As the Israeli military advances its ground invasion of Gaza City, Egypt is coming under mounting pressure to accept a mass expulsion of Palestinians.

The Israeli military has already confined Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians into a small area of the occupied strip. And the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has now accused Egypt of choosing “to imprison residents in Gaza who would prefer to leave the war zone”.

US president Donald Trump has also supported the idea of forcing out the Palestinians. In February, he made the extraordinary proposal that Egypt and Jordan should accept all of Gaza’s population and said the enclave should be rebuilt as a “riviera”.

Egypt responded quickly by drafting an Arab-funded plan to reconstruct Gaza for the Palestinians. The project was soon taken up and advanced by the Arab League, with UK and European support. However, it was rejected by both Israel and the US.

Egypt’s leaders have since hardened their position against Israel over its brutal war, which the UN’s independent international commission of inquiry has just concluded constitutes genocide.

Read more: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, says UN commission. But will it make any difference?

There are three primary reasons why Egypt objects to any expulsion of Palestinians. First, Cairo argues it cannot be complicit in what would amount to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, a grave violation of international law.

Forcing Palestinians out of Gaza would erode any remaining prospect of Palestinian statehood. Previous forced expulsions of Palestinians in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, and again in the 1967 war between Israel and its neighbours, proved permanent. Many of the Palestinians in Gaza are already from refugee families who were displaced from their homes in pre-1948 Palestine.

As Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, warned in early September: “Displacement is not an option and it is a red line for Egypt, and we will not allow it to happen.” Jordan’s King Abdullah has been just as firm in opposing the expulsion of Palestinians into his country.

Second, the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, possibly including Hamas fighters, would present an immediate security concern. Egyptian security forces have long confronted a local Islamist insurgency in the northern Sinai desert near Gaza.

Egypt deployed more troops into the Sinai in 2024 after Israeli forces seized control of the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land along Egypt’s border with Gaza. Egypt said Israel’s move violated their peace treaty. More Egyptian troops were mobilised ahead of the Gaza City offensive.

Third, a mass influx of refugees would create serious instability and incur heavy costs. Egypt already hosts at least 9 million migrants, including around 150,000 Palestinians.

The state has also suffered economic losses from Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and, in 2024, was forced to expand a loan from the International Monetary Fund to as much as US$8 billion (£5.9 billion) to rescue its ailing economy.

Egypt-Israeli relations

Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, who Trump once described as his “favourite dictator”, has toughened his position against Israel. In July, he called on Trump to use his political influence to end the war and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. He also accused Israel of mounting a “systematic war of genocide”.

Then, at a recent Arab-Islamic summit in the Qatari capital Doha, Sisi described Israel as “the enemy”. He and other Arab leaders warned their existing peace agreements with Israel were now at risk.

Egypt was the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, after the Camp David Accords. But it has been a cold peace. Former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 in part because he signed the normalisation deal.

The hardening in Sisi’s rhetoric comes after Israel’s brazen attack on Hamas negotiators in Qatar on September 9, which revealed the hollowness of the US security guarantee for its Gulf allies. The strike raised concerns of further Israeli attacks on Hamas leaders elsewhere in the Middle East, possibly including Cairo.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian government has faced escalating anger at home over the war. In July, protesters attacked a police station in the town of Helwan, south of Cairo, demanding their government open the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Sisi’s authoritarian regime, which relies on coercion to survive, has moved to stifle pro-Palestinian protests. It has even reportedly forced the leading cleric at Al-Azhar university to withdraw a statement condemning the starvation of Palestinians.

But Egypt’s peace treaty has tied it into complex obligations with both Israel and the US. Egypt relies on US$1.5 billion in annual aid from the US, most of it in military support, in return for upholding the agreement. Egypt and Israel coordinate on security and, for many months, worked together on negotiations with Hamas to establish a ceasefire and an end to the Gaza conflict.

The two states are also economically linked. An Egyptian firm signed a US$35 billion deal in August to import natural gas from Israel to avoid blackouts in hot summer temperatures. That deal alone provides around one-fifth of Egypt’s gas needs. Reports suggest Israel has now threatened to suspend the deal as tensions between the two countries mount.

Egypt will be calculating whether losing this financial aid and these gas imports would be less costly than giving in to an Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Rory McCarthy, Durham University

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Rory McCarthy receives funding for his academic research from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.