Shourky rejects Israeli call to settle Palestinians in Sinai

CAIRO – 28 November 2017: Egypt has rejected the Israeli Minister’s statements calling for settling Palestinian people in the Sinai Peninsula as an alternative solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Sinai is the best place for the Palestinians to live in,” Israel’s Social Equality Minister Gila Gamliel said during her visit to Cairo; the aim of her visit was to atten a regional conference on Monday.

Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukry denounced the Israeli minister’s statements and stressed that Egypt “will never give up Sinai.”

Shoukry firmly rejected the Israeli Minister's ideas on resettling the Palestinians, but added that her comments were made a long time ago.

Shoukry declared that Egyptian domestic affairs should not be “included in any statements by foreign parties most importantly when these statements touch Egyptian sovereignty.”

“The Egyptian land of Sinai has been irrigated by the bloods of Egyptian martyrs who were killed while they were fighting for its liberation…Giving up on Sinai is not a matter of discussion,” Shoukry told anchor Amr Adeeb on the ONE satellite channel on Monday.

Shoukry denied summoning the Israeli Ambassador to Cairo, adding that “the Israeli Ambassador paid a visit to the Egyptian ministry of foreign affairs upon his own request, not ours.”

Palestinian factions decried the recent statements by the Israeli minister on Tuesday, who called for establishing an alternative homeland for the Palestinians in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Hamas’s spokesman Sami Abou Zuhri said in a statement on Tuesday that “The Palestinian state will only be established on the land of Palestine.”
“We express our total solidarity with Egypt against any attempts or projects aimed at undermining the Egyptian sovereignty in Sinai or any other Egyptian territory,” Zuhri added.

Egypt has consistently reiterated its support for a two-state solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict along the 1967 borders.

Earlier this year, the spokesman for Egyptian President Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi said that the issue of "resettling of Palestinians" in Egypt's Sinai has never been on the table in discussions between Egypt and any Arab or international officials.