Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that Israel intends to maintain a presence on the strategic Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt.
He is right to stand firm on this issue.
Netanyahu’s detractors, always attributing to him the very worst motivations – in this case, that he does not care whether the hostages live or die – claim he is using this issue to torpedo an agreement that he doesn’t want with Hamas because it could collapse his government.
They are wrong.
Evacuating the corridor or relying on the Egyptians or technological solutions to prevent its use as a superhighway for smuggling weapons into Gaza would be a colossal mistake, a mistake the country has already committed once. Netanyahu is correct to define this as a red line.
Much has been written about the need for Israel to learn the lessons of October 7; these lessons are myriad, and we believe a State Commission of Inquiry needs to be established to investigate what led to such a catastrophic failure so those lessons can be learned.
However, the lessons of October 7 are not the only ones Israel needs to learn. It also needs to learn the lessons of September 1, 2005, and the decision at the time – concretized in an agreement with Egypt – to evacuate the Philadelphi Corridor and authorize Egypt to deploy border guards to patrol the corridor on the Egyptian side.
Some members of the security establishment argued that, despite Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, it should hold on to the corridor to prevent the smuggling of arms and terrorists into Gaza, but then-prime minister Ariel Sharon overruled them.
Sharon argued that maintaining a military presence there was becoming more of a security liability than an asset, as soldiers patrolling the corridor were easy targets for Palestinian terrorists. He also said that keeping soldiers there would be a constant source of friction that could destabilize the region.
Sharon further claimed that only by removing the Israeli presence from the corridor could Israel say – and have the international community recognize – that it had fully withdrawn from Gaza.
That decision has proven disastrous.
The Philadelphi Corridor, as well as the border crossing at Rafah, is the route through which Hamas turned Gaza into an armed stronghold with an arsenal of weapons that would make a small NATO country blush.
Reliance on Egypt to prevent smuggling, either through tunnels or at the Rafah Crossing by bribing poorly paid and unmotivated Egyptian soldiers, was a tragic mistake.
Not only that, but it did not prevent the international community from saying that Israel continues to “occupy” Gaza and that it was the “world’s largest open-air prison.”
Those who argued adamantly against this move were cavalierly dismissed as doomsayers and told that if Israel saw that the corridor was being used to smuggle in arms and material, the IDF could easily retake it.
That turned out to be hubris. Israel saw that the corridor had become a highway for arming Gaza, but it did not take action to retake it. Why not? Because doing so is not simple, neither militarily nor in terms of international legitimacy. Now that Israel has retaken the area, it will vacate it again at its own peril.
IDF should not evacuate
If the IDF evacuates the area, whatever remains of Hamas after the war will use it – again – to rebuild its capabilities. The Philadelphi Corridor is Hamas’s lifeline. If Israel wants to prevent Hamas from reestablishing itself after the war, it needs to cut off this lifeline, and the only way to do that is for the IDF to be present.
This brings us to another important lesson, although this one is from October 7: Technological solutions to real security problems are not always the answer. One idea floated in recent days to get Israel to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor was to rely heavily on state-of-the-art sensors to monitor the area.
Israel relied on state-of-the-art sensors and other technological wizardry on October 7 to defend its borders and prevent terrorist infiltration, but how did that work out?
Israel needs its own boots on the ground to protect itself, and what is true along the border with Gaza and Lebanon is true along the border between Gaza and Egypt. Without an IDF presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, Gaza could once again turn into a killing fortress.