DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Egypt is building a wall and leveling land near its border with the Gaza Strip ahead of Israel's expected offensive on the border town of Rafah, satellite images analyzed Friday by The Associated Press.
Egypt, which has not publicly acknowledged the work, has repeatedly warned Israel, in the fifth month of its war with the insurgent group Hamas, not to forcibly evict the more than a million displaced Palestinians who have now sought refuge in Rafah.
But preparations on the Egyptian side of the border, in the Sinai Peninsula, suggest that Cairo is preparing for this scenario, which could jeopardize its 1979 peace agreement with Israel, which is a key factor in the region's security.
The Egyptian government did not respond to a request for comment from the AP on Friday. In a statement on February 11, the Foreign Ministry warned Israel of a possible offensive in Rafah and the “expulsion of the Palestinian people.”
Satellite images captured by Maxar Technologies on Thursday show construction work on the wall along the Sheikh Zuweid-Rafah highway, about 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) west of the Gaza border. In the photos, cranes, trucks and what appear to be prefabricated concrete barriers can be seen along the road.
These images correspond to those in a video distributed on February 12 by the London-based Sinai Foundation for Human Rights. The footage shows a crane lifting concrete walls along the road.
Nearby, crews of workers appear to be leveling and clearing land for unknown purposes. This can also be seen in the images taken of the area by Planet Labs PBC. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed Egyptian officials, construction is underway on a “20-square-kilometer (eight-square-mile) walled compound” that could house more than 100,000 people.
More conservative officials in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government have raised the possibility of expelling Palestinians from Gaza, something Israel's main ally, the United States, strongly opposes. Gaza and the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are the areas the Palestinians want for their future state.
The Israeli military referred questions related to construction in Egypt to Netanyahu's office, which did not immediately respond.
An Israeli Intelligence Ministry report, written just six days after Hamas's Oct. 7 attack from Gaza that killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage, included a proposal to transfer the coastal enclave's civilian population to tent cities in North Sinai and then build permanent cities and an unspecified humanitarian corridor.
Since then, the war between Israel and Hamas has devastated large swaths of Gaza territory and killed more than 28,600 Palestinians, mostly women and minors, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.