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NICOSIA: Egypt said on Friday it would not tolerate mass displacement of Palestinians and what it described as genocide, continuing to ratchet up its criticism of Israel’s Gaza offensive as thousands of residents of Gaza City defied Israeli orders to leave.
“Displacement is not an option and it is a red line for Egypt and we will not allow it to happen,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told reporters in Nicosia.
“Displacement means liquidation and the end of the Palestinian cause and there is no legal or moral or ethical ground to evict people from their homeland,” he said.
His comments are in line with a hardening of Egyptian language this year about Israel’s conduct in the enclave, which borders Egypt, even as it has worked with Qatar and the US to try to mediate a ceasefire in the almost two-year-old war.
Repeating accusations of genocide levelled by the Egyptian leadership against Israel in recent months, he added: “What is happening on the ground is far beyond the imagination. There is a genocide in motion there, mass killing of civilians, artificial starvation created by the Israelis,” Abdelatty said.
Israeli authorities did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Israel has in the past strongly denied that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide and says they are justified as self defense. It is fighting a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague that accuses it of genocide and which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned as “outrageous.”
Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023,.
More than 64,000 Palestinians have since been killed, Gaza health authorities say, with much of the densely populated enclave laid to ruin and its residents facing a humanitarian crisis.
Israel began an offensive in Gaza City on August 10, in what Netanyahu says is a plan to defeat Hamas militants in the part of Gaza where Israeli troops fought most heavily in the war’s initial phase. It now controls about 40 percent of Gaza City, a military spokesperson said on Thursday.
Much of Gaza City was laid to waste in the war’s initial weeks in October-November 2023. About a million people lived there before the war, and hundreds of thousands are believed to have returned to live among the ruins, especially since Israel ordered people out of other areas and launched offensives elsewhere.

JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said it struck a high-rise in Gaza City on Friday, shortly after announcing it would target a range of structures identified as being used by Hamas, particularly tall buildings.
Israel has been expanding its forces, intensifying its bombardments and operating on the outskirts of Gaza City ever since announcing its plans to capture the Palestinian territory’s largest urban center after nearly two years of devastating war.
In a statement Friday, the military said it had “identified significant Hamas terrorist activity within a wide variety of infrastructure sites in Gaza City, and particularly in high-rise buildings.”
“In the coming days, the (Israeli military) will strike structures that have been converted into terrorist infrastructure in Gaza City: cameras, observation command centers, sniper and anti-tank firing positions, command-and-control compounds,” the statement said.
Less than an hour later, the army issued another statement announcing it had struck one such high-rise, adding Hamas had used it “to advance and execute attacks against (Israeli) troops in the area.”
An animated infographic accompanying the first statement showed a video camera on top of a tower block with a Hamas “observation command center” in the building and an “underground tunnel route” below.
The army said that before Friday’s strike, “precautionary measures were taken in order to mitigate harm to civilians,” including prior warnings.
“The news about Israel beginning to bomb towers and apartment buildings is terrifying. Everyone is scared and doesn’t know where to go,” said Ahmed Abu Wutfa, 45, who lives in his relatives’ partially destroyed fifth-floor apartment in western Gaza City.
“My children are terrified, and so am I. There is no safe place — we only hope that death comes quickly,” he told AFP by telephone.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli strikes killed 19 people on Friday in and around Gaza City, an area which the United Nations estimates is home to nearly one million people.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement on Friday that: “the bolt has now been removed from the gates of hell in Gaza.”