US may fund wall to stop Hamas arms smuggling, cabinet says

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant said one proposed course of action would be for the United States to fund the construction of an underground obstruction similar to the one built on the Gaza-Israel border. said.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has emphasized the importance of Israel’s control of the corridor in recent public statements, despite pushback from Egyptian officials. In addition to the continued flow of weapons into the Strip, Israel’s concerns are that Hamas leaders are using underground tunnels to escape from the IDF, which pursues them with ground attacks, and even to remove Israeli hostages from Gaza. The question was whether it could be done. anywhere in the world.

Prime Minister Netanyahu said: “The Philadelphia Corridor, more precisely the southern barrier, must be taken into our hands and closed. Other arrangements will ensure the creation of the buffer zone that we want and need to secure. It’s not something you should do.” Saturday.

The Philadelphia Corridor is the name given to the 14-kilometer (8.7-mile) Salah al-Din road that runs from east to west along the Egyptian border. A peace agreement signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979 imposes limits on the deployment of troops on either side of the corridor.

Israel controlled the Philadelphia Corridor until it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, when it was transferred to the Palestinian Authority, which then ruled Gaza. A new agreement signed with Egypt restricts the presence of troops and specifies security coordination between Jerusalem and Cairo.

Since then, Egypt has deployed limited military forces with the official goal of preventing infiltration and smuggling into the country. However, despite Egyptian claims to have destroyed the tunnels connecting Gaza and the Sinai desert, the quantity and quality of weapons and weapons systems revealed to be in Hamas’s arsenal limits the effectiveness of Egyptian efforts. It showed that it was a target.

Egyptian parliamentarian Mustafa Bakri condemned Prime Minister Netanyahu’s stated intentions in a post on X on Monday. “For Prime Minister Netanyahu to say that the Philadelphia Corridor on the Egyptian border should be under Israeli control is a blatant attack on the peace agreement between the two countries. Stay away, the Egyptian border is a red line. You’re right. You seem to think, ‘You don’t know the capabilities and strength of our military. ”