Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdel Aati accused Israel of spreading lies to distract attention from reaching a prisoner exchange deal and a ceasefire in Gaza.
Abdel-Ati said – during a press conference in Cairo with his Danish counterpart Lars Lokke Rasmussen – that whenever the agreement comes close, Israel rushes to invent excuses and justifications to obstruct it.
He stressed that “the closer we get to an agreement in Gaza, the more we face provocative policies that only aim to further escalate.”
The Egyptian Foreign Minister continued, “We spent huge sums of money to build a security fence and destroy tunnels on the border with the Gaza Strip,” stressing that “the claim that weapons entered Gaza from our side is a complete lie.”
He stressed that the continued closure of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing by the Israeli occupation prevents the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, stressing the importance of full access for humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip without any restrictions.
He stressed that the two-state solution is the basic solution to resolve the crisis between Palestine and Israel.
Abdel-Ati did not clarify what he meant by Israeli lies, but Cairo announced on Tuesday its rejection of a statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the smuggling of weapons from Egypt to Gaza through tunnels under the Philadelphi border axis.
Egypt considered Netanyahu’s statement an attempt to obstruct the Egyptian-Qatari-American mediation to reach an agreement to end the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza for the 11th month.
Netanyahu insists on continuing to occupy the Philadelphi Corridor on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, which is rejected by Cairo and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and hinders reaching an agreement.
In Israel, too, security officials, the opposition, and prisoners’ families have accused Netanyahu for months of obstructing an agreement with Hamas, fearing the collapse of his ruling coalition and the loss of his position, and are demanding that he resign.
Far-right ministers, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are threatening to withdraw from the government and bring it down if it accepts an agreement to end the war.
With American support, Israel has been waging a war on Gaza since October 7, resulting in more than 135,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that killed dozens of children.
