Canadian man shot dead in Egypt among rising tensions

A Canadian man “of Jewish Israeli descent” has been shot dead during a robbery in the Egyptian city of Alexandria and authorities are investigating the incident as a criminal case, a security source said on Tuesday.

The security source told Reuters the man had been killed “with the motive of robbery”. The source made no link between the shooting and the dead man’s ethnic background.

The interior ministry confirmed the shooting and said the man had been a permanent resident of Egypt. Neither the ministry nor the source gave any further details.

A statement claiming the killing by a previously unknown group called “Liberation Vanguards” was circulating on social media, but security sources said they had no information on the existence of such a group or whether it had been involved in the incident.

One day after the war in Gaza began last October following an attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel, two Israeli tourists and their Egyptian guide were shot dead in Alexandria, in the first such attack on Israelis in Egypt in decades.

A policeman who said he had “lost control” was placed in custody regarding that incident.

The shooting happened on Tuesday as Israeli forces seized the main border crossing between Gaza and Egypt in Rafah, where more than one million displaced Palestinians have sought shelter during Israel’s seven-month-old offensive.

The Israeli military said on Wednesday that it has reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, a key terminal for the entry of humanitarian aid that was closed over the weekend after a Hamas rocket attack killed four Israeli soldiers nearby.

But the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said no aid has yet entered and there is no one to receive it on the Palestinian side. Workers fled during an incursion by an Israeli tank brigade on Tuesday that captured the nearby Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which remains closed.

That limited incursion did not appear to be the start of the full-scale invasion of Rafah that Israel has repeatedly promised. But the prolonged closure of the two main crossings could exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where the U.N. says a “full-blown famine” is already underway in the north.

The United States paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on Rafah, in a further widening of divisions between the two close allies.