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ConflictsEgypt

Egypt's red line: Control of Gaza's southern border

January 31, 2024

Israel has said it wants to retake control of the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The Egyptians are opposed and say this will hurt their working relationship on the border.

https://p.dw.com/p/4bsoo
isplaced Palestinians from northern Gaza pitched their tents near the wall separating Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
About 85% of Gaza's population of almost 2 million has been displaced and most have been forced into southern Gaza, near the Egyptain borderImage: Mohammed Talatene/dpa/picture alliance

There was no doubt in Egyptian journalist Diaa Rashwan's mind: Any attempt by Israel to regain control over the territory between the Gaza Strip and Egypt would seriously impact relations between the two countries.

"It must be strictly emphasized that any Israeli move in this direction will lead to a serious threat to Egyptian-Israeli relations," Rashwan, the head of Egypt's State Information Service, said a few days ago in an online statement about what is known as the Philadelphi Corridor.

The Philadelphi Corridor is the strip of land that makes up the border area between Gaza and Egypt, a "no man's land" that was established as a buffer between the two, to prevent goods and weapons from being smuggled into Gaza from Egypt. Its establishment was part of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Ever since the Israeli military offensive began in response to the October 7 terror attack by the militant Islamist Hamas group, classified as a terrorist organization by the US, Germany, Israel and other governments, Israeli politicians have been asking how weapons for Hamas might still be entering Gaza. 

Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip is secure, Rashwan insisted. The border crossing between Gaza and Egypt is at Rafah and Israel's claims that goods are being smuggled into the Gaza Strip from Egypt are "lies," he said, adding that the Israeli government was only trying to divert attention from its own military failures in the current conflict.

In early January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had informed Egypt of plans for a military operation to regain control of the Philadelphi Corridor.

The corridor must be "in our hands," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on December 30 last year. This is the only way to ensure that smuggling stops and the Gaza Strip is demilitarized, he insisted. Netanyahu has since repeated those demands.

Israeli army vehicles are seen near the Gaza Strip border, in southern Israel.
Israeli army vehicles near Gaza: The Philadelphi Corridor is about 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) longImage: Tsafrir Abayov/AP/picture alliance

Egypt's control of border conditional

In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. The same year, Egypt and Israel signed the so-called Philadelphi Agreement which said Egypt would control the corridor between its territory and the Gaza Strip. Egypt could use 750 border guards armed with light weapons to do so. Heavy armored vehicles were forbidden.

There are indications that security cooperation between the two countries has been working. Egypt has regularly destroyed smuggling tunnels in the border strip. And last October, Michael McCaul, head of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters that Egypt had actually warned Israel about possible violence three days before the Hamas attack. Netanyahu rejected that claim as "absolutely false."

The Gaza conflict has put pressure on the two countries' already difficult relationship. Many Egyptians are sympathetic towards the plight of Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip, where the death toll is now over 26,000, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, due to Israel's ongoing bombardment of the enclave. Israel also continues to block water, power and much aid coming into Gaza. Even though many displaced locals have been pushed up against the Gaza-Egypt border by the Israeli military, Cairo is trying to avoid any large movement of Palestinians into its own territory.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, casts his vote for the presidential elections at a polling station, in Cairo.
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi must balance national, strategic interests with the anger of ordinary Egyptians about GazaImage: Egyptian Presidency Media Office via AP/picture alliance

Cairo's anger about Netanyahu's proposed plans for the Philadelphi Corridor is due to several factors, said Sonja Hegasy, deputy director of the Leibniz Center for the Modern Orient in Berlin.

"Egypt would view it with concern if Israeli security forces solely controlled the corridor," she told DW. "[Egypt's] security interests would be compromised if it were no longer present in the buffer zone itself."

Additionally, if Israel were to take over the buffer zone it would make Egypt look weak, as though it wasn't capable of controlling the zone itself, Hegasy noted. 

In fact,  Egypt and Israel have always cooperated on border security even if Egypt's authoritarian leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, has often tried to play it down. Too much contact on security issues with Israel would be seen negatively by the vast majority of the Egyptian public.

What next for the Gaza Strip?

The current dispute about the Philadelphi Corridor also has to do with the ongoing debate about the future of the Gaza Strip, Hegasy continued.

There is discussion in Israel about Israelis coming back to settle the Gaza Strip — an idea that has found much favor with far-right politicians in the Israeli government, even though this would be considered illegal under international law.

Israeli and international media have reported that ultranationalist Israeli cabinet minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for Israeli settlers to return to the enclave and parts of the West Bank, and that Palestinians living there should be "encouraged" to migrate. This is the only way to prevent another attack like that of October 7, he has said.

Even though Netanyahu has described plans to resettle the Gaza Strip as unrealistic, local media said that a dozen members of Netanyahu's own Likud party also attended a controversial conference in Jerusalem on Sunday where this prospect was discussed. 

"Israel does not want to be responsible for Gaza in the long term, but the question is how do you make sure that Gaza stays demilitarized?," an anonymous source in the Israeli military told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

"It's a real dilemma. The only way to control a geographic area is to control what's going in and out," the source argued, concluding that Israel would likely have to control the border area for decades to come, something that again flies in the face of international calls for a two-state solution.

"The Egyptians probably interpret such discussions as an indication that Israel wants to control the border again," Hegasy said. "Behind this is the bigger question of what will become of the Gaza Strip. No one has been able to answer that so far."

And that question will be followed by others, Hegasy concluded.

"How the borders of the Gaza Strip will be secured [in the future], where they will be and what will happen to the residents of the Gaza Strip. Of course, Egypt doesn't want to commit itself — either directly or indirectly — on this issue just yet," she said.

This story was originally published in German.

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Kersten Knipp
Kersten Knipp Political editor with a focus on the Middle East