I wish Samuel Beckett, the founder of the Theatre of the Absurd, were with us today to see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears an absurdity that surpasses all his works. What we are witnessing now in the Middle East, specifically in Egypt, defies description in any language. The final paragraph of President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi's speech at the opening session of the 33rd Arab League Council in Bahrain a few days ago went as follows:
"The next generations, whether Palestinian or Israeli, deserve a region where justice is realized, peace prevails, and security reigns – a region where the hopes of the future transcend the pains of the past." The paragraph ended there, lacking only a piece of hymn music to further numb awareness, seize minds, distort facts, and mix up matters.
At the very same time el-Sissi was speaking these words, Israeli forces in the southern city of Rafah were discovering tunnels crossing into Egyptian territory one after the other, and rocket launch platforms one after the other. According to the testimony of Gilad Noam, the senior attorney representing Israel before the International Court of Justice, "more than 700 tunnels have been discovered in Rafah, 50 of which extend across the Rafah-Egypt border, in addition to 1,400 rockets launched from Rafah into Israel, 120 of them in the past two weeks, along with the smuggling of Hamas leaders and Israeli hostages into Egypt." Gilad's statement means the issue of Egyptian participation in smuggling weapons and equipment to the "terrorist" Hamas movement is settled. For the record, I have stated this verbatim in many interviews with Israeli media since the war in Gaza started, and my words are not for childish boasting but for documentation.
Naturally, Cairo defies the entire world watching these scandals, persistently denying them as it has for years. They claimed they flooded and closed all those tunnels in 2016. Since then, Diaa Rashwan, head of the Egyptian State Information Service has consistently affirmed that Israeli talk about the tunnels is just false allegations and accusations. Supposedly, Egypt closed 1,500 tunnels and there are no more tunnels. Recently, he was joined by an army of deniers in the media; one of them is Major General Yehia Kedwani, a member of the Egyptian Parliament's Defense and National Security Committee, who said in an interview with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper that there are currently no tunnels across the Palestinian-Egyptian border and that Egypt destroyed all the tunnels. He added that there is a buffer zone five kilometers deep on the Egyptian side of Rafah.
A few days ago, I was a guest on Makan Channel with journalist Firas Hamed, who asked me how I would describe the Egyptian-Israeli scene. I replied that the Egyptian regime practices a strange kind of "political bullying and blood engineering; it is an outstanding downfall."
As if there was a decision that May would be the month of resounding scandals for the authoritarian military regime in Egypt, the matter did not stop there. CNN revealed a major surprise concerning Egypt's sabotage of the ceasefire negotiations that were supposed to be reached at the beginning of this month. They were thwarted by Major General Ahmed Abdel Khaleq, the official in charge of the Palestinian portfolio, and Deputy Head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service Major General Abbas Kamel. For the record, Khaleq took responsibility for the Palestine portfolio a week after Kamel was appointed head of the agency in 2018.
The president personally attends the final evaluations of candidates applying to military colleges and institutes; awards contracts for construction projects; and chairs all councils related to industry, trade, tourism, investment, agriculture, and other tasks of junior officials. Most importantly, he runs the National Security Council, so it is naive to think that el-Sissi is not aware of the actions of Khaleq in Gaza, which aim to maintain a sustainable international role for Cairo by using and exploiting the conflict.
Do not forget that the president's son, Mahmoud el-Sissi, works in the same agency as Khaleq. Mahmoud el-Sissi is referred to as "the strong man," and a close friend of Ibrahim al-Arjani, the head of the Union of Arab Tribes and owner of the Hala Tourism Company. The company controls the movement of Gaza residents to Egypt for a fee of $5,000 per person, astronomical sums that are now the talk of the international media, all the while, the regime boasts of its interest in and treatment of Gazans.
After the CNN scandal, which completely removed Egypt from the role of "trusted mediator," extremism in Cairo reached terrifying levels, reminiscent of those that preceded Abdel Nasser's call for the 1967 war with Israel. Yesterday, Lieutenant General Muhammad Zaki, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Minister of Defense and Military Production, carried out the main phase of a tactical project with live ammunition for one of the units of the Second Field Army. Zaki delivered an adrenaline-fueled speech that targeted the Egyptians' glands, regarding the readiness of the Egyptian army to fight and defend its interests. The urgent question that must now be asked is: Do the higher interests of the Egyptian state require tunnels in Rafah that constitute a hotbed of hell inside Israel?
Additionally, Egypt's announcement of its intention to intervene to support South Africa's lawsuit against Israel before the International Court of Justice represents a blatant violation of the peace treaty signed between the two countries on March 26, 1979.
In conclusion, I scream at the top of my lungs, "Dear Beckett, please come immediately. You have work in Egypt."
