Turkey, Egypt unite to stop Israel's looming offensive in Gaza's Rafah

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egypt’s leader joined hands on Wednesday in Cairo, calling for an end to Israel’s impending onslaught on a southern Gaza city in its fight against Hamas.

Erdogan’s visit comes at a time when relations between Ankara and Cairo are improving after years of tension and hostility. Turkey has historically supported the pan-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt considers a terrorist organisation.

The Turkish president landed in Cairo for his first visit in over a decade, following a visit to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, when he met with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Erdogan met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi at Cairo’s Ittihadiya palace, according to Egypt’s state-run media. Their talks focused on bilateral relations and regional challenges, especially efforts to stop the war in Gaza, el-Sissi later said at a joint news conference.

“We agreed on the need for an immediate cease-fire (in Gaza) and the need to achieve calm in the West Bank” to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks with the ultimate goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state, el-Sissi said.

Egypt and Turkey fell out after the Egyptian military in 2013 ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, who hailed from the Muslim Brotherhood, amid mass protest against his divisive one year of rule.

Over the past few years, Ankara abandoned its criticism of el-Sissi’s government as it tried to repair frayed ties with Egypt and other Arab heavyweights. In November 2022, Erdogan and el-Sissi were photographed shaking hands during the World Cup in Qatar.

The war in Gaza has reached a critical point, with an impending Israeli offensive on the city of Rafah, along the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, where some 1.4 million people — over half the territory’s population — are crammed into tent camps and overflowing apartments and shelters.

Speaking at the news conference with el-Sissi, Erdogan urged Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avoid a ground offensive in Rafah and accused the Israeli government of committing “massacres” in Gaza.

“Efforts to depopulate Gaza are not acceptable,” he said.

Egypt is concerned that a ground assault on Rafah would push hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians across the border and into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It has threatened to suspend the country’s decades-old peace treaty with Israel.

Egypt, together with Qatar and the United States, a key Israel ally, has been working to try and broker a cease-fire and the return of the remaining 130 hostages held by Hamas, around a fourth of whom are believed to be dead. The negotiators held talks in Cairo on Tuesday but there were no signs of a breakthrough.

The war began with Hamas’ assault into Israel on Oct. 7, in which the militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250. The overall Palestinian death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 28,000 people, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, and a quarter of the territory’s residents are starving.

“Before the region is exposed to harsher threats, we need to stop the massacre in Gaza now,” Erdogan said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday.

With inputs from AP.