From Egyptian small farms, to Israeli tables
How food exporting to Israel folded in the Delta’s hamlets
Last December, an Israeli man named Nissim Kimhi turned to a Facebook group devoted to Egyptian recipes with a simple question: how do you cook Mulukhiyah? He attached a photo to make his case — two bags of it, frozen. One bore the FRIO brand. The other was unmarked and translucent, just a white label in Hebrew: "frozen Mulukhiyah."
Following that brand name led us to mulukhiyah.co.il, an Israeli site selling Mulukhiyah and other frozen goods, all marketed as "Egyptian in origin" and priced from 15 shekels (266 Egyptian pounds). Corporate records pulled the thread further: ZoomInfo links the FRIO brand to EGCT Fresh Egypt, a company in Zezenia, Alexandria, that packages, processes, and exports agricultural crops.
EGCT Fresh turns up in the foreign trade database kept by Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), listed as an exporter to Israel. It turns up again in the records of Israel's Chief Rabbinate, the religious body that decides whether food meets kosher requirements: 31 records, all certified in 2025 and 2026.
That frozen bag of Mulukhiyah, it turns out, is a small thread in something much larger. Egyptian exports to Israel roughly doubled during the years of the genocide in Gaza, climbing from $145 million in 2023 to $307 million in 2025, then $26 million more in January 2026 alone.
But the money is only half the story. Egypt’s export network to Israel didn’t just grow in value during the war. It grew in hands.
The number of Egyptian companies exporting to Israel rose by about 650% from 313 before the assault on Gaza to 2,346 today. Seven times the players involved, all operating within a vast network that feeds Egyptian crops to Israeli tables.
This trade is no longer confined to major corporations and well-known investment zones. Dozens of small export offices have joined in, collecting produce from smallholder farmers and large landholders alike, in hamlets, villages, small towns, and district centers across the governorates. Shipping lines, collection points, and local agents now form the critical link connecting these small hands to foreign markets, Israel among them.
Going back to that database of companies exporting to Israel, we found 39 companies headquartered inside ’ezab (hamlets) across different governorates. Al-Attia Export sits in Ezbet Arab El-Fadan, Abu Hammad district, Sharqiya. Sky Export sits in Basayla village, part of Ezbet El-Lahm, Damietta.
By analyzing foreign trade data, sea, air, and land shipping schedules, and kosher certification lists covering 200 Egyptian products, we traced the infrastructure that made this expansion possible: regular shipping lines running to Haifa and Ashdod, local freight agents recruiting small companies with the glittering promise of exporting to “global markets,” and food certifications that open the door for Egyptian products to reach Israeli importers.
Out of Delengat, into Israel
EGCT Fresh has a facility in Zahra village, in the Kafr El-Dawwar district of Beheira governorate, where produce from Delta farmers is collected. A few kilometers away sits Delengat district: the single most common location in Egypt for companies exporting to Israel, according to CAPMAS data.
There, we counted 14 small companies and offices, most bearing the names of individuals or families, working mainly in grain, produce, and food exports. Their addresses are scattered across hamlets most maps don’t bother naming—Ezbet Gilani, Abiya El-Hamra, Ezbet Sakran among them—but two recur.
Ezbet Abdel Meguid Saleh, which claims more than one exporter to its name. And Nag Attia, so small it isn’t even its own village—considered only a part of Al-Hagar Al-Mahrouq.
Beheira is one of Egypt’s most important agricultural production hubs, the largest governorate by cultivated area, at roughly 1.6 million feddans, growing everything from wheat, fava beans, cotton, corn, and peanuts to tomatoes, potatoes, mangoes, grapes, peaches, and apples. The Ministry of Investment actively encourages investors to set up agricultural operations there.
But how do these products travel from small Egyptian villages to the ports on occupied Palestinian land?
Hamada Askar, a representative of Fajr Al-Islam Import & Export in Delengat—one of the companies on the list of exporters to Israel—says the company deals in dried produce and leafy vegetables, sourced from “traders and some farmers,” then shipped through Damietta, Alexandria, Suez, and Ain Sokhna ports, with the help of customs brokers.
Deals don't always run through a collection company, Askar told Al Manassa. Sometimes it’s direct contact with clients met at agricultural fairs and trade events, specifications agreed on the spot, the shipment settled, the payment cleared through the banks afterward.
His company’s name sits on the government’s own list of exporters to Israel. Askar denies it anyway. “I don’t export to Israel,” he says. “I export to Palestine.” A pause, then the rest of the sentence undoes the first half: “But the goods have to pass through Israel.” Any Egyptian company exporting to Palestine, he adds, “has to go in through Israel.”
Askar never answered Al Manassa’s later request to name the Palestinian companies he deals with. This leaves a significant gap, since his statements contradict the foreign trade database, which keeps exports to Israel and exports to Palestinian territory on two separate lists. Fajr Al-Islam appears on both.
We asked CAPMAS how it defines “destination state,” and how a shipment gets sorted into one country’s column of the foreign trade database and not another’s. A month passed. The answer, when it came, was a shrug dressed as procedure: CAPMAS only “presents the data.” Responsibility for what the data means belongs to the Customs Authority. Customs, in turn, said the destination is “recorded from the papers and documents of each shipment,” nothing more.
Egyptian companies on the kosher list
In the spring of 2019, another bag of frozen Mulukhiyah surfaced—this one made by Faragalla—posted by the Israeli military spokesperson in Arabic on X.
At the time, Egyptian businessman Farag Amer denied any export activity from his company to Israel, saying access to that market came with conditions, kosher certification among them.
Seven years later, his position hasn’t budged. His companies, he maintains, don’t export to Israel. He exports, he told broadcaster Magdy El-Galad, to “the world’s kitchen [sic]” and to the World Food Programme “that one feeding the Palestinians.”
That denial notwithstanding, Faragalla Group appears six times in the kosher certification lists issued by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, each record naming the Israeli importer who received the goods.
On the company’s own website, the kosher logo sits noticeably larger than its other quality certifications. Its products turn up for sale on Israeli shopping sites.
Kosher oversight of agricultural products, Israel’s Chief Rabbinate explains, goes beyond inspecting the product itself. Religious requirements attach to origin and to how a product moves through the supply chain: fruit from trees in their first three years doesn’t qualify under Jewish law, and rules require setting aside “tithes and donations.”
A dedicated department tracks fruit and vegetable marketing, working with rabbis, kosher supervisors, agricultural experts, and religious council officials, using a computer system that includes aerial imagery and lists of approved farmers and packing stations.
The Rabbinate’s data show 200 records for frozen fruits and vegetables — a figure close to what Arabi Post found in its June 2024 investigation, “Arab Kosher.”
Those records, spanning dozens of food categories, trace back to 33 Egyptian companies and exporters—Jenan Group, Healthy Food, Al-Wessam Foods, Agro Green among them—linked to 36 Israeli importers who move the goods on to big-box stores, malls, supermarkets, and small groceries.
The timing matters. Getting certified kosher costs around $8,000, one importer told Al Manassa, is typically renewed every one to two years per the Rabbinate’s stipulations. Every certificate linked to Egyptian products in Al Manassa’s analysis was issued or renewed after the war on Gaza began: 135 records in 2025, 56 more since the start of 2026.
Faragalla ranks seventh on the kosher lists, behind EGCT, which tops it at 31 products noted at the start of this investigation.
EGCT’s website discloses no ownership structure, no shareholder names. But data from trade fairs and specialist coverage ties its management to the Al-Dessouky family: Mohamed Al-Dessouky as board chairman, Ayman Mohamed Al-Dessouky as his deputy, Raghda Al-Dessouky as export director.
EGCT’s case shows how collection and freezing companies link Egypt’s agricultural market to Israel and beyond. The company calls itself one of Egypt’s largest, a middleman standing between the country’s smallholders and foreign markets. Israel included.
It pulls produce from farmers and small agricultural companies, freezes it, packages it, stamps it FRIO—the same brand on the bag Nissim posted a photo of—and sells it, much like that bag, in Israeli stores and shopping sites.
The company’s name also appears among 1,124 others registered under the QIZ (Qualifying Industrial Zones) agreement, per the latest data from the Ministry of Trade and Industry. The deal lets Egyptian companies export to the United States duty-free, provided their manufacturing includes an Israeli component worth at least 10.5% of the product’s value.
Trade with Israel became embedded in a larger export structure after Egypt signed the QIZ protocol on Dec. 14, 2004, a trilateral agreement between Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Washington opening the US market duty-free, on condition of that Israeli component. It started at 11.7% when the deal took effect in February 2005, before dropping to 10.5% in 2007.
Why kosher?
An owner of a company exporting frozen fruit from Beheira says it comes down mainly to money: kosher certification buys a price edge in Western markets, he says, comparable to the gap between regular and halal meat in Europe.
“Business is business,” the trader says, asking not to be named. Certification can run to $8,000 a year, sure. But exporting a single 20-ton container more than makes up for it.
The certificate, he says, can be obtained entirely online: application, payment, even the certificate itself arrives by email, paper documents following later. The certifying body checks the company’s papers and the factory’s address against Egypt’s own records.
He exports to companies and traders in the West Bank, he says, not to Israeli companies:
“If you’re shipping through the land crossings, you write Palestine. By sea, you write Israel. That’s just what’s required of you.” Not his business, he says, what happens after that.
He also gets offers from Israeli traders, by email, at trade fairs. “I went to a fair in the UAE. You register your info, and traders from Israel, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, reach out to you. And there’s a price incentive, I mean you make good money.”
Egypt’s bounty in Israeli markets
Foreign trade data shows the scale of expanding trade with Tel Aviv. Food exports to Israel jumped from $49.79 million in 2022–2023 to $105.58 million in the two years after; and by January 2026, a rise of $55.79 million. Roughly 112%.
Food, in other words, was the clearest channels through which trade with Israel widened during the war.
Dried and frozen fruits and vegetables, canned goods, and sauces top the list, rising from $12 million before the war to $29.9 million after. Fresh vegetables, plants, roots, and tubers followed, up from $13.2 million to $21.3 million.
Egyptian Nile Food Industries appears on official lists of kosher-certified products, with 20 records for products imported by Israel's Opal Yatsa during 2025 and 2026. Yet the company’s director, Ahmed Hendy, denied exporting any of its products to the Israeli market.
Hendy initially denied any export activity to Israel altogether, explaining the roughly 20 of his company’s products that show up in the Chief Rabbinate’s lists as leftovers from old dealings with an Egyptian intermediary company called Al-Marwa; an explanation that echoes similar statements Nile Food officials gave in the Arabi Post investigation mentioned earlier.(*)
“I never sought kosher certification and I don’t export to Israel,” Hendy told Al Manassa. “What happened is that the intermediary, Al-Marwa, bought our products years ago, and used our factory’s manufacturing papers to get certified so it could export on its own account.” The certification, he said, “renews automatically,” no involvement on his part, so long as the factory was approved in the first place.
He says he regularly turns down offers from middlemen at $3 to $4 a product to export to Israel. Still, he says, appearing on the kosher registries helps commercially in Western markets: Jewish customers in the United States trust his products once they see the certification.
Al Manassa tried to reach Al-Marwa’s director for comment. He declined to explain.
CAPMAS data tells a different story: registered export operations under Nile Food’s own name, headed to Israel. Directly contradicting Hendy’s denial. And contrary to the claim that the certificates date back years and renew automatically, Israel’s Chief Rabbinate shows Nile Food’s certificate was issued in 2026, expiring next year. Renewing kosher certification generally requires submitting updated reports on production lines and raw materials.
The Israeli registry doesn’t say Al-Marwa, as Hendy claimed. It says Opal Yatsa; twenty products, Nile Food named plainly as the maker of every one.
The list of exporters to Israel isn’t limited to small offices or produce companies. It includes entities with domestic and foreign investment: beverage, cheese, confectionery, coffee, and pickle companies. AJE Group Egypt, the soft drinks maker behind Big Cola and Volt, with a branch in the First Industrial Zone in 6th of October City. Bel Egypt Expansion, the cheese producer behind La Vache Qui Rit, Abou El Walad, and Kiri.
Also on the list is Africano Food Industries, a Syrian-Italian joint venture founded in Egypt in 2015; Al-Amal Food Industries and Export, based in Zamalek, Cairo; and United Poultry Packaging and Supplies, which signed a $3.3 million deal with the Suez Canal Economic Zone Authority to assemble poultry equipment in the West Qantara Industrial Zone.
Port Said Food Industries and Beverages. Green House Food Industries. Raya Foods. Finia Sweets and Chocolate. Egypt Cafe Company. Egyptian International Food Products. Hashem Food and Trading Manufacturing. And dozens more, smaller still.
By land, sea, and air: Every 48 hours
This jump in exports to Israel doesn’t exist apart from a logistics infrastructure that expanded right alongside its genocidal war.
The growth in exporting companies tracked a parallel multiplication of sea, air, and land shipping lines, and the rise of regular schedules linking Egyptian ports to Haifa and Ashdod.
With local agents for these lines now operating inside Egypt, reaching the Israeli market depends less on major exporters and more on small and medium companies, who fold their shipments into broader collection services not necessarily marketed as Israel-bound at all.
According to Fluent Cargo, four Egyptian ports—Port Said, Abu Qir, Damietta, Alexandria—feed into Haifa and Ashdod along seven shipping routes: 25 direct services, 10 more in transit. Thirty-five sailings, for container cargo alone. Thirteen carriers run them, Maersk and ZIM and Hapag-Lloyd among the names any importer would recognize, alongside MSC, ONE, Yang Ming, HMM, Grimaldi, and Borchard. Some direct routes take barely a day, repeating two to four times a week.
That figure doesn't capture the whole picture. It covers container lines only; bulk shipping, cement carriers, and raw materials move along separate routes, visible instead in ship-tracking data between Egyptian and Israeli ports.
Nor does the infrastructure stop at international carriers. Inside Egypt it becomes a network of freight and shipping agents actively recruiting small companies under the banner of “world markets,” while their schedules, implicitly and in practice, include Israeli ports.
PG Shipping Agency, the Egyptian agent for Britain’s Borchard Lines, promotes collection services for vegetables and fruit and appears among the services linking Alexandria to Israeli ports by sea.
Nor is it confined to the sea. Al Manassa ran a test on Fluent Cargo simulating an air shipment from Egypt to Israel that turned up a direct route between Cairo International Airport and Ben Gurion Airport—about one hour and 25 minutes, two to four flights a week—plus an alternate route from Sharm El-Sheikh to Tel Aviv via Cairo: two to four flights daily to Cairo, two to four more a week onward to Tel Aviv.
ZIM in Egypt
Inside this network, one name stands out as its most telling: ZIM, the Israeli shipping line. Data from the Alexandria Chamber of Shipping shows its Egyptian agent runs at least four main lines between Egypt and Israel, up to 16 sailings a month. The NE2 line alone offers eight monthly sailings—four to Haifa, four to Ashdod—alongside the Turkey Egypt Express, Sirius Line, and Turkey Israel Express, all running regular monthly service to Israeli ports.
ZIM was founded in 1945, a joint initiative of the Jewish Agency and the Israeli Maritime League. Its early work moved Jews to Palestine in the years before 1948, before it grew into a freight and logistics company. In February 2026, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd agreed to merge its Israeli subsidiary with ZIM, with a deal worth close to $4.2 billion, still awaiting regulatory sign-off.
The Israel Express service launched in response to rising demand for exports from Egypt to Israel
In 2008, Egypt renewed its agreement with ZIM to handle its maritime trade—through ZIM’s own fleet or through other lines in exchange for a share of profits. This came eight years after ties had been severed under pressure from Egyptian port workers, who boycotted the line in 2000 in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada.
Egyptian shipping and unloading companies in Alexandria and Port Said were ordered back into dealings with ZIM, which carried the Israeli manufacturing component required under the QIZ agreement for Egyptian garment exports.
In 2013, Walid Abdel Moneim Badr Amin—known as Walid Badr, now head of Egymar—announced he had taken over as ZIM’s shipping agent. At the time he headed East Med International Transport, served as treasurer of the Alexandria Chamber of Shipping, and chaired the transport committee at the Businessmen’s Association. He succeeded Ahmed Khairy, a former treasurer of the National Democratic Party’s Alexandria branch, who had held the agency for nearly 30 years.
ZIM isn’t the only link between Egypt and Israel. China’s COSCO runs seven monthly sailings from Egypt to Israel; three from East Port Said to Ashdod, and four from West Port Said to the same port.
In February 2023, Ocean Network Express (ONE) announced the launch of its Israel Express (ILX) service, a weekly line running as a direct maritime bridge between Egypt’s Damietta port and the Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod. The company said at the time the new line responded to rising demand for import and export shipments, and its first sailing launched on March 29, 2023. ONE now has four branches in Egypt employing dozens of Egyptians, according to LinkedIn.
In May 2024, Israeli logistics site Port2Port reported that MEDKON Lines had opened two new shipping lines — one connecting the Italian port of Ravenna to Alexandria and then to Ashdod and Haifa, the other linking Egyptian and Israeli ports directly, with container ships running both routes.
That wasn’t Medkon’s first appearance in Egypt-Israel maritime links; the same site reported in September 2023 that the company already operated three lines to Israeli ports, including one running through Alexandria and Ashdod to Haifa.
On the Egyptian side, Medkon Lines Egypt S.A.E. belongs to the Pan Marine group, which has worked in maritime transport and logistics for decades and sits fairly close to decision-making circles in the sector. Medkon’s representatives have taken part in past meetings with the head of the Suez Canal Authority, in a gathering of 25 shipping lines and agencies, and transport minister Kamel El-Wazir has visited the company’s RoRo shipping terminal at Damietta port.
Gulf – Egypt – Israel
The routes to Israel aren’t confined to the sea. In December 2023, as tensions rose in the Red Sea amid the war on Gaza, Israel’s Trucknet Enterprise announced agreements to launch a land corridor linking Dubai’s Jebel Ali and Bahrain’s Salman Port to Israel’s Haifa, and to Egypt’s Port Said and Ain Sokhna. The route runs through Saudi Arabia and Jordan, cutting travel time from 14 days by sea to four days by truck: a saving of roughly 70%.
Egypt’s role centers on WWCS, based in Alexandria. A company carrying particular weight given its founder and chairman, Hisham Helmy, Ireland’s honorary consul in Alexandria and a former adviser to Maersk Egypt. WWCS manages container movement on the Egyptian side of the land bridge, turning Egyptian ports into more than a final stop for domestic exports: a transit platform, securing the flow of goods straight from the Gulf to Israel.
Not all of it moves through Israeli importers, either. Some passes through Palestinian hands instead. According to a Palestinian citizen of Israel who trades in fruit and vegetables and spoke to Al Manassa, part of the Egyptian produce doesn't reach Israeli consumers through a direct contract between the Egyptian exporter and an Israeli importer; in some cases, it moves through Palestinian brokers and traders instead, who buy the shipments and redistribute them inside the Israeli market.
The trader, who asked not to be named, said this route gained importance after the war on Gaza began, as agricultural supply inside Israel took a hit from the drop in production out of the Gaza-envelope settlements, which used to supply a large share of vegetables and a significant portion of fruit before the war.
“After the war there was a shortage in the market, so Palestinian traders started buying from Jordan and from Egypt. The Egyptian exporter might have a deal with a Palestinian trader, and as far as he’s concerned, that’s the point of sale. Then it’s the Palestinian trader who distributes the goods inside the Israeli market, or sells them on to traders there, because the price and the profit are better.”
The bulk of what moves this way, he added, is frozen, chilled, and dried fruit and vegetables — goods built to survive longer transport and storage, unlike most fresh produce, which comes from Jordan instead.
War and ports’ second life
Set 2022 and 2023 data, ostensibly the ‘pre-genocide’ years, against 2024 and 2025, and a clear redistribution emerges in the exit points for Egyptian exports to Israel. Setting aside Al-Arish port, covered in a dedicated Al Manassa investigation, exports rose through Alexandria, Al-Dekheila, Damietta, and Port Said. The 6th of October dry port logged the sharpest jump of all: from $9 million before the war to $37.1 million after, an increase of more than 312%.
Exports through 10th of Ramadan, Suez, and Cairo Airport fell, meanwhile. Not a general rise across every outlet, in other words, but a shift toward specific ports and crossings.
Within three years, Al-Arish port transformed from a secondary harbor contributing just 0.1% of total Egyptian exports to Israel in 2021, worth $149,000, into a primary corridor and major logistics hub, capturing 23% of the value of Egyptian exports to Israel in 2024, and rising to 30% during the first nine months of 2025.
Ship movement data suggests this route is only widening. MarineTraffic data, tracked by the Egypt Intel newsletter, logged 461 round-trip sailings between Egyptian and Israeli ports in five months, from January 20 to June 2, 2026.
Al-Arish led the list with 192 sailings, followed by Damietta with 77, then Port Said with 67, Abu Qir with 65, Al-Dekheila with 31, and Alexandria with 29.
The question Nissim Kimhi asked, “the best way to cook Egyptian Mulukhiyah,” turns out to be only the visible tip of a sprawling export network reaching into hamlets and villages whose residents mostly have no idea what happens to their crop once it’s sold.
Between a farmer’s hand in Nag Attia and a plate on an Israeli table lies a distance that looks short on a shipping map, but folds in far bigger questions about the nature of this trade, its timing, and its limits.
Methodology and Data Sources
Foreign trade data: In tracking the dollar value of Egyptian exports to Israel, this investigation relied on the foreign trade database published by CAPMAS — an official database requiring a paid annual subscription for access to shipment and destination details. Al Manassa extracted the value of Egyptian exports to Israel by selecting the country and specifying the desired time range within the database's search engine, then selecting the relevant categories for analysis, comparing 2022 and 2023 data, as the pre-war period, against 2024, 2025, and January 2026 data, as the war period and after. A copy of the data can be viewed [here].
Company count: In counting Egyptian companies exporting to Israel, the investigation relied on the exporter and importer list within CAPMAS's foreign trade database, selecting Israel as the destination country and specifying export as the data type. Through this list, Al Manassa tracked the growth in the number of companies exporting to Israel, along with their geographic and sectoral distribution. A copy of the data can be viewed [here].
Kosher data: In analyzing Egyptian food products holding kosher certification, the investigation relied on data published by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, which includes the product name, the manufacturing or exporting company’s name, country of production, the Israeli importer’s name, the certificate number, and its issue and expiration dates. Al Manassa analyzed a sample of records linked to Egyptian products to verify the timing of certificate issuance and renewal, and to connect them to Egyptian companies and Israeli importers. A copy of the data can be viewed [here].
Ship voyages: In tracking ship movement between Egypt and Israel during 2026, the investigation relied on MarineTraffic data compiled by the Egypt Intel platform for the period between January 20 and May 19, 2026, to track round-trip sailings between Egyptian and Israeli ports and their distribution by port. A copy of the data can be viewed [here], or follow the Egypt Intel newsletter.