On Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the first instance of direct contact between the two national leaders. They discussed the presidential crisis in Lebanon and the fact that Israel had reduced its fuel trade with Gaza in response to Hamas’s rocket attacks.

“The more Palestinians are martyred, the heavier our duties become. It is time for us to save Palestinians from this intolerable situation,” Ahmadinejad told Mubarak. “We should push for lifting the siege of Gaza and help provide basic living requirements to Palestinians.”

“Gaza should be supplied with food, medicine and fuel as soon as possible,” Mubarak agreed.

This call came the day after Mubarak phoned Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, urging him to “stop the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.”

The timing of the conversation between the leaders of Iran and Egypt is particularly interesting in light of what followed the next day, when Hamas blew open Gaza’s border with Egypt. Mubarak has allowed Palestinians to traverse the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt for the past two days; Gaza residents are freely crossing over into Egypt for the first time since the Hamas takeover in June.

This first instance of direct contact between the presidents of Egypt and Iran shows not only how far the two countries have come toward restoring full diplomatic relations, it also shows how aligned the thinking of the two national leaders has become.

Egypt and Jordan are the only two Middle Eastern nations that have a peace treaty with Israel. Now, the Egyptian president is cooperating with Israel’s greatest enemy, criticizing the Israeli prime minister for reducing fuel imports to a terrorist regime that is launching rockets into Israeli territory, and supporting that same terrorist regime with food and other goods. He is acting more like an ally of Iran and Hamas. Expect Egypt’s cooperation with Iran to continue to surge in the months ahead.

For more information on the forming Egyptian-Iranian alliance, read The King of the South.