Natural gas for Gaza!

Natural gas for Gaza!
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(Hassan Al-Rushdie)
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December 19, 1445 AH
May 7, 2024 AD
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Did the gas crisis in Egypt play a role in the events in Gaza, especially with regard to the Philadelphia axis and the Rafah crossing, was the Zionist side able to exert pressure on the Egyptian side, and what were the intentions of the Egyptian regime to respond to these extortion attempts?

Through this equation, the Zionist entity has tried in recent days to impose its will on Egypt.

When the army of the Zionist entity invaded Rafah a few weeks ago, its first priority was to capture the Philadelphia axis and control the Rafah crossing, which is the only way out of Gaza that is not controlled by the Zionist occupation and through which aid enters Israel. Doctors and medical teams are being evacuated from Egyptian territory and entering Gaza through this crossing to help treat the wounded, while some sources speak of delivering weapons to resistance groups through the tunnels between Sinai and Gaza.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the occupation army targeted this crossing point in order to control it and along the Philadelphia axis, and especially when it entered the axis and occupied this crossing point, it deliberately provoked the Egyptian side by publishing photos taken from Zionist reconnaissance aircraft. While reviewing the Egyptian side of the crossing, a Zionist armored vehicle appeared, which was … raising a huge Zionist flag, which the Egyptians saw as a show and a challenge.

The Zionists were not satisfied with this, but they began to build a new axis parallel to the Philadelphia axis to the east, extending from the Kerem Shalom point to the Mediterranean Sea, which they called the Davidic Axis or the Axis of David. The Zionist army completed the isolation of Gaza from Egypt, especially as they now began to supply the new axis with tools and equipment to detect tunnels or prevent the construction of new ones.

Despite Egypt’s silence and despite the threats made before the invasion of Rafah that the Philadelphia axis was a red line, the Zionists went a step further and demanded that the Egyptian government, in coordination with them, open the Rafah crossing for humanitarian aid and that Egypt send a joint Arab force into the Gaza Strip as part of Hamas’ plan to take control of the Strip and keep it away from Palestinian resistance groups.

But the Egyptian government rejected these demands and demanded that the entity withdraw from the crossing points and the Philadelphia axis and hand them over to the Palestinian Authority or any Palestinian party, and refused to send troops or support any army that entered the Gaza Strip unless an agreement was reached with the Hamas people.

Despite the intensification of Zionist pressure by Arab and Western parties, Egypt refuses to give up the Palestinian card, as it is the only one that gives it a regional role and is also related to Egypt’s cohesion. The regime itself is threatened with economic collapse due to the deepening of its external debt problems and the collapse of its currency.

In a report published in the Times of Israel, the Zionist Energy Minister said that the Zionist government decided to increase gas exports to Egypt to achieve diplomatic goals, but he did not reveal what those goals were.

As the Zionists became increasingly embroiled in the Gaza War quagmire, unable to achieve a strategic victory over the Palestinian resistance movement and realize their goal of finding an alternative to Hamas, any alternative regional military force would need to be recognized by Egypt, the Zionists took the option of using gas cards to pressure the Egyptians.

The impact of Zionist blackmail became apparent when the Egyptian government announced plans to cut electricity to Egyptian cities and villages for a few hours each day at an unspecified time.

The matter does not concern household electricity but extends to factories, where many large fertilizer factories have announced that they are producing more fertilizer than they export due to a lack of natural gas supply needed for their operations.

While the government’s reason for interrupting the gas from neighboring gas fields needed for the power station is due to technical problems related to the field, news sources claim that the country is a Zionist entity, and confirming this information is that Egypt only imports gas from this entity.

But why did the Egyptian government push itself into this corner? Why did Egypt go from being a natural gas producer and even exporter to an importer that mortgaged its national security with a strategic enemy?

Egypt Natural Gas Facts

Suddenly, in 2011, Egypt went from being a gas exporter to a gas importer. How did this transformation happen?

Until 2010, Egypt was a natural gas exporter, and for eight years, from 2002 to 2010, Wood Mackenzie, a global company specializing in energy, published annual reports on Egypt’s natural gas reserves, concluding that the reserves were sufficient to meet Egypt’s domestic consumption and enable Egypt to export natural gas for no less than 35 years.

In mid-2011, Egypt’s natural gas supply was suddenly cut off, and the then government represented by the Military Council was forced to contact Qatar and other Gulf countries to meet the country’s needs for liquefied natural gas and oil.

At the time, no one could give a convincing explanation or account for why Egypt’s gas fields were depleted in seven months, despite scientific facts suggesting that such depletion would take years to achieve.

When the Egyptian Minister of Petroleum was asked at the time what happened to the fields, his answer surprised everyone by saying: “We don’t know the coordinates of the wells in these fields, and even if we knew the coordinates, we cannot reach them because they are located at a depth of 1,500 to 2,500 meters below the surface of the sea, which led to speculation within Egypt that some sovereign body had closed the wells.

But over the past decade, people have started talking again about the natural gas possibilities that Egypt is beginning to discover.

Huge gas discoveries were announced, the most notable of which was the Zohr field.

The field accounts for more than 40% of Egypt’s natural gas production, and with the discovery of the field in 2018, there was a major breakthrough, and Egypt began to export natural gas, but Egypt’s mismanagement of the Zohr field has led to a dispute between the Egyptian government and Italy’s Eni, which discovered and manages the field, which made the company withdraw from the Egyptian market because it did not receive $1.6 billion from the Egyptian government.

Ahmed Al-Saadi, an energy expert and petroleum engineer at a foreign oil company in Egypt, told the Al-Hurra website that one of the most important reasons for the crisis is that natural gas is being extracted from oil fields faster than normal rates, which results in multiple errors such as leaks, which causes some wells to stop working, resulting in a drop in natural gas production.

Before the uproar over the Italian divestment and the Zohr field shutdown, Egypt announced that it would import Israeli gas, but not to be re-exported to Europe later, as Egypt said at the time. It was re-liquefied, but we found out this year, a few months after the Gaza war, that Egypt was importing this gas for local production, because a large number of power stations would supply Egypt with electricity once the Zionist entity stopped exporting gas. The suspension of production in Egypt, which led to a long period of darkness, meant that Israeli gas was used for local consumption, not for export, as it was said at the beginning.

This was confirmed by Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly, who defended the power outage in Egypt by saying that an oil field in a neighboring country was shut down and there was a technical failure, which caused a sudden 12-hour power outage.

The website says "Cairo 24" Masri said the Egyptian prime minister’s statement raised questions among many citizens about the gas field, which has been experiencing a 12-hour crisis. The prime minister said the field is located in one of the neighboring regions, but did not mention his name or mention the region or company that operates the field. The website suggested that the field is an Israeli field.

The negligence in gas archiving does not stop there, as numerous studies have proven that two oil fields claimed by the Zionist entity (one of which exports gas to Egypt) were originally Egyptian-owned and were neglected after the border between Egypt and Cyprus was demarcated in 2003, resulting in the withdrawal of the fields from Egyptian waters, shortly before the Zionist entity announced its discovery.

Now the Egyptian government buys gas from them at twice the international price.

The future of gas crises

News agencies reported that the UAE announced a new plan to supply natural gas to Egypt, and the news came after reports that the UAE, Jordan and Egypt would send a joint force to Gaza.

But the Egyptian leadership seems to be heading in another direction, to open up a different path from the Zionist gas imports, so it has signed new contracts with other countries on the international market to import liquefied natural gas from them in order to avoid Zionist blackmail regarding Gaza.

Reuters reported that Egypt has won a bid to buy 17 cargoes of liquefied natural gas from the Dutch gas trading platform, which will be delivered in the summer.

Egypt is seeking three more deliveries between August and September, the sources said.

Egyptian television cited security sources as saying Egypt had refused to send troops to Gaza in an apparent response to Zionist pressure.

This is what prompted the Zionist entity to retreat in order not to lose this blackmail card.

In a report published in the Times of Israel, the Zionist Energy Minister said that the Zionist government decided to increase gas exports to Egypt to achieve diplomatic goals, but he did not reveal what those goals were.

The minister literally meant that doubling fossil gas exports would increase state revenues and improve foreign relations.

But what is surprising is the size of this increase, with the Israeli Ministry of Energy initially approving an additional 118 billion cubic meters of fossil gas exports from the Leviathan field, compared to the current 105 billion cubic meters. The export regulator of the Zionist entity has granted permission.

The question now is: Will the Egyptian side continue to stand firm in the face of Zionist pressure so that the Palestinians do not lose the minimum support to move away from Zionist control and domination?

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