By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
(Click on cartoon by Carlos Latuff to enlarge)
"CAIRO, Jan 24 (IPS) - The U.S. and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding last week ostensibly aimed at combating arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip. Egypt, however, which shares a 14-kilometre border with the embattled territory, rejected the accord as an infringement on its national sovereignty [COMMENT: Do not believe this "rejection" by the Pharaoh. This is just a smokescreen to hide behind. He is fully on board with USrael to keep the Gaza ghetto sealed and the genocide going!].
"Egypt was not even a signatory to this document," Tarek Fahmi, political science professor at Cairo University and head of the Israel desk at the Cairo-based National Centre for Middle East Studies, told IPS. "Egypt is not obliged to follow security procedures arranged behind its back."
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) outlines general procedures aimed at stopping weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip. The strip, governed by Palestinian resistance faction Hamas since 2007, was recently the target of a devastating, three-week-long Israeli military campaign that ended Jan. 17.
Signed in Washington by outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the accord notes that "securing Gaza's border is indispensable to realising a durable and sustainable end to fighting in Gaza." With this stated aim, the document commits Washington to "accelerate its efforts to provide logistical and technical assistance and to train and equip regional security forces in counter-smuggling tactics."......
According to Fahmi, any new security arrangement on the border would require formal changes to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Camp David peace agreement. "But in the past, when Egypt wanted to modify the agreement to allow it to increase its border forces, Israel has adamantly refused," he said.
The Camp David protocols stipulate that Egypt can deploy no more than 750 border police on its borders with Israel and the Gaza Strip.......
According to a "senior Israeli political source" quoted by Ha'aretz, the number of Egyptian police on the border with Gaza could be tripled to reach a total of 2,250. But it remains unclear, the newspaper added, whether new border procedures would entail an amendment of the Camp David protocols or would merely represent a "tacit agreement" between the two countries."
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