Suspicions Mount After Trump Unveils Initiative

Egypt Plans New Concrete Wall on Gaza Border

Date: 18 February 2020 - 22:16

News ID: ۷۶۳۱۵

CAIRO (Dispatches) -- Egyptian security and military forces are working around the clock to build a new concrete wall on the Egyptian side of the border with the besieged Gaza Strip which they aim to have completed by mid-2020, Palestinian sources told Middle East Eye.
Egypt embarked on the first stage of construction on 27 January in the area extending from the Karm Abu Salem commercial crossing to the Rafah crossing. The wall is set to extend along two kilometers in its first stage, and stand six meters tall above ground and five meters deep below it.
The move has not been welcomed in the besieged Palestinian territory, where many view the timing of the construction as suspicious given the recent unveiling of a U.S. plan for the occupying regime of Israel and Palestine that has been categorically rejected by the Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.
The border between Egypt and Gaza is some 14 kilometers long in total.
The new wall is about ten meters away from an existing wall built by the Egyptian army after Palestinians stormed the border in early 2008, MEE was able to observe from the ground.
According to available information, the second stage of construction of the wall will focus on tightening control of separate border sections that extend from the Rafah border crossing to the Mediterranean Sea - sectors which the Egyptian army believes are weak points used for infiltration and smuggling in and out of Gaza.
A Palestinian officer working for

Hamas’ security forces in Gaza revealed to MEE that Egyptian engineers and security and military experts have been periodically monitoring the progress of construction work from the Palestinian side of the border.
An Egyptian engineering and technical delegation visited Gaza Strip on February 13 and made a field tour along the border.
This visit came after a similar tour a few days earlier by an Egyptian security delegation led by Palestinian Major General Ahmed Abdel Khaliq, a member of Gaza’s General Intelligence Agency, on 10 February.
The decision to build a wall reaching deep into the ground is no accident, as Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has sought to shut down tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Province.
Since then-president Muhammad Morsi was deposed in a military coup in July 2013, Egyptian authorities have intensified their security and military operations in the Sinai, particularly cracking down on smuggling tunnels to Gaza.
The Egyptian army has largely succeeded in destroying hundreds of tunnels that Palestinians have dug to circumvent the suffocating siege imposed by the Zionist regime on the small coastal enclave since 2007.
In addition to destroying tunnels or flooding them with sewage water, Egypt has established a 1.5-kilometre long buffer zone along the border.
Hamas’ relationship with Egypt, which had been strong under Muslim Brotherhood leader Morsi’s rule, suffered after army chief Sisi rose to power.
Ibrahim Habib, a lecturer at the al-Rebat police academy in Gaza, does not see the value of building the new wall in terms of security.
He described the timing of the construction as "suspicious” given the U.S. administration’s unveiling in January of its controversial plan for the Zionist regime and Palestine, saying the proposal known colloquially as the "deal of the century” was "forcing the resistance in Gaza to accept the status quo”.
The construction of the wall and new security measures on both sides of the border coincide with U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to expand the Gaza Strip by adding to it new lands in the Negev desert adjacent to the Egyptian Sinai - while formalizing the annexation of East Jerusalem Al-Quds, Israeli settlements and large swathes of land in the occupied West Bank, and creating a demilitarized, fragmented Palestinian state with little to no sovereignty.
Habib wondered why Egypt has focused on its short border with Gaza, while there are many entry points for the infiltration of militants, whether by sea or through Egypt’s long land borders with other countries.
"Hamas has been making great efforts for years to protect Egyptian national security through security reinforcements from the deployment of additional forces and new buildings on the Palestinian side of the border,” he said.
"I do not think that this wall has a real security dimension. Its construction is in line with the (Israeli) occupation’s policy of building walls.”