RAFAH, EGYPT — The wounded come, speckled with shrapnel, blistered by flame. The man in the sunglasses and untucked shirt puts them into ambulances bound for hospitals in northern Egypt. It's been like this for days, bandaged Palestinians trickling out of the Gaza Strip.
This is a harsh land where the desert meets the sea and farming is a trick against nature and the elements. It is not easy terrain, not one for coddling, and perhaps that is why the Egyptian in the shades, Dr. Emad Eddin Kharboush, believes his country should permit only wounded Palestinians to cross its borders. Otherwise, he said, Israel will win in Gaza.
"We shouldn't accept refugees. The Palestinians have to defend themselves or die," said Kharboush, head of a network of 130 ambulances in the northern Sinai peninsula. "If we allow the Israelis to take Gaza, the problem remains."
Smoke from the 11-day-old Israeli offensive against the militant group Hamas, which seized control of Gaza after a unity government with its factional rivals collapsed in 2007, curls above the Egyptian border. As Israeli planes and tanks continued to pound Hamas targets in Gaza, Egyptians in Cairo, 200 miles to the southwest, have been protesting the decision by President Hosni Mubarak's government to keep most Gaza residents out. The gate at Rafah remains closed except to the injured who are ferried out in ambulances.
Kharboush's support of his president's policy speaks to the conundrum faced by Arab nations that have populations largely sympathetic to the Palestinians but either are powerless to stop the Israelis or choose for political reasons not to aid Gaza's extremist leadership.
"We can't send the Egyptian army to fight for the Palestinians," said Kharboush. "We are doing all we can. Egypt is being unfairly blamed. You can't expect me to fight for you, a Palestinian. I have no reason to go to war with Israel."
The fate of the Palestinians is a history in which Arab kinship is often trumped by national interests.
No country understands this more acutely than Egypt. It fought several wars with Israel before signing an unpopular 1979 peace treaty with its long-standing enemy and emerging as a key power in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Cairo brokered the six-month cease-fire between Hamas and Israel that the Palestinian group let expire
Mubarak's government is a U.S. ally that opposes Hamas' Islamic radicalism. But geographically and psychologically, Egypt cannot escape the turmoil in the Palestinian enclave to its north.
