No ambassador in Tel Aviv, a thaw with Tehran: Cairo’s quiet recalibration

On the night of Sept. 9, 2025, Israeli warplanes struck a residential compound in Doha where Hamas negotiators were meeting to discuss a new American ceasefire proposal for Gaza. It was the first Israeli attack on the capital of a Gulf state that hosts a US air base and mediates on behalf of Washington and Israel. A state that, only days earlier, had been relaying American terms to the Palestinian resistance figures Israel tried to kill in the strike.

Six days later, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi flew to the emergency summit in Doha and denounced Israel’s “recklessness” and its swelling “arrogance,” called it “the enemy,” and warned of the region sliding back into “an atmosphere of conflict.” An official source who spoke to Al Manassa believes the president added some of the language himself. If so, it points to a shift in how Egypt’s establishment reads Israel today: not as a peace partner who can be difficult but is bound by a 45-year-old treaty, but as a direct threat to regional security, and to Egypt’s own.

The Gaza war is no longer just a crisis on Egypt’s border. In the three years since Oct. 7, 2023, its effects have spread through Cairo’s wider network of relationships, from Israel and Iran to Turkey and the Gulf states, and to Cairo’s sense of the role it can play in a highly volatile regional order.

In May 2024, an Egyptian soldier was killed and others were wounded by Israeli fire near the Rafah crossing. The Egyptian and Israeli militaries each opened an investigation, while Egypt warned against any threat to its forces and said it would take the necessary measures to prevent a repeat.

The incident came weeks after Israeli forces took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing and began operating along the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip about 14 kilometers long on the Egyptian border. By the end of May, Israel said it had achieved “operational control” of the corridor, which effectively gave its military control of Gaza’s entire land border.

Tactical adjustment

For Egypt, the pressure now falls directly on the security arrangements Cairo and Tel Aviv have built over decades. An Israel that is prepared to strike a Gulf capital, and whose leaders have openly floated the idea of expelling Gaza’s population to Egyptian territory, is no longer the Israel with which Egypt’s politicians built the peace treaty four decades ago.

According to the Associated Press, which cited a senior Egyptian official at the time, Cairo formally protested to Israel, the United States and European governments, warning that the Rafah operation could put the peace treaty at “high risk.” Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that Egyptian officials told CIA Director William Burns, during his visit to Cairo that month, that Washington must immediately press Tel Aviv to halt its military operations or Cairo might move to “suspend” the Camp David accords, which led to the 1979 peace treaty. The reports coincided with Egypt’s announcement that it intended to join South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, which accuses Israel of genocide.

But then-Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry came out at a press conference with his Slovenian counterpart and insisted that the peace treaty with Israel has been an Egyptian “strategic choice for 40 years, and the main pillar of peace in the region to achieve peace and stability.” The deadline for applications and declarations of intervention in South Africa’s case also expired in March 2026 without Egypt formally joining.

That contradiction is the real way into understanding what has changed in Egyptian policy: something closer to tactical adjustment than structural change.

For most of El-Sisi’s tenure, as for much of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Cairo treated the relationship with Israel as a strategic asset more than a political burden. It forged a working relationship that went beyond the text of the treaty: security coordination on Sinai and counterterrorism, intelligence and military understandings, mediation between Israel and Hamas, and large gas deals.

“It was a utilitarian relationship, and for Cairo that mattered more than warmth. But the war on Gaza was getting in the way of that almost every day,” a source familiar with the matter tells Al Manassa. Before Oct. 7, the source says, Cairo saw its relationship with Israel and the Palestinian issue as “parallel tracks.” The war changed that equation. True, the war has not made Egypt more engaged on the Palestinian issue: for decades, Palestine has been a core security and diplomatic matter for Cairo. But the nature of the questions Egypt has been forced to deal with has changed.

“With Israel’s attempts to expel Palestinians to Sinai, and the possibility of clashes on the border, the issue turned into a direct Egyptian national security matter. That brought calculations closer to the ones you make about an enemy, not the ones you make as a mediator,” the source adds.

On top of the traditional public coldness, there is now an “official chill,” in the words of a diplomatic source, “even though coordination and contacts continue at the lower security level.” Political and diplomatic relations have fallen to their lowest point: there are no meetings between the two foreign ministers or with the Israeli prime minister, and no diplomatic representation at the ambassadorial level.

Egypt’s ambassadorial post in Tel Aviv has stood empty since Khaled Azmy left in October 2024, and Cairo has made do with naming Magdy El-Dereiny chargé d’affaires, according to Egyptian official sources who spoke to Al Manassa. The Israeli ambassador’s post in Cairo has also been vacant since 2023. After the previous ambassador, Amira Oron, left, Tel Aviv nominated Uri Rothman to succeed her, but Cairo withheld agrément.

“In all likelihood, there won’t be any exchange of ambassadors under a Netanyahu government,” the diplomat says.

Over the same period, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty repeatedly affirmed Egypt’s commitment to its obligations to Israel under the peace treaty, as long as Israel honored its own. But he described relations as under “acute strain” because of Israel’s “aggressive policies,” and went as far as saying: “We currently have no partner in Israel for peace.”

Egypt came to see that Israel had crossed red lines, and that Israel’s own conduct has changed the assumptions on which the official relationship rested, the diplomatic source tells Al Manassa. The scale of destruction in Gaza, the threat of expulsion toward Sinai, the operations around Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor, and then the widening of Israeli operations to Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Qatar have deepened concern in Cairo about a pattern of regional behavior that reaches beyond Palestine.

Egypt holds to the substance of the relationship set by the peace treaty, but Cairo has at times grown less guarded in its language toward Israel, condemning its expansionist ambitions and military dominance and increasingly seeing it as a source of broad regional instability.

Cairo is therefore thinking about how to manage a relationship it considers riskier to abandon altogether than to stay in, while searching in parallel for wider regional arrangements. “That’s why Egypt’s regional strategy has become more a matter of managing crises as they arise,” says a second diplomat.

Iran and the stalled thaw

Egypt used to hedge among partners that largely agreed with one another. Now it has to straddle camps that are truly at odds: Israel and Iran at open war, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in an unprecedented public dispute, Turkey and Israel in rising tension, and the United States itself seeming less able, or less willing, to set the region’s tempo as it did for decades.

The same cross-currents run through Egypt’s immediate neighborhood, from Sudan to Libya to the Horn of Africa, and they weigh on a fragile domestic economy that at times stops it from choosing a side all the way. The second diplomat believes the war on Iran has made “the balance point shift east, toward Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar,” while the source familiar with the matter says Cairo has looked in that direction too, because there is something there that also unsettles Israel.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian visited Cairo in December 2024 for the summit of the D-8 developing nations. Months later, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi came to the Egyptian capital as part of Egyptian attempts to mediate between Tehran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He met a group of intellectuals and former diplomats, toured Fatimid Cairo, visited the Hussein mosque, and spoke of a “new phase” in relations with Egypt.

Soon afterward, the Iranian government stripped the name of Khaled Al-Islambouli, the army officer who assassinated President Anwar Sadat, from a main street in northern Tehran, and painted over a large mural of him on the Imam Khomeini building on the same street, according to official diplomatic sources who spoke to Al Manassa.

By the end of 2025, normalization was moving quickly and had produced frequent contact between the two presidents, and arrangements were under way for the Egyptian foreign minister to visit Tehran. But the track stumbled after the protests in Iran in January 2026, and then the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Even so, coordination between the two countries has continued, and Araghchi has visited Egypt seven times so far. Yet Iran’s response to the US-Israeli strikes, by targeting Gulf states, “affected the course of bilateral relations and stalled them,” says the first diplomat. An official announcement on exchanging ambassadors remained on hold.

The first diplomat praises the rapprochement with Iran as part of what the diplomat considers a broader Egyptian policy of not boycotting any party or turning away from any issue, including “Al-Sharaa’s Syria.” The source familiar with the matter, by contrast, criticizes the “negotiating methodology” of that rapprochement.

“We decided to open up to Iran, first of all because of Gaza, once we had a real problem with Israel, just as the break with Iran went on out of concern for our relationship with the Gulf states.” By the same source’s account, the break and the return were both for the wrong reasons, and in both cases Cairo needed to look for reasons of its own rather than carry other people’s burdens. Egypt, the source says, “as the center of the Arab world, shouldn’t go easy on the spread of Iran’s influence in the East. What I care about is my own standing and influence, and getting this close like this, Tehran might read it as at least accepting its policy.”

“This is a big bargaining chip,” the source believes. “We needed to get better terms, and to think about how to use our opening to Iran in our relationship with Saudi Arabia and where we stand with the Americans.”

Eyes on Istanbul

Egypt’s opening to Turkey followed a similar logic but moved faster, because the thaw was already further along before Gaza: the two countries restored ambassadors in July 2023, months before the war, after years of rupture following the political changes in Egypt in 2013. Al Manassa has previously examined in detail how the relationship went from rivalry to rapidly growing military cooperation.

But Gaza gave the rapprochement added strategic weight. “The reconciliation with Turkey sped up for economic reasons, but also because we have a common adversary and enemy, Israel,” the first diplomat says. The source familiar with the matter says: “What mattered was confronting the fearsome Israeli war machine on our eastern border, but we backed off on some points for the sake of our interest with Turkey, and we looked the other way on Turkey’s role in Libya and Sudan. Now we’re allying with Turkey in the Horn of Africa.”

The shift shows most clearly in Libya. After years in which Cairo backed the eastern forces led by Khalifa Haftar against the Tripoli government backed by Ankara, Egypt opened up to the government of Abdulhamid Dbeibah, and El-Sisi received him in El-Alamein, while Ankara widened its coordination with Haftar and his two sons.

The second diplomat calls this approach “geo-economic diplomacy,” while the source familiar with the matter believes it was “one of the cards we gave up easily, even though the East was under our control and we were trying to reach into western Libya. Now it [Turkey] controls the West and is extending its influence eastward.” The same source asks: “It’s a welcome situation, because our relations with Turkey are good now. But what if they turn bad at some point down the road?”

In 2025 and 2026, the rapprochement went beyond politics into direct operational cooperation. According to an investigation The New York Times published in February 2026, Egypt and Turkey have since November 2025 been running joint military operations in support of the Sudanese army: Ankara supplies Egypt with Akinci drones and precision munitions† for airstrikes on supply lines that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces run from Libyan territory held by Haftar’s forces. Such cooperation was hard to imagine a few years ago.

The rapprochement with Turkey also opens a door onto Egypt’s Gulf calculations. Cairo backs the Sudanese army as the guarantor of a unified state on its southern border, while UN experts, rights investigators and Sudanese officials have accused the UAE of arming the Rapid Support Forces.

By January 2026, with the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council seizing territory in Yemen and tensions widening between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, El-Sisi and the Saudi foreign minister declared their positions on Yemen and Sudan “identical,” which put Cairo closer to the Saudi position on those two issues despite its continued heavy economic dependence on the UAE.

But none of this amounts to a rupture. The UAE remains one of Egypt’s most important sources of investment, and since the Gaza war, Cairo has found another anchor in Qatar, where “there’s a great deal of harmony in the relationship, and you could say it’s at its best,” according to the first diplomat.

The Mecca question

If one moment brings into focus what has changed and what has not in Egyptian strategy, it is Cairo’s absence from the Mecca mutual defense pact.

On Aug. 7, 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement providing that an armed attack on any of the three would be treated as an attack on all of them, and strengthening defense cooperation among them, as calls grow for regional security structures to replace the arrangement Washington led for decades.

Egypt had taken part in consultative meetings the year before. But although it was looking for a new security formula for the region after the war, it had little appetite for joining a military alliance that could be read as directed against a specific country, and its need for binding military alliances seems less pressing.

Cairo turned instead to another form of coordination, the regional quartet, or R-4, a consultative mechanism that brings it together with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey. A third diplomat says Cairo assumed the idea of a military alliance had been buried, until it learned of the final form two days before the announcement.

Egypt did not sign the agreement, and Foreign Minister Abdelatty said joining would require “in-depth studies in light of Egypt’s constitution and its legal obligations.” Speculation followed, driven by press reports that Saudi Arabia was not keen to bring Egypt in and by Turkey’s mention of a possible later accession. Cairo was offended by the way the matter was handled, although it had shown no desire to join, and voiced its anger by boycotting a quartet meeting scheduled for Istanbul in late August.

The tension soon dissipated. In September, Egypt hosted a follow-up quartet meeting at its mission in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. It ended by reaffirming the centrality of the Palestinian cause to any lasting regional peace.

That sequence sums up the limits of Egypt’s shift: Cairo wants more room to move and a wider network of partners, but it remains wary of binding military alliances that could push it to take sides openly.

The economy adds another constraint. Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping cut Suez Canal revenue by about two-thirds in 2024, and tourism and gas exports have also suffered from conflicts in the region. A government this fragile economically has little room for maneuver when it comes to turning its positions into clear alignments or costly security commitments.

The source familiar with the matter believes Egypt “gave up some cards voluntarily, and that’s why we badly need to get out of this predicament and the economic crisis, especially as some of the donor countries are working against our interests and we can’t take any action to deter them because of the economic situation.” The source adds: “We need to get back our ability to show strength, because a basic part of politics is that others have to factor you in.”

But Egyptian foreign policy, the sources agree, remains cautious, risk-averse and reluctant to take center stage. What the Gaza war has exposed is that Egypt’s traditional identity as a moderate mediator, aligned with none of the parties, has become harder to sustain. The Middle East is now polarized around Israel, its dreams and its expansionist actions, and strained by a rift in the Gulf camp from the widening Saudi-Emirati dispute, an Iran question that remains unsettled, and a Turkey present from Syria to Egypt’s own African backyard.

Egypt does not want to pull out of its old relationships, but it cannot afford the luxury of fully aligning with a new axis. Caught between the two, Cairo is reworking its calculations without yet having decided what regional order it wants to see, or what role it wants to play in it.