Israel’s demand for lasting control over two strategic corridors in Gaza, which Hamas has long rejected, threatens to unravel cease-fire talks aimed at ending the 10-month-old war.
Officials close to the negotiations have said Israel wants to maintain a military presence in a narrow buffer zone along the Gaza-Egypt border it calls the Philadelphi corridor and in an area it carved out that cuts off northern Gaza from the south, known as the Netzarim corridor.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says control of the Egyptian border area is needed to prevent Hamas from replenishing its arsenal through smuggling tunnels and that Israel needs a “mechanism” to prevent militants from returning to the north, which has been largely isolated since October.
Egypt rejects those allegations, saying it destroyed hundreds of tunnels on its side of the border years ago and set up a military buffer zone of its own that prevents smuggling.
Israeli control over either corridor would require closed roads, fences, guard towers and other military installations. Checkpoints are among the most visible manifestations of Israel’s open-ended military rule over the West Bank, and over Gaza prior to its 2005 withdrawal.
Israel says such checkpoints are needed for security, but Palestinians view them as a humiliating infringement on their daily life. They would also be seen by many Palestinians as a prelude to a lasting military occupation and the return of Jewish settlements — something Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners have openly called for.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-ceasefire-talks-corridors-03deb20a6c549273fb4b8ce3475fff17
Posted by Naurgul
8 comments
“Humiliating infringement on their daily life” vastly undersells the criminal nature of Israeli checkpoints in Palestine. Imagine the worst tsa line of your life, then imagine the guards will openly molest you and your wife and kids without consequence, that they will sometimes refuse to let you pass (thus stealing your job that makes pennies on a good day), and there is always a chance that you will be randomly kidnapped and put in rape and torture concentration camps.
While I appreciate that Egypt has been facilitating peace talks, except for that one time they intentionally tanked the peace deal, saying they’ve prevented all smuggling from their side is pretty audacious when you look at how many tunnels the IDF found going under the Egyptian border.
I can understand Egypt not wanting Israel on the Philidalphi corridor. But why is Hamas opposed? Israel isn’t asking to control the border crossing. Just the fence. Unless Hamas are openly saying that they need that space to illegally get things over the border.
Oh oh, I can answer this one! It’s because Hamas uses tunnels underneath the Gaza-Egypt border to smuggle weapons and other warfighting materials into Gaza.
Israel wants to ensure that these terror tunnels can’t be rebuilt, because if they are, Hamas will simply use them to resupply themselves again from Egypt and then use those weapons to launch another war against Israel. Israel obvious doesn’t want that to happen, and the only way to ensure that it doesn’t is if Israeli troops are supervising the area.
Hope that answers your question, AP journalist who wrote this article!
The netzarim corridor is in some ways going to be the bigger issue here. Israel says it’s to stop terrorists returning to the North but have given no specifics on what that means. I worry/suspect this means preventing anyone connected to hamas from returning. If this includes family of those employed as civil servants in the non-militant parts of the organisation suddenly you have a massive part of the population excluded from returning and this starts to look like a forced population transfer. This is why Israel’s cloak and dagger attitude to it’s post war plans is so poisonous as it makes everyone assume the worst.
Many comments here forget why the checkpoints were put up. Do y’all remember the suicide bombings? The rampant violence for Palestinians who came in unchecked?
No, because many of you don’t care about the reasons. You just want to hate on Israel because it’s “bad”. Israel gets to control who comes in just like every other country in the world.
Thread already filling with spammers and brigading, but it doesn’t matter.
Israel supporters’ mask always fall off when the subject is checkpoints, the west bank and the dictatorship and second-class status they live under. You just sound like racist lunatics justifying the unjustifiable.
We have seen, been seeing, and still see the israeli military presence in west bank and east jerusalem. Their lives are fucked. It would take no time before people starts dying again.
There mere presence on gaza’s borders BEFORE 7 oct was already awful.