Following Egypt’s January 25 Revolution, Egyptians are pushing for some of the country’s foreign relations policies to change, especially those related to Israel and Palestine.
Aid or protest convoys to Gaza were frequently stopped or arrested during the Mubarak era by the ousted president’s regime, and now for the first time since the revolution thousands of activists are planning to march to the Rafah border town.
According to Egyptian reports, buses will depart from Cairo’s Tahrir Square at noon on 14 May and then meet up with more protesters in Suez. Planners say they hope to reach Gaza by the evening, march on the border crossing, and participate in the marches and protests inside the Palestinian territory scheduled for the following morning.
Besides the march, protests are also scheduled to be held outside the Israeli embassy.
Ahmed Doma, member of the Justice and Freedom Youth Movement, said “we are organising this event as part of the Arab internet call for a third Palestinian Intifada and as part of what has now been termed ‘the Arab mass march’.”
The call went out on Facebook for all Arabs to march en masse towards the borders to besiege Israel from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and demand the right of all Palestinian refugees to return.
“The former [Egyptian] regime was largely responsible for driving and enforcing the sanctions on Gaza, even when international agreements called on Egypt to keep the Rafah border open,” said Halim Heneish, a founding member of the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom.
The Palestinian refugees say that in the summer of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes after armed Jewish guerrillas stormed their villages and forced them to leave after hundreds of other Palestinian fellows were slaughtered.
The refugees fled to neighboring countries like Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, but many of them went to the West Bank, which was under Jordan’s rule and to the Gaza Strip which was under Egypt’s rule. The United Nations helped the refugees by setting up refugee camps for them.
There are 5 million Palestinian refugees living in the Palestinian territories, in Arab countries and all over the world, according to figures from UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA).
Palestinians demand the right for the 4.6 million descendants of those who fled in 1948 to return to their occupied lands that are now inside Israel.
Source: Agencies