When Donald Trump took office, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi — a man the US president once described as his “favourite dictator” — might have expected better relations with Washington.
Trump’s return helped spur a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, briefly halting more than a year of conflict on Egypt’s border. Houthi militants said they would limit attacks on Red Sea shipping, raising the prospect that vessels would return to the Suez Canal and ease disruption that cost Egypt an estimated $7bn in revenue last year.
It has gone downhill since. Israel last month restarted fighting in Gaza, scuppering hopes of an imminent end to the war. The Houthis and US resumed strikes, reigniting tensions across the Red Sea. And Trump has repeatedly proposed expelling Gaza’s 2.2mn population into Jordan and Egypt, which would pose a severe, destabilising threat.
All this has left the Egyptian president in an especially difficult position as he tries not to anger the unpredictable, transactional US president while leading diplomatic efforts to find an alternative peace plan for Gaza.
“He has been playing his hand very, very carefully,” said Mirette Mabrouk, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “At the end of the day, President Trump has a way of upending the normal rules.”
Egypt has long relied on US support, with Washington providing an annual $1.3bn in military aid and helping it secure an $8bn IMF loan last year and stave off economic meltdown. This was partly in recognition of Egypt’s mediating role to secure a Gaza ceasefire, but also to stabilise the economy of the most populous Arab nation.
While relations were frosty under Barack Obama, Trump’s first term brought a welcome improvement for Sisi, a former general who took power in a popularly backed coup in 2013 against an elected Islamist president. Trump invited the Egyptian president twice to the White House, describing him as “my favourite dictator” at a 2019 summit.
But facilitating Trump’s explosive plan to depopulate and take over Gaza — turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” — is an impossible proposition for any Arab leader.
Analysts say Egyptian and Arab public opinion would consider Sisi a traitor to the Palestinian cause, galvanising opposition and fuelling instability. Former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist militants in 1981 in part over anger at having normalised relations with Israel.
Yet Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have doubled down. At a meeting in the White House last week, Trump repeated his claim that Gaza, an “incredible piece of important real estate”, should be under US control.
Since the start of the war in October 2023, Egypt has feared Israel’s ultimate goal was to drive Palestinians across the border into its Sinai desert.
More than two-thirds of Gaza is under evacuation orders, while Israel has blocked all aid from entering since the beginning of March and announced a new directorate to oversee the “voluntary” emigration of Gazans. Cairo has accused it of using “hunger as a weapon”.
Netanyahu said at the White House that Gazans “should be given a choice” to leave and that it was not Israel locking them in, a reference to Egypt’s refusal to allow the population transfer.
The deteriorating conditions in Gaza under Israel’s onslaught and blockade appear to be a prelude to moving its people out altogether, said Michael Wahid Hanna at the International Crisis Group.
“If you look at the discourse [in Washington] and you see what’s happening on the ground in Gaza and what the Israelis are saying, it’s hard to think that transfer and depopulation aren’t at the core of this,” he said.
Sisi has refrained from criticising the US president, saying only that he would not “participate in an injustice towards the Palestinians”.
He has even sought to flatter Trump. The US president was “capable of achieving the long-awaited objective of bringing a fair and lasting peace to the Middle East”, he said in January when Trump first spoke of the transfer plan, which has been widely condemned around the world as ethnic cleansing.
Sisi has instead tried to mobilise international support for an alternative plan to rebuild Gaza and ensure Palestinians could stay on their land, with limited success.
He gained the support of the Arab League and, with caveats, the EU for a proposal to rebuild Gaza via a committee of Palestinian technocrats that would exclude Hamas and eventually hand government to the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the occupied West Bank.
But the US and Israel rejected this, saying it does not address disarming Hamas militants or ensure their departure, something Arab public opinion would condemn as collaborating with the occupation.
“Egypt recognises the limitations of the plan, but it cannot advance it further on the core issues . . . without much broader diplomatic support,” said Hanna.
Sisi is well aware that defying Trump can come at a high cost. The US president hinted in February he could cut military aid from Egypt and Jordan after their leaders refused his proposal.
Although Trump later appeared to backtrack, his patience might prove finite. In the leaked Signal chat of US officials discussing last month’s attack on the Houthis, an official said the administration should “make clear” what it expected from Egypt “in return”.
Despite all that, Mabrouk said the risks of agreeing to resettle Palestinians forced from Gaza far outweighed the rewards.
“The Egyptians are not going to knuckle under,” she said, “because there is nothing that the US can impose that is going to be worse than what is going to happen if they agree to the depopulation of Gaza.”
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