The demonstrations are a reminder that Egypt shares a border with the coastal enclave.By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel NewsProtests have occurred at Egyptian embassies around the world over the last nine days, with the demonstrators demanding that Cairo stop blocking Gazans from fleeing their war-torn enclave.The first protest occurred on July 21, when a 27-year-old Egyptian resident of the Netherlands, Anas Habib, chained shut the gates of his embassy in The Hague with a simple bicycle lock.He livestreamed his actions on social media, and when the newly barricaded embassy employees protested, he exclaimed sarcastically in Arabic, “Why are you upset now? It’s blocked on your side, not ours… Turns out the siege really hurts. It breaks your heart to be trapped.”“Go on then, open the crossing,” he said in a deliberate play on words. “Now do you see how the blockade humiliates? How it crushes?”Mentioning that children are dying in Gaza, he added, “We’ve been hearing their lies for two years straight. They say, ‘It’s closed from their side, not ours,’” referring to the false Egyptian claim that the IDF, which controls Rafah, would not allow Gazans to leave.Those in the embassy, he said, “couldn’t handle a lie and a siege for one second. Imagine how everyone in Gaza is feeling hearing your lies every day for the past two years.”The mocking phrase “It’s closed from their side, not ours” quickly trended on social media, with pro-Palestinian activists chanting it every time they chained the doors of another embassy.Hundreds of protesters have since targeted Egyptian representations in such European capitals as Berlin, Helsinki, London, Madrid, and Oslo as well as in Arab countries such as Lebanon, Libya and Tunisia.In Turkey, two young women put a simple lock on the Egyptian Embassy gate in Ankara and quickly walked away as a security guard approached, calling back over their shoulders that the situation in Gaza was untenable.In South Africa, several masked men walked up to the large house that acts as the embassy, spraying red graffiti all over its walls, shouting for Egypt to “open the border immediately,” and calling the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi a “traitor” who has betrayed his country and “the people of Palestine.”Cairo has steadfastly refused to create even temporary refugee camps for Gazans.One of the government’s main concerns is that Hamas forces who would hide among them would become a national security threat, as Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is considered an illegal terrorist organization in Egypt.Other worries include not wanting to be seen as facilitating Israel’s offensive in Gaza in any way, including by helping remove Hamas’ human shields.More than 100,000 Gazans have reportedly managed to enter Egypt nonetheless, either as humanitarian cases, being ill or wounded, or by bribing officials for thousands of dollars apiece.The post Protests at Egyptian embassies around world for blocking exit from Gaza appeared first on World Israel News.