Food in a bottle: Symbolic gesture highlights Egypt’s Gaza dilemma

Starvation in the Palestinian territory sparked online campaign that lays bare Egypt’s uneasy balancing act

Palestinian families on a beach in Gaza. Israel controls all border crossings in and out of the strip. EPA

An Egyptian man in a widely shared video clip throws a partially filled plastic bottle with rice into the Mediterranean and prays that it reaches the starving in Gaza.

"Forgive us!" he pleads, addressing the Palestinians in the war-devastated enclave that borders Egypt. "God, please take this away and deliver it to Gaza!"

The food-in-a-bottle gesture quickly resonated in Egypt, where unconditional support for the Palestinian cause and anti-Israeli sentiment are ingrained in the hearts and minds of most of its 107 million people.

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Girls in the Sinai Peninsula, which neighbours Gaza, have now been filling bottles with rice and lentils and casting them into the sea.

“These are from the children of Sinai to the children of Gaza,” said one girl as she poured lentils into a plastic bottle. Another clip appears to show a man in Gaza retrieving one of the makeshift donations.

"Our Egyptian brothers, one bottle has arrived," the man joyfully announces as he stands with the sea behind him.

Some have suggested using balloons to send food to Gaza, with a warning that the wind direction and speed must be carefully calculated before release.

"Tell us if this can work because maybe it can be the beginning of hope and we can all tell God on judgment day that it was all we could do," Faten wrote on a social media platform.

Starvation and daily killings in Gaza have stoked public anger around the world. AFP

On Sunday, relief aid began entering Gaza from Egypt alongside air drops by Jordan and the UAE after Israel temporarily eased restrictions on the entry of humanitarian assistance into the strip.

That will likely bring an end to the social media storm stirred by the food-in-a-bottle video, but the broader challenges the Gaza war poses for Egypt’s government are far from over.

Delicate position

The Gaza war and its fallout have left Egypt with the delicate and complex task of balancing its national interests with its historical role as the leading champion of the Palestinian cause.

At stake is its 1979 peace treaty with Israel that is widely viewed as a cornerstone of the current regional order and the foundation of nearly 50 years of close ties between Egypt and the US, by far Israel's closest western backer and the donor of billions of dollars in aid to Egypt over the years.

The US-sponsored treaty has often looked fragile, even irrelevant, with the Gaza war and Egypt's repeated condemnation of Israel's actions causing relations to plummet to their lowest since 1979.

Another balancing act thrown up by the Gaza war is Egypt's close working relationship with Hamas – designated a terrorist group by the US and European Union – which came about as a by-product of Cairo's joint mediation alongside Qatar and the US to end the conflict.

Gazans have been living under an Israeli siege since a ceasefire collapsed in March. AFP

An equally foreboding challenge for Egypt is to stop Israel from making life so difficult or even impossible for Palestinians in Gaza that they would cross the border to settle in the sparsely populated Sinai, a scenario that Cairo sees as a threat to its national security that would hollow out the Palestinian cause.

Since the war began, President Abdel Fattah El Sisi's government has repeatedly sought to ease public discontent over the conflict, and, in a similar vein, other regional crises such as those in Libya and Sudan, as well as the Nile water dispute with Ethiopia.

Egypt and Gaza are closely tied by social and political bonds. Egypt is the only Arab nation that shares a border with the Strip. The coastal enclave has consistently been part of Egyptian empires dating back to Pharaonic times. Most Gaza families have an Egyptian connection through centuries of intermarriage or tribal ties across the border in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. In the modern era, Egypt administered Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when Israel captured the enclave along with Sinai and the West Bank.

The growing anger among Egyptians over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has reached a level that has compelled Mr El Sisi to address the nation on Monday, to debunk accusations that it was not doing enough to end the war.

"Don't ever think that we could ever play a negative role towards our brothers in Palestine, or that we would do that because of the gravity of the situation," he said in the televised address. "We play a role that's honest, sincere, respectable and honourable. That never changed and never will."

The potential for public discontent over Gaza spilling over is seen by some as realistic, particularly as many Egyptians are already struggling with rising prices for everyday goods and services, a challenge some associate with broader issues in government policy.

Al Azhar mosque in Cairo retracted a statement on Gaza amid rumours of Egyptian government pressure. AFP

Street demonstrations in Egypt are barred without a permit, including those in support of Palestinians in Gaza or criticising Israel. When limited protests were allowed in the early days of the war, some demonstrators chanted anti-government slogans and attempted to occupy a central Cairo square, the symbolic heart of the 2011 uprising that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 29-year rule.

'Feeble accusations'

Deepening the government's predicament, Al Azhar issued a strongly-worded statement accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, condemning what it called the international silence over the famine there, and bemoaning a lack of concrete action to feed starving Palestinians.

Millions read the statement and shared it online before Al Azhar withdrew it and released a follow-up, saying it had "bravely" taken it off social media out of a sense of responsibility before God, to spare the Palestinians more bloodshed and not interfere with efforts to reach a ceasefire. The message made no mention of any government directive.

Meanwhile, activists have been calling on the government for weeks to open Egypt's border crossing to allow food and other essential items through.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah El Sisi is under pressure. AFP

For its part, the government has insisted it was Israel, whose military occupies the Gaza side of the border, that closed the crossing. Sending humanitarian aid to Gaza without co-ordination with Israel could lead to armed clashes and possibly war, pro-government commentators argued.

"Egypt emphasises the shallowness and lack of logic in those feeble accusations," the Foreign Ministry said.

"Their content runs contrary to Egypt's positions and interests while ignoring the role it has been – and is – playing since the start of Israel's aggression against Gaza, whether the tireless efforts to reach a ceasefire, relief operations and the entry of humanitarian assistance through the Rafah crossing," it added.

It accused "some malicious groups and parties" – Egyptian parlance that refers, among others, to the banned Muslim Brotherhood - of what it described as a campaign designed to turn attention from what caused the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It called on Egyptians to exercise "extreme caution" when dealing with those "lies".