Israel needs to secure Gaza-Egyptian border area

Daniel Pipes:
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To any sentient person, it is obvious that Israelis are 100-percent justified to protect themselves from wanton attacks. A cartoon from the First Hamas-Israel War of 2008-09 symbolically showed a Palestinian terrorist shooting from behind a baby carriage at an Israeli soldier in front of a baby carriage.

The tougher question is how to prevent further Hamas-Israel wars. Some background: If Israelis are 100-percent justified protecting themselves, their government also bears complete responsibility for creating this self-inflicted crisis. Specifically, it made two misguided unilateral withdrawals in 2005:
  • From Gaza: Ariel Sharon won reelection as prime minister in Jan. 2003 in part by mocking a rival who called for the unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli residents and soldiers from Gaza; then, inexplicably, in Nov. 2003 he adopted this same policy and put it into effect in Aug. 2005. I dubbed this at that time, "one of the worst errors ever made by a democracy."
  • From the Philadelphi Corridor: Under U.S. pressure, especially from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sharon signed an agreement in Sep. 2005, called "Agreed Arrangements," that withdrew Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor, a 14-km long and 100-meter wide area between Gaza and Egypt. The hapless "European Union Border Assistance Mission at the Rafah Crossing Point" (EUBAM Rafah) took their place.

...

To permit Israeli soldiers effectively to prevent armaments from reaching Gaza, David Eshel of Defense Update argued in 2009 for the IDF taking back the Philadelphi Corridor and increasing its size to "a fully sterile security line of about 1,000 meters," even though this would mean having to relocate about 50,000 Gaza residents. Interestingly, the Palestinian Authority's Ahmed Qurei privately endorsed similar steps in 2008.

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With the Muslim Brotherhood in control of Egypt now that strategy makes even more sense.  Even with the wider security zone they will still have to deal with tunnels, but they will have to use technology to disrupt them and cause their collapse.  There is a graphic at the link above that shows where the security corridor would be.

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