Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced Monday that Israel will build a security barrier on Israel’s eastern border with Jordan.
The move comes in response to an uptick in attempts by Jordanian infiltrators to smuggle weapons into the Palestinian Authority.
Some of those efforts are taking place on behalf of Iran, Gallant told a closed meeting of the Knesset Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense.
“We recognize an increase in Iranian involvement in attempted arms trafficking and reconnaissance in Judea and Samaria,” Gallant said.
“Iran and its terrorist proxies identify Judea and Samaria as the soft underbelly and direct many resources there with the aim of directing attacks,” Gallant told the lawmakers.
This is not the first time — or the second, or even the third — that the government has announced the intention to build a security barrier along Israel’s border with Jordan.
As far back as 2012, then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered IDF Brigadier General Eran Ofir, a member of the committee in charge of planning border fences, to begin a feasibility study with the aim of building a new barrier along Israel’s border with Jordan. It was believed at the time that the barrier would be done by 2013; but the project was never completed.
In 2015, the security cabinet in the Netanyahu government again approved construction of a security barrier along the eastern border with Jordan, to be an extension of the existing southern portion of the security barrier (along the border with Egypt).
The planned 30-kilometer (19 mile) barrier was to run northward from Eilat along the border with Jordan, up to the airport near Timna that was under construction at the time.
The 16-foot-high security barrier was intended at that point to prevent ISIS terrorists and illegal migrants from entering the country.
Two years ago, Israel began building a 46-foot-high wall of mineral salt along the southern section of the Dead Sea. Infiltrators from Jordan were smuggling migrants, drugs and weapons into Israel from Jordan, located on the other side of the water.
“Where there’s a criminal, there’s a terrorist,” IDF Colonel Yogev Bar Sheshet told Israeli media at the time.
Funding issues and other priorities eventually sidelined the project, as happened in previous years.
