Gaza Diplomacy, Sinai's Dirty War
Egypt Security Sector Report
This week’s Egypt Security Sector Report opens with Gaza and the day after, as international and regional actors meet in Sharm el-Sheikh today. I also cover the exposure of mass graves in Sinai, the Air Force’s expanding empire across food, agriculture, and energy, and the regime’s deepening control over the civil service. Plus: Suez Canal revenues plunge to a 20-year low, US arms contracts advance, and retired officers consolidate power in parliament.
📁 Gaza, Cairo, and the Day After
In related news, the Washington Post revealed on Saturday
Even as key Arab states condemned the war in the Gaza Strip, they quietly expanded security cooperation with the Israeli military, leaked U.S. documents reveal. Those military ties were thrown into crisis after Israel’s September airstrike in Qatar, but could now play a key role in overseeing the nascent ceasefire in Gaza.
Over the past three years, facilitated by the United States, senior military officials from Israel and six Arab countries came together for planning meetings in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan and Qatar.
📁 Suez Canal
Suez Canal revenues fell to their lowest level in two decades during the 2024/2025 fiscal year, dropping to US$3.62 billion (approx. LE181 billion) from US$8.76 billion the previous year—a 45.5% decline, according to the Central Bank of Egypt.
📁 UNESCO’s Moral Collapse: Egypt’s Enany Rises Amid the Rubble
The appointment of Khaled el-Enany as Director-General of UNESCO marks a darkly ironic moment in the history of an institution created to safeguard humanity’s heritage from destruction. Lauded by Egypt’s regime-controlled press as a “record landslide,” his victory—55 votes to two—was choreographed less as a testament to merit than as the culmination of a diplomatic charm offensive, lubricated by France’s political patronage and Egypt’s tireless lobbying machine. Paris even decorated Enany with the Légion d’honneur weeks before the vote, a gesture that now reads less like recognition and more like complicity.
To present Enany as a champion of heritage is to invert reality. His tenure as Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities (2019–2022) was defined not by preservation but by sanctioned vandalism. Under his watch, bulldozers tore through Cairo’s Mamluk cemeteries—UNESCO-listed heritage sites—to clear space for new highways. Entire clusters of centuries-old domes were flattened while the ministry issued press releases celebrating “urban development.” When scholars, architects, and residents protested what one called “the greatest heritage massacre of the modern era,” they faced silence or repression.
A detailed letter sent by Egyptian heritage professionals to UNESCO’s selection committee catalogued this record in excruciating detail: the delisting of monuments to ease demolition; the cement-patched disfigurement of Luxor’s temples; the transfer of obelisks from sacred sites to regime showpieces like Tahrir Square and the New Administrative Capital; and the grotesque spectacle of weddings and banquets held inside ancient mosques and temples under his authorization. Even Saint Catherine’s Monastery—one of the world’s oldest living Christian sites—was targeted for commercial “development” under his “Great Transfiguration” project, condemned by the Greek Orthodox Church as a “spiritual catastrophe.”
Behind these acts lies a worldview that treats heritage not as a collective trust but as a branding asset. Enany once reportedly dismissed Egypt’s antiquities as “a pile of old stones,” a remark that encapsulates his utilitarian approach: heritage as décor for authoritarian grandeur, not as history’s conscience.
UNESCO’s founding charter, born from the ashes of World War II, pledged to build peace through respect for humanity’s cultural legacy. To elect a man accused by his peers of dismantling that very legacy is to betray that mission. Enany’s ascent exposes the organization’s moral bankruptcy: an institution created to guard civilization now entrusting it to one of its own gravediggers.
Dig deeper: Why Sisi Is Turning Egypt Into a Large Military Camp