Enough Inflammatory Rhetoric. Egypt Hasn’t Violated Its Peace With Israel

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Egypt this week. His trip follows recent accusations between Egypt and Israel over the subterranean tunnel network inside the Gaza Strip. Egypt has accused Israel of failing to stop arms smuggling in Gaza from the West Bank, while Israel has accused Egypt of being responsible for the militarization of Gaza due to what it perceives as a failure by Egypt to tackle smuggling operations throughout its sovereign territory.
These accusations, were they true, would potentially constitute a violation of the 1979 Egypt-Israel Treaty of Peace. They also risk an escalation that could lead to the breakdown of this important peace agreement. The truth is more complex: Egypt, too, is suffering from Hamas’ subterfuge.
The tunnel network, known colloquially as the Gaza Metro, is a vast and intricate decentralized system of connected underground tunnels that were built by various Palestinian factions over the last two decades to serve their purposes. They crisscross Gaza’s Egyptian borders into the Sinai. But it’s important to remember that Egypt and Israel came to an understanding about how to handle the Rafah border area, which was named the Philadelphi Corridor, after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005. IDF troops had uncovered several tunnels along the borders between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai before the withdrawal, and identified the “militarization of the Gaza Strip” as a risk the tunnels posed. When IDF evacuated the corridor, Egypt and Israel signed the Philadelphi Accord as a separate agreement to allow Egypt to secure its borders with Gaza against smuggling, infiltration, and terrorism activities.
In November of the same year, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed the Agreement on Movement and Access, which outlined the governing principles for operating border crossings into the Gaza Strip, as well as the movement of people and goods between the strip and the West Bank with support from European Union (EU) monitors. But the escalation following the Palestinian Legislative Council elections of 2006 between the newly-formed, Hamas-led government of the PA and Israel, the capture of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, the subsequent IDF operations in the Gaza Strip, and finally the Battle of Gaza between Hamas and elements of the PA loyal to the Fatah Movement, led to the departure of the EU monitors, rendering the AMA defunct.
Led by Hamas, many factions and criminal gangs dug, licensed, and operated more cross-border tunnels into the Sinai. Those were used to smuggle weapons, munitions, tools, machinery, vehicles, goods, contra, and even livestock into the strip. Hamas levied taxes in American dollars on all smuggled items, including food, negating the popular narrative that Gaza was under blockade. In January of 2008, Hamas orchestrated a breach of the Egyptian borders, blowing up the border fence and allowing more than 700,000 Palestinians, almost half the population of the strip at the time, to enter the Sinai for more than 11 days.
After that incident, Egypt stepped up its efforts to tackle the tunnels and the smuggling problem. Egyptian Army Corps of Engineers officers received training on tunnel detection and destruction in the United States, and American Army Corps of Engineers personnel arrived in the Sinai as consultants to provide training and participate in patrolling. A project to build an underground steel fence was considered and abandoned due to technical difficulties. Egypt dispatched elite units to its borders with Sudan to interdict weapon shipments sent by the Islamic Republic of Iran, after breaking up two cells of 49 Egyptian, Palestinian, and Lebanese operatives working for Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as four Iranian Islamic Revolution Guard Corps agents who facilitated the smuggling operations.
The 2011 wave of popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring further destabilized regional security. With the Muslim Brotherhood securing a parliamentary majority and winning the presidency, smuggling operations increased dramatically into the Gaza Strip, and much of the weapons, munitions, and explosives in Libyan Stores found their way there, too. Smuggling from Sudan also increased, and terrorist attacks inside the Sinai against Egyptian Armed Forces and Police personnel skyrocketed. It was not until the coup of 2013 that Egypt started tackling the smuggling and terrorism threat in the Sinai, after negotiating agreements with Israel to increase the numbers of troops it could deploy to the Sinai.
Egyptian Combat Engineers Department officers waged a campaign to detect and destroy all cross-border tunnels using demolition and flooding tactics. Egypt ordered the creation of a buffer zone along the Philadelphi Corridor and relocated the entire city of Egyptian Rafah away from the borders. The border fence was further fortified and enhanced with sentry points, watchtowers, and surveillance equipment. Smuggling operations decreased significantly, and are now mainly limited to overground drug smugglers.
Building on the Philadelphi Accord—per its last article, only Egypt and Israel can resolve any disagreements without referring to a third party—it would do both parties good to deescalate their rhetoric. The United States should provide assistance to construct a state-of-the-art border fence with shared operation. The Multinational Force and Observers in the Sinai should continue to conduct third-party monitoring.
The 1979 Egypt-Israel Treaty of Peace has been the cornerstone of stability in the Middle East for almost 45 years. It provides a concrete foundation to further build on, if both parties drop inflammatory rhetoric and false accusations.
M. A. Al-Asqalani is an independent national security and open source intelligence analyst based in Cairo, Egypt.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.