Cairo: An Egyptian group, which played a major role in the army’s ouster of Islamist president Mohammad Mursi last year, has called for cancelling a peace treaty that Cairo signed with Israel more than three decades ago, in reaction to a deadly Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip.
“We are against the [1979] Camp David agreement, which is also rejected by the Egyptian people,” the Tamarod (Rebellion) movement, an ally of recently elected President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, said in a statement Thursday. There was no official comment.
Egypt’s relations with the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, which is governing Gaza, have deteriorated since the military ousted Mursi in July last year. Egyptian media has claimed that Hamas, an offshoot of Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, is involved in a spate of deadly violence that has hit the country in the past year, an accusation vehemently denied by the Palestinian group.
“The Palestinian cause is greater than any political leanings,” added Tamarod, implicitly referring to strains in ties with Hamas.
Egypt Thursday reopened the Rafah border crossing, for the first time since late June, to allow the transportation of Palestinians wounded in the Israeli offensive to be treated at Egyptian hospitals.
Egyptian medics and ambulances were waiting on the Egyptian side of the crossing, Gaza’s only outlet to the outside world, to carry the wounded to hospitals in Egypt’s North Sinai, state media reported.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s prestigious Islamic seat of learning, Al Azhar, condemned the Israeli attacks as “barbaric and bestial”.
“The Arabs and Muslims will not remain patient for long on these violations that contradict humanitarian values and international laws,” Al Azhar Grand Shaikh Ahmad Al Tayyeb said in a statement.
Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. However, trade and professional unions bar their members from having normal ties with Israelis.
