Egypt puts Gaza border forces on alert after breach threat

EGYPT: Egypt on Wednesday put its security forces on the border with the Gaza Strip on high alert after Hamas threatened to repeat a January breach that saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flood into Egypt.

Security measures in the Sinai peninsula have been reinforced, especially in the area between the divided border town of Rafah and the city of El-Arish to the southwest, a security official said.

Ambulances have also been sent to near Egypt's 14-kilometre (nine-mile) border with the Gaza Strip.

Egypt "will not take lightly the protection of its frontiers against any attempt to violate them, no matter who they are," an unnamed official told the official MENA news agency.

"Egypt's borders are a red line you cannot cross," the official said. "Egypt is capable of responding to any attempt to violate its frontiers."

On Tuesday, Khalil al-Hayya, a senior member of Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip, said that "all options are open to break the siege" by Israel. "I expect that what will happen next will be greater than what happened before, not only against the Egyptian border, but against all the crossings," Hayya said.

Israel has sealed off Gaza from all but vital goods since Hamas seized power last June, in a bid to halt rocket attacks from the territory and to put pressure on the Islamist-run government.

"We call parties to move urgently and immediately to end the siege and warn of an unprecedented explosion if it continues," Hayya said.

Hamas has been negotiating with Egypt for weeks in a bid to reopen the Rafah crossing, the only gateway to Gaza that bypasses Israel.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has called for a return to a 2005 agreement in which European Union monitors were stationed at the crossing and Israel monitored it with electronic surveillance.

But Hamas, which violently took control of Gaza after routing forces loyal to Abbas, has rejected any foreign involvement and demanded that Rafah be reopened as an Egyptian-Palestinian crossing.

On January 23, Palestinian militants demolished the border barricades between Gaza and Egypt, sending hundreds of thousands of Gazans streaming into Egypt to stock up on supplies.

Cairo, Friday, AFP