Egypt-Israel. From political alliance to military tensions

Since the beginning of 2025, Israel has launched diplomatic and media campaigns hostile to Egypt, accusing it of violating the Camp David agreements¹ . Cairo is accused of having deployed troops in the Sinai and intending to set up military infrastructure there - in particular developing the al-Arish airfield and port as well as other military installations.

According to Israel, such projects were not part of the original agreement. But the Israelis themselves have recently occupied the Philadelphia corridor along the border between Egypt and Gaza in total violation of that peace agreement. Yet none of these developments have prevented the volumes of Israeli gas imported by Cairo from rising several times in recent months - 20 % up in October 2024, 10 % in November, 17 % in January 2025.

This scenario gives some idea of the nature of Egypto-Israeli relations since the signature of the Camp David accords 1978. At that time President Anwar Sadat had placed Egypt squarely in the sphere of US influence, committing Cairo to sharing US strategic aims, such as making peace with Israel - a country which an overwhelming majority of Egyptians regard as their principal enemy - and fighting communism.

All successive Egyptian governments have taken advantage of this situation to portray themselves to the Americans as the regime protecting Israel from the hatred and hostility of the most populous country in the Arab word. Cairo tries to channel the people’s anger and frustration by having its secret services organise demonstrations. Thus the Egyptian authorities staged a protest of several thousand people on 9 April at the border with Rafah against Israel’s plans to forcibly displace the Gaza population. But at the same time the Public Prosecutor’s Office extended the detention of dozens of young men who had demonstrated their solidarity with Gaza independently². So with one hand they distribute banners and with the other they ban the demonstrations they haven’t organised for fear they may get out of hand and end up threatening the regime’s security.

Thus the Gaza Strip has become one of the main preoccupations shared by Egypt and Israel. For the latter, Gaza represents the most dangerous and most important area of Palestinian resistance to their occupation. The enclave’s only other border is with Egypt. And until October 2023, the Rafah crossing with Egypt was the Gaza strip’s only window to the outside world.

The “closest regime” to Tel Aviv

While relations between Israel and Egypt have always been complicated, they have become more so under Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, considering the circumstances of his rise to power and the events which have reshaped his regime since then.

Israel has been one of Sissi’s most important supporters and defenders since the overthrow in July 2013 of the elected Islamist President, Mohammad Morsi. At the time, Benyamin Netanyahu and his team acted like a regular international public relations agency, contriving to deny the reality of a military coup against a duly elected President. The Israeli Minister of Regional Cooperation even went so far as to accuse the South African government of favouring terrorism because of its critical attitude towards the Sissi regime³.

It was as vital for Israel as for the Egyptian military regime to put an end to the threat of the Islamists taking power. It was also important for Israel to push the Egyptian army into the quagmire of politics, the governance of the affairs of State, as several Israeli generals and heads of the country’s intelligence agencies explicitly declared when interviewed by Razi Barkai on Galei Tsahal (the army’s official radio station) in February 2014. In that program, the former chief of staff of the Israeli Air Force, General Reuven Pedatzur, former chief of staff Dan Halutz, and Amos Gilboa, former head of the research section of military intelligence, declared that the Egyptian coup was of great strategic interest for Israel. “Even in its wildest dreams, Israel could never have foreseen this outcome, Reuven Pedatzur declared. The unprecedented involvement of the Egyptian army means that the balance of forces between Israel and the Arabs will remain unchanged for a long time to come.”

In this context, the Gaza Strip was a trump card that the Cairo regime could play at will in its dealings with Tel Aviv and Washington. After years of using closures of the Rafah crossing to punish the Gazans and the resistance factions, under the Sissi regime Egyptian intelligence services have developed relations with those same factions. They have even cooperated with them to fight the armed terrorist organisations in the Sinai. At the same time, and even before taking power in 2013, Sissi made considerable efforts to improve relations with Israel. As Mohammad Morsi’s Defence Minister, he worked unstintingly to destroy and flood the tunnels connecting Egypt with the Gaza strip, with no opposition from the President and even with the approval of his entourage. In 2014, he also had the land along the border evacuated in order to isolate the Palestinian territory completely. We see the consequences of this today with the strict blockade imposed by Israel, preventing the entrance of so much as a single loaf of bread for over two months now.

After that, the Egyptian intelligence services played an important peace-making role, putting an end to the armed clashes between the resistance factions and Israel. Thus Egypt sponsored the 2021 cease-fire following the Israeli offensive called “The Sword of Jerusalem”. The Egyptian regime became a key player in relations between Gaza and Tel Aviv.

After taking power, Sissi also turned to Israel for help in his war against the armed terrorist organisations in the Sinai - an intervention which interested Tel Aviv in that it protected it from attacks launched from that territory. On several occasions - the last was in 2021 - the Camp David agreement was amended to allow Egyptian troops [an] easier access to northern Sinai. The Israeli air force carried out air strikes there as well. In February 2018 The New York Times reported that more than 1,000 strikes had been carried out secretly by Israel, in close coordination with Sissi and with his personal approval⁴ .

These operations began after the terrorist attack on a Russian airliner over the Sinai which caused 224 deaths, and for which the Islamic State Organisation (ISIS) claimed responsibility. This security cooperation was the closest and most solid in the history of the two countries, as Sissi himself admitted in an interview with the CBS show “Sixty Minutes” in January 2019. He later asked for the interview not to be aired⁵ .

All of which was completely undone when the genocidal war against Gaza was unleashed in October 2023, with the unconditional backing of the United States. Tel Aviv broke every political, military and humanitarian boundary, making any mediation or diplomacy impossible. Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, took control of the border and separated Gaza from Egypt.

The army’s paradoxes

Despite its importance under Sissi’s rule, Egypt’s cooperation with Israel has remained limited in the military arena. Just as their common interests have prompted Israel to collaborate closely with Egypt’s highest officials in spite of the people’s opposition, a certain rapprochement has also taken place with the top brass of the military institution despite the hatred and hostility which most of the Egyptian army entertains towards the State of Israel. But it has to be said that this pressure from deep in the ranks has limited the extent of collaboration with a neighbour still regarded as a “strategic enemy”.

In Egypt’s popular imagination, Israel is indeed still that enemy which, in the course of a series of wars from 1948 to 1972, occupied its territory, bombed its schools and factories, committed many massacres of its civilians and buried alive many prisoners⁶. The military aspect is perhaps the trickiest and most obscure part of Egypt’s relations with Israel. For indeed it is thanks to the peace agreements that Egypt has received over $60bn in US military aid since 1970, i.e. $1.3bn per year. But during that same period, the US has always been careful to maintain Israel’s absolute military superiority over all the countries of the Middle East.

This superiority is based on the weapons supplied to Israel but also on preventing other countries from acquiring similar arms. For example, it was due to pressure from the US that Egypt was obliged to withdraw from two deals with Russia for the acquisition of Sukhoi-35 fighter planes and the S-400 air defence system⁷ . These deals came after the US had refused to provide any Arab country - including the United Arab Emirates despite its normalisation of relations with Israel in the summer of 2020 - with its F-35 fighter planes, thanks to which Israel dominates the region’s airspace. Egypt has often tried to make up for its inferiority with anti-aircraft systems and fighter planes such as the Russian S-300 system and MIG fighters. It has also tried to acquire Chinese planes equipped with long-range air-to-air missiles and other air-to-ground combinations in order to neutralise Israeli squadrons. These efforts were all aimed at bridging the gap between Egypt’s capacities and Israel’s air supremacy.

Under Sissi, the Egyptian army has been massively re-armed, a process one might also call unprecedented in quantitative terms and in the diversification of sources. There has been talk of more anti-aircraft systems, German submarines, aircraft carriers, frigates, French and Russian fighter and helicopter squadrons, destroyers, as well as hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces. Military cooperation and arms deals have also been stepped up in the East (Russia and China), with in particular Russian MIG-29 aircraft, Ka-52 helicopters, and Chinese drones.

It should be pointed out that these weapons are meant for conventional warfare and are suitable only for use against a neighbouring country. Moreover, US aid as a proportion of Egyptian arms expenditure has dropped considerably, from a quarter of the country’s military budget to 12 % today, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies⁸.

Israel’s forced displacement plan for Gaza

It is against this background that the Israeli campaigns against Egypt must be understood; they are part of the pressures being brought to bear on Sissi to make him accept the forced displacement of the Gaza Palestinians into the Sinai desert. Since October 2023, Israel has seen an opportunity to implement this plan, which dates from 1950. By so doing, Tel Aviv would eliminate the main pocket of Palestinian resistance, thus facilitating the conquest of the whole of historic Palestine. However Israel has come up against outright Egyptian rejection, which neither Israeli nor US efforts have succeeded in overcoming.

Sissi’s regime has been quick to realise that this time the displacement of Palestinians will not resemble those of 2005 and 2008, when hundreds of thousands of Gazans sought refuge on Egyptian soil to escape Israeli bombings. Once the aggression was ended, they went home. But this time, not only is the territory 80% destroyed, making any possibly of living there extremely difficult, but Israel’s determination to occupy and colonise the Gaza Strip is now perfectly clear. For Egypt, the displacement of over two million Palestinians - including over 10,000 fighters - would be a security disaster from several points of view.

First of all, there would probably be pockets of resistance formed in the Sinai - where Cairo has already had great difficulty suppressing an Islamist insurgency - and resistance operations could be launched from there into the occupied territories. This would bring about Israeli air strikes against Egyptian territory, repeating the Jordanian scenario of the sixties when Jordan’s army fought the Palestinian resistance groups during what was called “Black September”. So for Egypt to turn its arms against the Palestinians would have very negative consequences.

On the internal security front, there would also be a great risk if ever a part of the Egyptian opposition, especially the Islamists who conducted that armed insurrection in the Sinai after 2013, were to join up with some 10,000 battle-hardened fighters with very advanced combat skills after a year and a half spent fighting the Israeli army. Consequently, Cairo feels that American financial inducements or economic threats are insignificant compared with the risks inherent in this plan. The constant criticisms and warnings from Israel regarding the strength of the Egyptian army, which the former Israeli chief of staff Herzl Halevi had warned against before his departure in March, must be interpreted in the light of these various pressures - and of the actual risk of a clash between Tel Aviv and Cairo.

Translated from French by Noël Burch.