Egypt collaborating with israel in trying to starve Gaza into submission

Israeli minister embarrassed after revealing security co-operation with Egypt

Close security ties usually kept quiet to spare Arab regime criticism from its people

An Israeli minister has broken one of the Middle East’s key unwritten rules by publicly praising his country’s close security co-operation with Egypt, most of whose citizens fiercely resent its ties to the “Zionist state”.

Yuval Steinitz, the energy minister, revealed on Saturday that Egypt’s decision to flood the underground supply tunnels run by Hamas from the Egyptian Sinai into Gaza had been to a “certain extent at Israel’s request”. Security co-operation with Egypt was “better than ever”, he added.

Gaza’s network of tunnels is used to transport anything from donkeys to RPG’s  Photo: AFP/Getty

His words were met with an immediate outcry from commentators and former ambassadors. “He said something that shouldn’t be said in so many words,” Eli Shaked, Israel’s former ambassador to Egypt, told The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Steinitz was forced to retract his comments and apologise for the “unintended impression” his words had given, though by then the damage was done.

His comments followed news reports that Egypt flooded ten of Hamas’s tunnels near the border last Friday, the latest in a long series of moves against the group, with which Cairo has had fluctuating relations.

This 65 foot deep tunnel was designed to smuggle Palestinian militants into Israel  Photo: AP

Since the coup led by current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in July 2013, the Egyptian authorities have turned on it, cracking down on its supply lines and increasing security co-operation along the Israeli border to unprecedented levels.

This is no secret to the outside world, but it is a potential source of instability inside Egypt, where the Arab world’s hatred of Israel is widely shared.

“The security coordination between the two countries is one of the most sensitive issues there is for the security establishment,” the Israeli commentator Yossi Melman wrote in the Ma’ariv daily, adding that the comments reflected “the serious disease of uncontrollable talking” by Israeli officials.

Last week, a screening of an Israeli film in Cairo was cancelled by the Egyptian culture ministry in order to “prevent normalisation,” while this week, an Egyptian parliamentarian is demanding an investigation into how a book penned by an Israeli author on modern Arab society was allowed to feature in an international book fair in Cairo, Israeli daily Haaretz reported.

Mr Shaked said: “The relationship between Israel and Egypt is going very well. It may be words like these that can embarrass the Egyptian regime and el-Sisi in the eyes of the rest of the Arab world, and the Egyptian public opinion. It can put him under pressure.”