Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that Israeli troops remain along the 9-mile border between Gaza and Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, to block the smuggling through Hamas’s hundreds of underground tunnels. The Biden administration as well as the Harvard graduates among Israel’s security brass have been laboring to persuade Netanyahu to settle for technological substitutes to the presence of IDF soldiers who would kill Hamas smugglers.
Part of the Washington-Harvard axis solution are eight guard towers along the Philadelphi corridor. There was also talk about installing the same impenetrable metal barrier that stopped Hamas marauders from digging new tunnels into Israel under the border separating Arab Gaza from the Jewish Gaza envelope settlements. Of course, what Hamas did instead was climb over the border fence – but that joke belongs in a separate standup routine.
For now, it appears there won’t be eight guard towers to secure the Egypt-Gaza Strip border. According to a Thursday Wall Street Journal report, Egypt has refused Netanyahu’s demand for towers, because it would be a violation of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
Egypt also doesn’t want to appear as if it’s supporting the Israeli occupation of Gaza.
In short, Egypt wants the smuggling to resume. Heck, it’s aching for it.
Dr. Yaron Friedman of the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies wrote in mid-May in Maariv that on its face, Egyptian rage at Israel’s attack on Hamas is incomprehensible. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power through a military coup in the summer of 2013 by overthrowing a regime affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a subsidiary. In the following years, as terrorist attacks increased in the Sinai Peninsula and mainland Egypt, Al-Sisi’s regime claimed there was close cooperation between ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in Gaza – indeed dozens of Egyptian tourists and soldiers were killed in Sinai from terrorist attacks, which severely damaged the tourism economy.
Israel was eager to help at the time. It agreed to suspend the peace agreement’s ban on Egyptian military presence in Sinai, and so between 2013 and 2018, the Egyptians moved thousands of soldiers and hundreds of armored combat vehicles into Sinai. Now Israel’s gesture of goodwill is being repaid with an Egyptian refusal to help even a little.
The reason is that the smuggling operations from Sinai to Egypt have made many Egyptian officials rich, including Al-Sisi’s relatives, and has provided the dirt-poor Bedouins of northern Sinai with a steady income (southern Sinai Bedouins live off tourism, but there’s no tourism in the north – DI).
Now, following the war in Gaza and Israel’s entry into Rafah, the entire corrupt enterprise that Egypt forged in recent years with Hamas and the north Sinai tribes has collapsed. The flow of Qatari money to Hamas has stopped––a huge Hamas fortune has been seized by the IDF––so there is no one to continue paying all the folks who paid for their champagne and cigars by smuggling stuff. And as the days go by, the IDF is discovering and demolishing hundreds of tunnels.
This is why Egypt is angry and won’t let Netanyahu walk away from Philadelphi secure in protection against renewed Hamas smuggling. They’re nothing but a clowder of fat cats waiting for their cream.
On Thursday, Brett McGurk, the White House Middle East coordinator, convened with Egypt’s intelligence chief Abbas Kamel in Cairo to explore avenues for advancing negotiations. Later that evening, Israeli officials joined McGurk for additional discussions with Kamel. CIA Director William Burns was anticipated to arrive in Cairo the following day. These meetings came on the heels of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s encounter with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in New Alamein earlier in the week on Tuesday. That’s all they were talking about: how to enlist the Egyptians into finding Netanyahu a reliable way of moving the IDF from the Philadelphi corridor, And it ain’t happening.
And there’s another point: according to the WSJ, the Egyptians want guarantees from the US that even if the ceasefire collapsed and Hamas broke every one of its promises, coupled with murdering all the remaining living hostages – the US won’t allow Netanyahu to send troops back into Rafah and the Philadelphi corridor.
You probably thought it was Hamas making it difficult to reach a deal. Nope. It’s the honest broker, Egypt.
