending sovereignty and the rules of international law.

Paradoxically, these clashes coexist with economic cooperation. As part of an update to a 2019 gas deal between Egypt and Israel, Cairo and Tel Aviv signed a $35 billion agreement earlier this year – the largest in Israel’s history. Egypt’s Prime Minister insisted that the agreement would not interfere with Cairo’s ‘strong and clear stance . . . reject[ing] attempts to eliminate the Palestinian cause’, despite there being significant criticism of the agreement. Yet Netanyahu’s threats to revisit the agreement over alleged Egyptian ‘violations’ highlight the risks of overdependence. Egypt responded by accelerating energy diversification strategies through partnerships with Turkey and Qatar, underscoring that economic ties cannot override core security red lines, but nonetheless indicating the difficult position that Cairo is in with regards to energy supplies.

A Transactional Relationship at Risk

Israel risks eroding 50 years of stable relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv by pursuing the rhetoric of Palestinian ethnic cleansing, its war on Gaza, and cross-border regional strikes. The Egyptian military and leadership views Camp David as a cornerstone of national security, and would be loath to consider abjuring it, but Tel Aviv’s policies have already jeopardised the relationship, and is strategically reckless.

For Cairo, the calculus is straightforward: the displacement of Palestinians, which Israeli ministers and officials speak of quite openly, equals Sinai instability, the violation of Egyptian sovereignty, and the continuation if not completion of genocide. As far as Egypt is concerned, supporting Qatar against Israeli strikes is only part and parcel of a broader stance in defence of sovereignty and regional stability.

The Egypt–Israel relationship has always been transactional, rooted in calculation rather than friendship. Against the backdrop of the last two years, those calculations have been shifting quite dramatically. It is not simply that Cairo will not accept the displacement of Palestinians into Egypt – it is also that Tel Aviv has underestimated Egypt’s rejection in this regard, as noted by an earlier RUSI Commentary, and seems to continue to do so. The gap has become a chasm, and the risks associated with that are substantial.

It may be that Israel is gambling recklessly with the one peace it can least afford to lose. Half a century of hard, transactional stability is being put at risk for short-term aims, and the consequences of that gamble may extend far beyond Sinai. If Tel Aviv persists, the rupture will not be Cairo’s choice, but Israel’s making.

© RUSI, 2025.

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