Israel Presses Egypt To Secure Border

Israel and Egypt are negotiating the future of a corridor between Egypt and Gaza that Israel says has been used by Hamas to smuggle weapons and people through underground tunnels and is key to destroying the militant group.

Israel has requested that sensors be installed along the Philadelphi Corridor – the sliver of land controlled by Egypt that borders Gaza – according to senior Egyptian officials, to alert Israel in case Hamas attempts to rebuild a tunnel and smuggling network after the war. Israel, which used to control the corridor, also requested direct notifications if the sensors are triggered and the right to send surveillance drones into the area in case of such a trigger, the officials said.

In response, Egypt said it would consider adding the sensors but direct notification or approval of drones would be a violation of Egyptian sovereignty. Negotiations are stuck on this issue.

As Israel has set out to destroy Hamas, the frontier between Egypt and Gaza has come under focus. Israel has curtailed the delivery of aid through the border as part of a drive to ensure Hamas doesn’t misdirect it for military uses. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Philadelphi Corridor must be “in our hands” at a December 30 news conference, and that control of the border between Gaza and Egypt was key to ensuring the demilitarisation of Gaza.

“It must be closed,” he said. “It’s clear that any other arrangement won’t guarantee the disarmament that we want.”

The corridor is a roughly 14km-long buffer running the length of the Gaza frontier with Egypt. The security buffer was initially established by the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and was controlled by Israel to prevent the movement of weapons and goods between Egypt and Gaza. But Israel relinquished that control to Egypt and Palestinian authorities after Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Since Hamas took over the enclave in 2007, Israel alleges the corridor has become the militant group’s main avenue for smuggling weapons and illicit goods into the Gaza Strip.

“It’s clear that the Egyptians failed to stop the flow of munitions and weapons into Gaza in the past 18 years; they can’t deny it,” said Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli general.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had managed to destroy Hamas’s military structure in northern Gaza, although it still doesn’t have full military control over the area. Israel has killed key leadership and severed command lines, rendering the 12 Hamas battalions in northern Gaza unable to fight in an organised manner, said Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman.

Israel has also destroyed several kilometres of subterranean tunnel and military infrastructure in northern Gaza, he said.

Israel has been under pressure from the US and other allies to transition to lower-intensity fighting, which analysts say might happen in phases across the Strip, probably starting with northern Gaza, where Israel has made the most progress and is already withdrawing forces.

However, high-intensity battles are expected to continue in central and southern Gaza, which represent newer and more complicated fronts, the Israeli military said, as the area is full of civilians who have fled from the north to the south. Some 1.9 million Gazans have been displaced since the war began, according to the UN, representing 90 per cent of the strip’s population.

More than 22,000 people, mostly women and children, have been killed since Israel launched a war in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials. The number doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Gazans who are being asked to evacuate their homes by Israeli forces are struggling to find a place to go. Fatima Khalaf, 35, said she had no room to host her sister, who was forced to evacuate her home in Nuseirat, in central Gaza. “I could not help her,” she said. Khalaf, who is farther south in Deir al-Balah, said she worries she too could face evacuation orders and won’t have anywhere to go. “You need to sign up and wait for a week until you get a tent,” she said. “The humanitarian situation is rapidly deteriorating.”