El Arish sits on the Mediterranean coast of North Sinai, close to the border with Gaza. The road from the city to the Rafah crossing carries aid trucks, and the crossing is where the aid stops and waits for permission to go on.
On Tuesday, 10 November, a racing driver flew into the city. Al Jazeera reported that Lewis Hamilton, seven times world champion in Formula One, came to El Arish to see first-hand how Egypt receives the humanitarian aid bound for the Gaza Strip. The North Sinai governor, Khaled Megawer, welcomed him and took him round the aid warehouses of the Egyptian Red Crescent.
The itinerary
The day was organised by the state. Hamilton landed at Arish International Airport, where the governor, a major general, received him before the drive to the border. Some outlets, among them the Times of Israel, spell his name Maghawer. The visit stayed on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing and in El Arish. Hamilton did not go into Gaza.
The government described the purpose of the trip in its own words. A statement, carried by Middle East Eye, said the governor “took Lewis Hamilton on a visit to the Rafah land crossing to learn about the Egyptian efforts to support the Palestinian brothers in the Gaza Strip”. The governorate’s account of the warehouse stop said it was meant to show the mechanisms by which relief is prepared and coordinated before it enters Gaza. At the crossing he saw aid parcels stacked on trucks and was briefed on how the cargo is readied.
The guest also gave the cameras a small gesture of his own. According to the Associated Press, the 41-year-old greeted the aid workers with “Assalamu alaikum”, Arabic for “peace be upon you”, then shook hands and talked briefly with staff and officials. The governor’s office released video of the exchange.
What a visitor is shown
States have always known the value of a famous visitor. A visitor is shown the warehouse, the full shelves, the organised workers, the trucks ready at the gate. The warehouse is real and the work in it is real. The question a guided tour doesn’t answer is why the trucks are still standing at the gate.
Part of the answer lies in a number. Under the truce Israel and Hamas agreed last year, at least 600 trucks of aid a day are supposed to enter Gaza, a territory of more than two million people. As Reuters reported, deliveries remain well below that floor. Aid workers say Israeli authorities, who control all entry into the strip, let through only a fraction of it. The truce has not fully stopped the fighting either, and Israeli strikes are still reported.
The Egyptian Red Crescent, for its part, keeps sending. The Israeli outlet Walla noted that the organisation dispatched its 308th convoy to Gaza the day before Hamilton arrived. The figure tells you how much has been sent. It doesn’t tell you how much got through, or how long each convoy waited.
The weather was bad on the other side of the border too. This week heavy rains swept away tens of thousands of tents in Gaza, where whole families have been living under canvas. Last month it was the crossings closing and the food agency’s money running out in the same week. People in Gaza now measure their lives in truckloads, and the count keeps falling short.
The driver between races
Hamilton came to North Sinai straight from the São Paulo Grand Prix. His season with Ferrari is winding down without a title: he is fourth in the drivers’ championship, and Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli has already won it with three races still to run. Off the track, he has repeatedly used his social media to draw attention to children killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and to call for a ceasefire. Only weeks ago he was weighing up the politics of Formula One’s new race in Rwanda.
This was not his first time near the edges of the war. He had earlier visited a hospital and an aid-packing operation for Gaza in Jordan, and afterwards he wrote that “The time I spent in Jordan visiting a hospital and aid packaging facility dedicated to helping people in Gaza was life changing.” He praised the British Red Cross, the Jordan Red Crescent and the Palestine Red Crescent for their work getting aid into the strip. Some reports of the Egypt trip repeated the phrase “life changing”, but those words came from the Jordan post, not from anything he is reported to have said in El Arish.
Egypt got its pictures: a world champion, a governor, full warehouses, a greeting in Arabic. The trucks are still parked on the Egyptian side of the border, and Israeli authorities still decide when they can cross.