CrossFireArabia
Final statement of the 38th African Union Summit:
“Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and must be prosecuted internationally. We call for an end to cooperation and normalization with Israel until it ends its occupation and aggression against Palestine.”
The Summit was held in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
CrossFireArabia
Egypt said Sunday that it has a “clear vision” regarding the reconstruction of the war-torn Gaza Strip without displacing Palestinians from the territory.
“The Egyptian efforts regarding Gaza are ongoing and will not stop with regard to implementing the specific requirements of the ceasefire agreement in its three stages,” Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told a news conference in Cairo with his Djiboutian counterpart Mahamoud Ali Youssouf.
“We have a clear vision for rebuilding the Gaza Strip without any citizen leaving his land,” he added.
Trump suggested last weekend that Palestinians in Gaza should be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, calling the enclave a “demolition site” after Israel’s war. His proposal, however, was vehemently rejected by Cairo and Amman.
A six-nation Arab ministerial meeting in Cairo on Saturday firmly rejected Palestinian displacement from Gaza and renewed calls for implementing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Trump’s proposal came after a ceasefire agreement took effect in Gaza on Jan. 19, suspending Israel’s genocidal war that has killed nearly 47,500 people, most of them women and children, and injured over 111,000 since Oct. 7, 2023.
Red Sea
The top Egyptian diplomat said there is no justification for military escalation in the Red Sea after the Gaza ceasefire.
“We stress the need to enhance the security of the Red Sea and freedom of maritime navigation, and we reject any military presence of any country that does not border the Red Sea,” he added.
Tension has begun to ease in the Red Sea after the Gaza ceasefire deal. During the Gaza war, Yemen’s Houthi group carried out drone and missile attacks on Israeli cargo ships or ones linked with Tel Aviv in the Red Sea in a show of support for the Palestinian enclave.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi met early Sunday with the Djiboutian foreign minister to discuss bilateral cooperation and the latest developments in Somalia and the Red Sea region, the presidency said in a statement.
Tension escalated between Ethiopia and Somalia originated in January 2024, when Addis Ababa signed an agreement with Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland to use the Red Sea port of Berbera. Since then, Türkiye has actively mediated to ease tensions between the two nations.
Egypt and Ethiopia are already locked in a decade-long dispute over the construction of a dam project on the Nile River, which Cairo fears will drastically reduce its share from the Nile water. Ethiopia says that the dam is vital for its development process according to Anadolu.
Dr Khairi Janbek
By Dr Khairi Janbek
Like Dorian Grey in Oscar Wild’s novel, we hated the face of Arab political realism in the 20th century when we saw it, and hated it more in the 21st century when we stopped seeing it.
Without much ado, the current ongoing war, or perhaps more accurately wars, in the Middle East, started by opportunists for opportunistic goals that converged. Hamas with its 7th October attacks knowing only too well that Israel has the most right-wing and racist government in its history, and must have known that the its retaliation would be most severe.
It stands the reason to think the more severe the better, because this is likely to involve what is called as the axis of resistance in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and as a bonus Iran as well. But closer to home, Israel by making Gaza uninhabitable to the people is expected to cause an exodus towards Egypt thus bringing it into the conflict, and the inevitable thought of Israel moving into the West Bank, and the likely push out of the Palestinians towards Jordan will bring the country into the conflict as well.
For Israel, with its most extremist right wing and racist government, the attacks couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. The situation presented them with the opportunity of attempting to put what were merely theoretical ideas in their minds, into practical policies. Of course the root of what became a policy, is the rejection of an independent Palestinian state and the death of the two-state solution, by starting with breaking the Hamas grip in Gaza and transforming the area into a buffer zone with possible rebuilding of colonies/settlements on the area.
This is while the Gazans can be completely dependent on the good will of Israel for their survival, however, if the Arabs want to rebuild Gaza then by all means, but let them this time protect their investments by keeping actively the peace, and if Egypt can be persuaded to voluntarily taken in some Gazan refugees all the better!
Of course all eyes are also on the West Bank. Here Israel’s aim, one would say, is to turn the area into a “bantustan” totally dependent on Israel, with the trimmings of municipal power to the PNA to manage internal affairs while real control of the economic, political domains remain in Israel’s hands.
The Palestinians here would also be dependent on the Israeli economy, and relations between the West Bank and Jordan would be only possible with Israeli consent. If of course, Jordan would accept taking displaced Palestinians from the West Bank voluntarily, all the better as well.
Having said all that, where do we stand now after so much recent death and destruction? A total war? Whatever does that actually mean when Jordan has already its own war against drugs, Egypt and its problems with Ethiopia, Somalia, Syria between the hammer of Israel and the anvil of Iran, Iraq a soup for Americans, Iranian partisans and a non-descript government, Yemen teetering on the brink of losing the existential battle, while Iran obsessed with its nuclear programme. One would hazard a guess that total war means, the killing of Israeli civilians by Hezbollah.
Dr Janbek is a Jordanian writer based in Paris, France
