Click here to see a map of the Gaza Strip. The road along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip is called the Philadelphi Corridor or Philadephi Route (In Hebrew, Tzir Philadelphi) Note Rafah and Kerem Shalom along that border.
It is under this narrow 14 mile long corridor between Egypt and Gaza that Hamas, the Bedouin in Sinai, along with other Palestinian Arab terrorists dug tunnels through which they smuggled Iranian made missiles and other lethal weapons into Gaza. Egypt turned a blind eye to this massive smuggling operation which armed Hamas to the level it was on October 7, 2023. Others think it cooperated.
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On August 23, 2011, I first wrote an article titled: "The Philadelphi Corridor: Take it Back, Israel, and Soon." I also wrote an updated column again after the October 7, 2023, Hamas horrific slaughter of over 1,400 Israelis in southern Israel. I yet again urged Israel to take immediate advantage of the IDF at war with the Hamas occupiers inside Gaza and finally re-possess the Corridor.
Israel is moving southward but has not reached the Corridor yet, although Netanyahu says it will happen. The immensely strategic border crossing is still under joint Egyptian/Hamas control. Some commentators now suggest possible Egyptian connivance with Hamas during the smuggling campaign which armed Hamas..
Indeed, many years have passed since those two articles were published, first on the Israel National News website and secondly on the Renew America website. Enormous quantities of Iranian missiles - all increasingly lethal – flooded into Gaza through the smuggling tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor. My pleas that Israel take back the strategic and vital Philadelphi Corridor despite its leaving Gaza in 2005 were to no avail.
Now, as Israel is growing closer to ridding the Hamas occupiers from Gaza, pressure by the Biden Administration, the U.N and the EU. for imposed ceasefires keep being raised. All would again create for Israel the same perilous situation, leaving Hamas alive to gloat at surviving and ready to commit yet more genocidal atrocities against Israeli civilians.
Hamas always attacks again and again when it deems the moment is favorable to it. This will only stop once and for all when Hamas is totally uprooted from its malign occupation of the Gaza Strip. But President Biden is hardening his pressure upon the embattled Jewish state, no doubt taking his orders from anti-Israel Barack Hussein Obama, and under pressure from Islamic mobs rioting in America and throughout an enfeebled West.
Repossessing the Philadelphi Corridor is again a militarily and strategically vital decision yet to be made affirmitavely. Doing so will no doubt evoke screams of rage from the morally compromised world, but then they will always condemn Israel however restrained the Jewish state acts. So, with that truism, it is surely better to be hung in the media and the international corridors of power as a lion than a sheep.
Repossessing territory as punishment for Palestinian Arab crimes and aggression is also a salutary move which strikes at the very heart of Islamic supremacy and expansionism.
It is just as much in Egypt’s best interests as well as Israel’s to frustrate Hamas aggression and so far, Egypt’s President al-Sisi, has shown no love for Hamas. It is Israel’s only hope of security to arbitrarily liberate and re-possess Gaza and the narrow Philadelphi Corridor.
After all, should al-Sisi be overthrown by the Muslim Brotherhood at some future time in the ever-shifting sands of Arab and Muslim internecine strife there would be no more need for smuggling tunnels beneath the Egyptian - Gaza border. Instead, endless fleets of trucks would bring into the Strip from Egypt -potentially again the big Muslim Brotherhood - the most sophisticated weapons and missiles needed for Hamas - the little Muslim Brotherhood. Only by fully and permanently repossessing the Philadelphi Corridor can Israel hope to stem such a lethal tide.
Most do not remember that when the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979, the 14 km long security and buffer zone known as the Philadelphi Corridor was left under Israel’s control. Its very purpose was to prevent the illegal importation into the Gaza Strip from Egypt of weapons and terrorists to be used against Israel.
The story in a nutshell:
The ill-fated Oslo Accords, signed in 1995, allowed Israel to retain the Philadelphi security corridor along the border but it soon became apparent that Sinai Bedouin and the Palestinian Arabs were digging ever more sophisticated smuggling tunnels under it. Following Israel’s tragic disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s subsequent urging, Israel foolishly and disastrously gave up control of the Philadelphi Corridor to the Palestinian Authority in September of that year and was no longer able to monitor and destroy those tunnels. Then two years later in 2007 Hamas defeated the PA in a bloody civil war, killed the PA supporters and began their malign occupation of Gaza.
I first urged Israeli leaders as far back as August 23, 2011, to liberate the Philadelphi Corridor, I again plead that Israel take it back now and take it soon. Widen it to two kilometers, destroy the tunnels and prevent their reconstruction. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and all the other haters of the Jewish state, should they be allowed to survive, neither sleep nor rest. Remember too, that Gaza was given to the Jewish Biblical tribe of Judah as an eternal possession millennia ago.
I tend to agree with what Rabbi Yigal Kamietsky, the rabbi of Gush Katif - the main Jewish town in Gaza at the time - said before its population and that of the other Jewish Gazan communities were egregiously expelled in 2005 by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Rabbi Kamietsky said the following: “Gaza is part of the Land of Israel, no less than Tel Aviv and Bnei Brak.” He had also said that not only was it considered a mitzvah (blessing) to settle there but that Jews in the Gaza communities act as a buffer for those Jews living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
In fact, some Israelis had expressed fears that once Israeli troops and residents were withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Arab terrorists might soon concentrate on building rockets that can hit the Israeli city of Ashkelon, north of Gaza.They were dismissed as doomsayers.
How right they were.
Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer and author of the four-volume work, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.