115,000 Gazans living in Egypt, most of them illegally

Cairo does not recognize nor help those who overstay the tourist visas paid for with extortionate fees.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

While Egypt officially closed its border to Gazans desperate to flee the Hamas-Israel war as soon as it began in October, some 115,000 have managed to get into the country, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

This number, cited by Cairo’s Palestinian embassy, includes some 5,500 injured Palestinians who have been allowed entry to receive medical treatment, out of the tens of thousands that Hamas claims have been wounded in the war.

According to the report, most of the rest came in with the aid of foreign embassies, and the Hala Consulting and Tourism agency, which according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an arm of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service.

Hala had been outed in February by the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar as charging people who want to escape Gaza through the Rafah border thousands of dollars apiece to receive a tourist visa.

When their 45-day visa runs out, these unrecognized refugees live completely under the radar. With no papers, finding a regular job, opening a business or even a bank account is a nightmare, and parents are unable to enroll their children in public schools.

Last month, Reuters reported that the Palestinian Embassy was asking Cairo to supply at least temporary permits for those who had made it out of Gaza.

“We are talking about a category (of people) in an exceptional situation,” Ambassador Diab al-Louh told the news agency. “We asked the state to give them temporary residencies that can be renewed until the crisis in Gaza is over.”

They do not want to stay in Egypt permanently, he stressed.

“We are speaking of 100,000 who are looking forward to the day they can come back to Gaza,” he said.

Egypt has steadily refused to allow Gazans to escape the war en masse even by building temporary refugee centers in the practically empty Sinai Desert.

The government has several major concerns.

It does not want to be seen as facilitating Israel’s offensive in Gaza in any way, including by helping remove Hamas’ human shields.

It fears that Israel would not allow these people to return home. This would turn the temporary camps into permanent towns in a country that is straining to feed and employ its own citizens.

Egyptians also do not want to be seen as repeating what Arabs call the Naqba (“catastrophe”), when hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled Israel in the War of Independence and became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. All except Jordan refused to absorb them and give them citizenship, normalizing their “refugee” status to this day.

Egyptgazan civiliansPalestinian refugeesRafah crossing