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Egypt is building a walled enclosure along its border with Gaza, according to satellite images and activists, as Israel warned it would expand its offensive into the city of Rafah where 1.5mn displaced Palestinians have massed.
The prospect of Israeli ground forces overrunning Rafah, the city in south Gaza nearest to the Egyptian border, has sparked concerns that large numbers of Palestinians could flee across the fortified frontier into Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Satellite images taken on Thursday show the construction of a wall along the border near Rafah, while an activist group called the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights said Egypt was creating a “gated high security area” on the Gaza border.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has said it was essential that the country’s military campaign in Gaza should extend into Rafah in order to achieve its aim of rooting out Hamas militants from the territory.
Rafah has become a last refuge for people driven from their homes by Israel’s offensive elsewhere in the devastated territory. It is also the base of the UN humanitarian operation in the strip.
Martin Griffiths, the UN’s relief chief, said a possible spillover of displaced Palestinians across the border was an “Egyptian nightmare” unfolding “right before our eyes”.
The UK-based Sinai Foundation for Human Rights said Egypt was preparing for a “mass exodus” of refugees, and published pictures and videos of bulldozers working in the desert.
The group said on its social media channels that it had interviewed two local contractors engaged in the construction who confirmed they were clearing the ground from remains of houses. Those homes were demolished in recent years as Egypt created an isolation zone during its war with a local affiliate of Isis.
The unnamed contractors are also quoted as saying they were building seven-metre-high walls around an enclosed area.
Egypt has repeatedly said it rejected any attempt by Israel to expel the people of Gaza into its Sinai peninsula. Analysts say the construction was likely a contingency measure in case Palestinians began streaming over the border to flee Israeli forces.
Egyptian officials, including the governor of North Sinai, have denied that any such preparations were taking place.
Netanyahu has said he has instructed the military to prepare a plan to evacuate civilians in Rafah to safe areas. But UN officials say there are no safe areas in Gaza and that much of the territory is uninhabitable and that there is a risk of unexploded ordnance in many places.
Tamara Alrifiai, spokesperson for UNRWA, the main UN agency working in the territory, said: “We have long been saying that the amassing of people in Rafah so close to the border and without anywhere safe to go will inevitably lead to their trying to cross over if they have no other option.”
Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, has traditionally had good relations with the Jewish state including security co-ordination in the sparsely populated Sinai, where Isis militants, though now largely vanquished, have operated for much of the past 10 years.
Cairo, along with Qatar and the US, has been involved in mediation efforts aimed at ending hostilities between Israel and Hamas and securing the release of Israeli hostages held in the territory.