According to a report in the North American newspaper “Wall Street Journal” (“WSJ”), Israel is considering an army deployment directly on the border of the Gaza Strip with Egypt. “Israeli authorities have informed Egypt that they are planning a military operation along the Gaza side of the border,” the newspaper wrote yesterday, citing unnamed Israeli and Egyptian sources.
A few weeks after Hamas' attack on southern Israel on October 7, which left 1,200 people dead, Israeli ground troops advanced into the Gaza Strip to dismantle Hamas' military infrastructure. The southern end of the coastal zone, which borders Egypt with the divided city of Rafah and the border crossing of the same name, is so far beyond the reach of Israeli ground troops.
Israel suspects tunnels
The Rafah border crossing is controlled by Egyptian and Palestinian authorities, the latter being under the control of Hamas. This is a thorn in the side of the Israeli leadership, which suspects that the tunnels that run under the border between Egypt and Gaza are still used to smuggle goods and weapons for Hamas.
An Israeli military operation, as currently being considered, “would likely mean that Palestinian authorities would be removed from the strategically important border crossing,” the WSJ continued. Israeli forces would therefore occupy a strip of land approximately twelve kilometers long, stretching from the border triangle between Israel, Gaza and Egypt to the Mediterranean coast.
The plan has not yet been approved by the Israeli government, the report says. It is considered extremely sensitive because there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in and around Rafah who have had to leave their residential areas in the center and north of the Gaza Strip on orders from the Israeli military. Cairo also has strong reservations about the project.