Egypt is evacuating thousands of its residents from the Sinai side of the Gaza border in order to form a buffer zone.

The Egyptian government declared a state of emergency in the area after last week’s attack in which 31 soldiers were killed by the Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, a terror group linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist organization.

Egyptians began moving from the area on Wednesday in accordance with military orders issued by the government.

The planned buffer zone is intended to block terrorists and smugglers, government officials told Egyptian media.

They keys to 62 homes were handed over to military officials by their owners on Wednesday (Oct. 29) in the town of Rafah, which straddles the border with Gaza.

According to international media, Egypt plans to expel families living in 880 homes along the northern Sinai border with Gaza.

That means that some 10,000 Egyptians will be left homeless, or at the least, displaced by the expulsion. The number is comparable to the number of Israelis expelled in the 2005 Disengagement from the Gush Katif region of Gaza and northern Samaria.

As was the case in Israel, the Egyptian government has promised financial compensation to those who were displaced – but residents have yet to see the money.

Unlike Israel, however, residents were given very short notice to pack up and leave their homes within the 13 kilometer area (8 miles).

The Egyptian paper Al Masri Al Youm reports that following investigations into the Sinai terror attack that killed 31 Egyptian soldiers, the Sinai terrorists acquired their weapons from three Hamas terrorists who transferred it to them.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi declared a three-month state of emergency Saturday after terrorists carried out a deadly assault in the northern Sinai, killing 33 Egyptian troops.

Al-Sisi charged that “this operation had a foreign fund to execute” he attack against the Egyptian army… to break the back of Egypt and Egyptians.”

A car bomb blew up at an army checkpoint, and armed terrorists fired on soldiers at another checkpoint.

Egypt closed the Rafah border crossing into Gaza.

No one has taken responsibility for the attack, but most analysts have concluded it was organized by the Al Qaeda-linked Ansar Beit al-Maqdis group.

The IDF has concluded that Wednesday’s attack on two soldiers at the Egyptian border involved a drug smuggling attempt and “was not related to terror.”

“An IDF inquiry suggests the cross-border attack on patrol was a violent drug smuggling attempt, foiled by Caracal Battalion Company Commanders,” military spokesmen said. ”The perpetrators opened fire from three locations including from a car driving along the border. From the attack the Company Commander, Captain Or Ben-Yehuda and another soldier were wounded. IDF responded and killed at least three of the attackers. We are continuing to review the circumstances of the incident.”

The Egyptian version is totally different. Egyptians security forces directly blamed the attack on the Al Qaeda-linked Ansar Beyt al-Maqdis (ABM) terrorist group.

“The goal is to provoke an Israeli incursion into Egyptian territory, which would then put Cairo in hot water,” Daniel Nisman, president of the Middle East think tank Levantine Group, told The Atlantic.

He added that Israel’s response is limited because “intervening in Egypt would backfire [and] all Israel can do is continue cooperating with the Egyptian government.”

Take the IDF statement for whatever it’s worth, but it is hard to believe that a “violent drug smuggling attempt” is not linked with terror, for which drug smuggling is a big money-maker.

Could it be that the IDF simply is trying to tone down the idea that Al Qaeda terrorists or ISIS sympathizers are active on the border?

Egypt killed 10 gunmen in northern Sinai from Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis Wahhabi. The Egypttian attacks took place near Sheikh Zuweid and Rafah.

Dozens more members of the group were wounded in the attack by the Egyptian military.

The group became active after Muslim Brotherhood’s President Morsi was ousted in Egypt’s 2013 military coup.

The group is reportedly responsible for numerous bombings inside Egyptian cities.

It’s estimated that the direct and indirect economic cost to Israel for the 51 day Gaza war was in the area of $3 billion dollars. It’s broken up between military costs, and economic damage.

I only mention that number because of an interesting article I read in Makor Rishon this weekend.

Assaf Gibor interviewed some young men (in their 20s and 30s) in Gaza who wanted to leave. They want to move to Europe, to start new lives and families there, away from Gaza, Hamas and war.

One man gave broke down the costs. He needed $12,000 to make a new life.

$5000 goes to pay the tunnel smugglers to get him out of Gaza and into the Sinai. Another thousand more to get him from the Sinai to Alexandria in Egypt. And two thousand dollars more to pay off a former Syrian woman named Um-Salim who helps Syrians (and now also Gazans) sneak into Europe via boat.

The boat goes out every Thursday with 300 people on it.

Once the boat reaches Italy, and the passengers reach shore (whether by docking or swimming), they head over to the local Red Cross office, they then get sent to jail for a short period of time, and soon after that, they are set free to go look for work and life in Europe.

At $12,000 a person, you could smuggle a million Gazans into Europe, and it would be far cheaper than what the European Union is going to waste in rebuilding Gaza, just so Hamas can get it all destroyed, when they attack Israel again. And the EU wouldn’t even notice the minuscule spike in new immigrants.

You’d need a lot more boats, but you get the idea.

When at least 70% of Arabs want to leave the Land of Israel (including Gaza), relocation is a concept seriously worth exploring.

There are financial solutions that would bring real peace. Just no one wants to talk about them.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has refused an offer by a senior Egyptian official to resettle “Palestinian refugees” in the Sinai, according to a report in the Middle East Monitor on Monday.

According to Abbas, the plan was first proposed in 1956 by Egypt, and was just put back on the the table again, in an attempt to help resolve the Arab-Israel conflict.

The idea was that the PA would receive a 618 square mile area adjacent to Gaza (the Gaza strip is 139 square miles) to resettle Arabs who claim refugee status. This would finally resolve the entire Palestinian refugee issue.

Abbas made it clear that he only wants to resettle refugees into Israel.

According to the report, Abbas proudly told the Fatah committee on Sunday that he refused the generous Egyptian offer to end the refugee problem.

Abbas said he refused the offer to settle them in the almost empty Sinai, as the plan “is absolutely unacceptable and the Palestinians will not accept it”.

Abbas clearly prefers to instead take money from the EU and the US to perpetuate the conflict.

Part of the PLO plan to eradicate Israel has always been founded on flooding Israel with “refugees”.

The refugees being referred to are primarily the 2nd and 3rd generation descendants of Arabs who were displaced from their homes when the Arab states attacked Israel in 1948.

At the time, the invading Arabs states told the Arabs in Israel to flee, so the invading armies could then wipe out the Jews unhindered. Others Arabs fled, thinking Israel would take revenge on them for what they did to the Jews over the years.

Most of these current “refugees”, and their parents, were born in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and other Arab countries.

UNRWA (remember them?) has perpetuated these people as refugees instead of rehabilitating them in their birth countries, where in fact many of their grandparents and great grandparents also originated from before migrating into Israel looking for work, once the Jews began to rebuild the country’s economy.

No other UN agency passes on refugee status to descendants like UNRWA does.

During the post 1948 period, an equivalent number of Jews were also forced to flee the Arab countries they had called home for thousands of years, long before Islam came on the scene.

Many of those Jews moved to Israel, where they were fully integrated as Israeli citizens. These Jewish refugees and their descendants have not yet received financial compensation from the Arab countries they were forced to flee from.

In the early 1970s, Israel attempted to build modern housing projects to improve the living conditions of Arab refugee through resettlement and economic development. This plan was rejected by the Arab as they claimed that socio-economic solutions cannot solve the Palestinian problem.

For the Palestinian Authority, the refugee issue is a timebomb to be used to extend the conflict until they win.