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Sinwar and Dahlan's Cairo face-to-face

Fatah's dismissed senior official Mohammed Dahlan met June 11 in Cairo with Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar in an attempt to advance a solution for Gaza’s economic crisis.
Yahya Sinwar, the new leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, attends the opening of a new mosque in Rafah town in the southern Gaza Strip on February 24, 2017. / AFP / SAID KHATIB        (Photo credit should read SAID KHATIB/AFP/Getty Images)
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Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, held a series of meetings June 10-11 in Cairo, including with former senior Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan. Samir Mashrawi, a Dahlan associate who also attended the meetings, told Al-Monitor that the Hamas delegation and the delegation that arrived with Dahlan had met four times and discussed various issues to resolve the crisis in Gaza. Sinwar traveled to Cairo at the head of a Hamas delegation to discuss tightening security on the Gaza border with Egypt, increasing the power supply from Egypt to Gaza and extending the hours of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Al-Monitor has learned that the heads of Egyptian intelligence facilitated the meeting between the two men. Dahlan and Hamas had had a channel of communication in the past, and top Hamas officials had used it to convey messages to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

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