The Philadelphi Corridor, where Israel is for the time being refraining from engaging in a ground maneuver, was a random, and not very creative code name that the IDF computer spewed out for the security buffer zone between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Israel established it after ceding the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as part of the historic peace accords. It controlled this wafer-thin strip of land for 23 years, not always with a great deal of success, until September 2005, when as part of the Disengagement Plan, it handed it over to Egypt.
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Few people currently remember: The prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, objected to any attempt to give up control of the Philadelphi Corridor. Israel's Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, also objected to this, but as has often been the case – in the end it is the position of the legal advisors that is the deciding one, based on the claim that as long as Israel is in control of the Philadelphi Corridor, it would not be possible to declare Israel's complete pullout from the Gaza Strip. The narrow strip of land that runs the length of the Gaza Strip's southern border with Egypt, from the coast to Kerem Shalom, was thus excluded from the agreement regarding the demilitarization of Sinai, and the government granted authorization for Egypt to maintain a 750-strong force there together with heavy weapons. The Rafah area was given over to the Palestinians.
The almost-immediate outcome was an exponential increase in the number of tunnels, with a concomitant increase in the volume of arms smuggling from Sinai into the Gaza Strip. This ongoing activity was nothing more than a promo for the seizure of control of the corridor on the Palestinian side by Hamas in the summer of 2007. An incident that led to the now famous embargo imposed by Israel and Egypt on the Gaza Strip.
Now, during the current war, this 14 km long and 100 m wide land corridor is the hole in the bucket, the breach in the dam. Hamas is still able to smuggle – and indeed still does so – arms to Rafah and the Gaza Strip both through it and underneath it. It has done so for many years, directly in front of the Egyptians who were supposed to oversee what goes on there, and what is even worse – underneath Israel's nose too. Another grand abject intelligence failure, which must be investigated after the war.
Video: Six facts about the Israel-Hamas war in 90 seconds / X/@idf
Israel's former minister of defense, Avigdor Lieberman, says that the situation in which the Philadelphi Corridor is not in our hands reminds him of an open faucet from which water flows incessantly. "Somebody with a mop is constantly running around from one corner to the other trying in vain to dry the floor, but the water continues to flow or trickle inside." "The smuggling has even continued now during the current combat effort," he maintained only this week. When current Minister of Defense Minister Yoav Galant was recently asked if there are still active tunnels underneath the Philadelphi Corridor that are used for smuggling, he gave a brief, almost laconic reply: "A few."
According to one security source, there are still about ten active tunnels operating underneath the Philadelphi Corridor, some of which are designed for military-related smuggling and some of which host criminal-related smuggling. Another source talks of many dozens of tunnels. Only a few weeks ago, concern was expressed that the Israeli hostages might be smuggled out of Gaza through these tunnels into Sinai, and it was reported that Israel is operating in a variety of ways to prevent such an eventuality from occurring. This week, a news item was reported according to which the hostages might already have been smuggled out via tunnels from Khan Younis to Rafah, but here too there is no certainty that this is in fact the case. The security officials admit that there are numerous questions surrounding the location of the hostages.
Israel has refrained from publishing any information concerning its plans relating to Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. "The IDF will strike at Hamas wherever is necessary," they say in the army, but it is commonly understood there that a military operation, even an extremely limited one, would force the IDF to maneuver in Rafah and the surrounding tent camps that currently house hundreds of thousands of displaced persons from the northern Gaza Strip unless they are allowed to return to the north.
Mines and RPGs
The Head of the National Security Council at the time of the Disengagement Plan, Major General (res.) Giora Eiland assesses that Israel "does not know what is currently happening, if it is happening, underneath the Philadelphi Corridor, just as it did not know what was going on there prior to October 7.
"What is absolutely clear is that the crazy volumes of standard weapons that are not manufactured in Gaza, which have been uncovered during the present combat effort, did not arrive there from nowhere. They poured into the Gaza Strip via the Philadelphi Corridor over a period of many years. They include, for example, the (improved) RPG-29 rockets, concealed rocket parts, mines, and other types of weapons. An immense scope of smuggling has been going on here for years, above the ground too, among others, via bribes paid to Egyptian officials."
MK Amit Halevi (Likud), a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, also believes, based on information he has gathered: "Smuggling is ongoing, even today, via the Philadelphi Corridor. The fact that to date the IDF has not taken control of the corridor conveys a message of weakness and our lack of control over the Gaza Strip."
The fate of the Philadelphi Corridor following the war will apparently be decided in the talks that are already ongoing between Israel, Egypt, and the US. For the time being, Israel has refrained from conducting a military operation along the corridor, mainly due to the Egyptian sensitivity, based on the concern of Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi that 800,000 refugees from the northern Gaza Strip, who are currently populating and overcrowding the Rafah area, will breach the Egyptian border and settle in Sinai.
For its part, Israel seeks to remove the Gazan-Palestinian officials from the Rafah Border Crossing and to station Israeli troops there. There, and along the entire strip of land, from its south-eastern corner to its north-western tip that meets the Mediterranean Sea. Israel also seeks to widen this strip by an additional few hundred meters, but it is doubtful whether the Americans will allow this. About two decades ago, when a similar plan was on the agenda, the then Attorney General, Menachem "Meni" Mazuz, took the trouble of visiting the Philadelphi Corridor, but he then disqualified the plan when he was told that it involved the demolition of 3,000 homes.
Another plan has now been placed on the table: construction of an underground slurry wall, to be built from the Egyptian side of the Gaza Strip border that would ostensibly neutralize the tunnels. Egypt built a similar wall in the past to a depth of several dozen meters into the ground, but Hamas succeeded in digging a number of tunnels underneath it. The US (together with additional states) has already voiced its theoretical consent to participate in the funding of this underground wall. It will work in a similar manner to a similar, existing underground slurry wall, that already blocks the path of tunnels penetrating into Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip. But the US administration needs to obtain budget authorization from Congress for this, and so there is still a long way ahead.
In addition, Israel seeks to install warning systems along the Philadelphi Corridor, that will provide real-time indications of renewed attempts to dig tunnels there and to operate UAVs over the area. Egypt objects to this demand. It regards this as a violation of its sovereignty there. This week, Diaa Rashwan, the current head of Egypt's State Information Service, warned that any Israeli move to take control of the Philadelphi Corridor would lead to a severe threat to the bilateral relations between Israel and Egypt.
In contrast, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that without a change in the current reality, along the Philadelphi Corridor too, within a few years, the Gaza Strip will return to the scope of armament that characterized it prior to October 7. "The Philadelphi Corridor must remain in our hands and it must remain closed. It is clear that any other arrangement will not be able to guarantee the demilitarization that we desire," warned Netanyahu.
Reverse smuggling?
Eiland says that alongside dissecting the Gaza Strip into two halves just south of Gaza City, which was carried out with a three-week delay, we should have taken control over the Philadelphi Corridor right from the first day of the war, "Not only to stop the smuggling from there but also to expand the corridor there as much as possible.
"It is not possible to maintain the corridor there as it is today, with a width of only about 100 meters," says Eiland. "We need at least 500 meters there that are completely clean. This should really have been done from the outset. Who knows what has passed through there since then, either underneath or above ground? Theoretically, there can also be reverse smuggling – not only from Egypt into the Gaza Strip, but also from the Gaza Strip into Egypt. Theoretically, some of the hostages might have been smuggled into Sinai, there is no way of knowing. Thus, the delay in taking action here might turn out to have been fateful."
The delay is already a fait accompli. What can we do now?
"Now it is much more complex," replies Eiland. "Instead of 200 thousand people, there are now about one million people in the Rafah area. This will lead to a much higher degree of friction, especially when you want to expand the corridor and destroy built-up areas in order to do so. This also ties in with the question of the post-war future of the Gaza Strip – had we responded to the US request and engaged in discussion on the 'day after', then we could have come with a focused demand regarding the Philadelphi Corridor already two-three months ago, as part of the overall arrangement for the future of Gaza. It would have been raised with the US and Egypt in a manner that would have dramatically reduced the chances of smuggling taking place from Egypt into the Gaza Strip, in ways that I cannot elaborate upon here. Although there is currently a dialogue being held with the Egyptians, it is devoid of the broader, overall context, and that is a shame."
Is a military operation still relevant?
"I doubt it. Even if successfully carry it out and we succeed in finding tunnels and destroying them, there is at least one thing that we cannot gain: Israel itself is currently entering humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip – flour and food, which is even more problematic than weapons. AK-47 'Kalashnikov assault rifles are 'a dime a dozen' in the Gaza Strip and it is actually flour and food that is really lacking there, so this is a significantly more powerful form of leverage. Given that this is the current situation – then what is the point of now engaging in a campaign in the Philadelphi Corridor to tighten the blockage on the Gaza Strip, when we ourselves are breaking the blockade on them in the name of humanitarian aid and are providing them with food and supplies? What is the point of engaging in a campaign with heavy prices in the Philadelphi Corridor in order to prevent smuggling there, when we ourselves are providing them with the flour, water, and fuel, due to US pressure?"
Did the government make a mistake here?
"Yes, I believe so. On October 7, Gaza, which de facto became a state 18 years ago, attacked the State of Israel. The first thing that a state under attack does against the state that is attacking it is to ask itself: what are my advantages in relation to the other side? What is our advantage? In order to defeat the state of Gaza, we have no choice but to impose a blockade on it, as numerous states encountering similar situations have done throughout the course of history.
"We should say to the Americans, and it is still not too late: if you continue with your approach and force us to supply flour, water, and fuel, to the state of Gaza – you will then effectively be sentencing the hostages to death. That is the truth, as without that there is no genuine pressure currently being brought to bear on Sinwar. This is a message that really needs to be resonated, and they should not be the ones to decide what is more moral and just."
36 million dollars per month
The Philadelphi Corridor, which was established after the signing of the Peace Accords with Egypt, left thousands of Rafah residents on the Egyptian side of the border. Families were artificially separated. Already back then, they began to excavate the first tunnels. At first, they served to maintain the ties between the families. Later on, they began to smuggle commodities and drugs via the tunnels, and following the Oslo Accords, they smuggled heavy weapons too, which were first put to use in the Western Wall tunnel incident in 1996. When the Second Intifada erupted, the tunnels were expanded, and large volumes of weapons flowed through them into the Gaza Strip.
In May 2004, it was the Philadelphi Corridor that provided us with one of the most harrowing images that have been etched in our collective memory as Israelis: IDF soldiers kneeling down in the sand, in a line, and looking for the remains of five of their comrades-in-arms, an officer and four soldiers who were killed as a result of an APC (armored personnel carrier) exploding there. The APC was hit by an RPG rocket fired at it, and the considerable volume of explosives that the APC was carrying, about one ton, exploded.
The soldiers were killed and as a result of the blast, it was almost impossible to identify or locate them. A further two IDF soldiers were killed during the rescue operation to extract the APC and the remains of the bodies from the Philadelphi Corridor. This incident occurred only 24 hours after six soldiers from the IDF Givati Brigade were killed in the explosion of an APC in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza, and subsequently, the IDF launched Operation Rainbow with the aim of locating tunnels along the corridor.
After a further 16 months elapsed, and following the Disengagement Plan, in September 2005, the PA (Palestinian Authority) took control of the corridor. But it managed to hold on to it for only a relatively short period of time. Hamas, which won in the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, taking him captive into the Gaza Strip via a tunnel located in the vicinity of the Philadelphi Corridor. In 2007, Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip, hurling the PA officials from the rooftops to their death, and the entire corridor on the Gaza side was taken over by terrorist organizations.
Under Hamas rule in Gaza, the Philadelphi Corridor was turned into a flourishing business. The tunnels were expanded and deepened, and new ones were excavated. On the eve of IDF Operation Cast Lead in late 2008, there were an estimated 500 tunnels there, and Hamas was raking in a monthly intake of some 36 million dollars from the goods passing through the tunnels.
There was absolutely nothing that didn't go through the tunnels: cars, clothes, drugs, medications, alcoholic drinks – and of course arms. Lots of arms. The tunnels were dug out from basements in private homes, from orchards and olive groves. Each tunnel was excavated for a period of between two weeks and two months. The owners of the houses or the fields in which the tunnels were dug received a percentage of the smuggling fees. At some point, the Rafah municipality required the tunnel owners to take out a business license, and even charged them, and still does, for connecting up to the water and electricity systems. At the peak of this activity, there were some 70 thousand people employed in the overall tunnel endeavor. The Abu Samhadana and Abu Rish Bedouin tribes controlled the majority of the tunnels. They earned tremendous profits from this activity. An approximate sum of 100 thousand dollars was invested in the construction of each tunnel. The average daily turnover of such a tunnel amounted to about a half a million shekels.
At the beginning of the last decade, when the Egyptians discovered a large quantity of weapons on the Egyptian side of the border and understood that the tunnels were not only endangering Israel but them too, they flooded many of the tunnels with gas, and with the help of the US, they began to establish an underground obstacle. But then, Mohamed Morsi won the presidential elections in Egypt. Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a friend of Hamas, turned the tables once again, and the tunnels gained a new lease of life, but this time on a much larger scale.
Only when President el-Sissi overthrew Morsi, did Egypt begin to act with an iron fist against the tunnels.
Since the rise to power of el-Sissi and until IDF Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and even during it, Egypt destroyed 1,639 tunnels connecting Sinai to the Gaza Strip, employing a variety of means to do so. This was a reaction to the series of terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas and ISIL in Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian army blew up the tunnels using explosives and flooded many of them with water too.
Over the years, both in routine and in many operations, Israel also took action against the tunnels, using special combat engineering squads that were subordinate to the IDF Gaza Division. In Operation Rainbow, for example, tunnels were located, sealed off, or exploded, and also in Operation Cast Lead (2009) and after that during Operation Protective Edge (2014), Israel took action to deal with the tunnels underneath the Philadelphi Corridor.
Bribing officials and soldiers
For many years, arms were smuggled into the Gaza Strip via the tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor while Egyptian troops and officials were bribed, and on many occasions, the Egyptian army turned a blind eye to what was going on. During the tenure of President Mubarak, the smuggling route for arms and missile parts passed from Iran via the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, and from there via the desert areas of Sudan and Egypt into the Sinai Peninsula, and from there to the Gaza Strip. The growth of ISIL led to a flurry of arms smuggling from Islamist organizations in Libya to the ISIL-Sinai Province. According to foreign reports, Israel also took part in the operations against ISIL-Sinai Province, which provided support to the Egyptian effort to oust the ISIL presence there.
Even today, there are those in Israel who believe that it is possible to reach an effective agreement with Egypt based on common interests, possibly with US mediation. Having said that, this time it is probably going to be much more of a complex challenge for el-Sissi. The Israeli public is not fully aware of the chasm between the president of Egypt, who for the moment is preserving the peace agreement with Israel and even engages in military, intelligence, and economic cooperation with it – and the state of mind of the masses in Egypt, many of whom positively hate and despise Israel, as this is how they were raised and educated, religiously and/or politically.
We have seen this in Alexandria, where the crowds screamed: "Ya Qassam, Ya Habib, strike and destroy Tel Aviv," along with the masses on the outskirts of Cairo calling on Hezbollah leader Nasrallah to fire on Tel Aviv, and also in Cairo's Tahrir Square, in which the crowds burst through the barriers waving Palestinian flags and tearing photos of el-Sissi into shreds.
el-Sissi is cautious of this public opinion and is well aware of its power and the danger that it could pose to his rule. He allows himself to lash out at radical Islam only when this involves incidents occurring far away from his home territory. For example, when ISIL carried out a terrorist attack on Christians in France, and even beheaded one of the victims there (in November 2015, ISIL murdered 130 people in France and wounded 352) – el-Sissi censured the Islamic clerics at Egypt's Al-Azhar University in extremely stern language.
In a speech he delivered then commemorating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, el-Sissi demanded that radical Islam should change its approach "to shape a proper discourse" and "out of a more enlightened vision." "It is not possible," he said then, that Islamic thinking "infuriates the entire world and causes the entire Islamic world to be a source of pain, danger, killing, and destruction for the rest of the world. It is inconceivable that the ideology that we hold most sacred should be a source of anxiety, danger, killing, and destruction among all the other nations...".
el-Sissi said nothing of the kind after the Palestinazi October 7 massacre in the Gaza belt communities – a massacre that was much more severe both in terms of scope and savagery. el-Sissi did not bother to go back to Al-Azhar to rebuke the senior members of this most important religious institution as he did then, even though these senior clerics applauded the horrendous terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas and the mass slaughter of innocent civilians.
El-Sissi's silence
el-Sissi's silence is even more deafening this time, as following the October 7 massacre, at Al-Azhar, they eagerly anticipated that "the end of Israel – a cancerous disease in the heart of the Arab Islamic nation – will be doom and devastation." The heads of Al-Azhar wished "annihilation" on the Jews, "the descendants of the monkeys and the pigs," "the murderers of the prophets," "the cursed" and "the enemies of humanity."
What has all this got to do with the Philadelphi Corridor? Because el-Sissi wants to secure his position on the domestic front too. Therefore, he talks about the holy Egyptian sovereignty and the fact that not even a single grain of sand will be given over to Israel. Although he does maintain an extensive relationship with Israel behind the scenes in a number of diverse spheres, and he did come to our aid to implement the hostage deal some 55 days ago, and at Washington's behest help transfer humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, we will not hear him condemn the jihad or the "shahids", or speak out against the use of terms such as "ribat" (a religious war and struggle to defend what is considered to be Islamic land).
In relation to the October 7 massacre in the Gaza belt communities, we will not see him attacking the clerics in Egypt, many of whom are still only prepared to accept the Jews as no more than a religion, and certainly not as a nation in sovereign possession of a land that they consider to be Islamic land. This view is so deeply enrooted among many people in Egypt, an Arab state with which we signed a peace agreement more than 40 years ago, so that even a leader such as el-Sissi, who enjoys excellent personal ties with Israel, does not allow himself to underestimate the power of the masses that might pose a serious threat to his regime. This is el-Sissi's base, and he will take pains to pay it the respect he feels it is due and will think twice before engaging in an encore of the dramatic 'show' he gave six years ago when he used such strong, formative language when faced with the Al-Azhar elders.
Similar caution, out of a desire not to antagonize Egypt, is what led to the Israeli decision at the beginning of the war to avoid taking control of Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. Israel is now being extremely careful to show deference to Egypt and el-Sissi and is fully aware of the sensitivities surrounding the Philadelphi Corridor. In retrospect, this consideration might turn out to have been a mistake. If Israel does not manage to reach an effective arrangement, which will block off smuggling cross the corridor for years to come – then sooner or later, the vast influx of weapons into the Gaza Strip will be renewed in precisely the same manner that it was done right under Israel's nose for many years.
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