Weekly Commentary: Reality Check - Corruption Cripples Egypt's Ability to Effectively Halt Smuggling into Gaza

Weekly Commentary: Reality Check – Corruption Cripples Egypt’s Ability to Effectively Halt Smuggling into Gaza
Dr. Aaron Lerner, 28 December 2023

If smuggling from Egypt into the Gaza Strip isn’t halted, ‘Stage Three’ of
our war against Hamas is doomed to fail.

Instead, our raids targeting specific objectives will amount to nothing more
than a costly Whack-A-Mole game, with Hamas swiftly recovering from any
damage we inflict.

And with all due respect to President Biden and the 2024 elections,
expecting us to literally ‘die to please him’ is simply immoral.

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Egyptian President el-Sisi is
genuinely committed to preventing smuggling into the Gaza Strip via the
Sinai.

Consider this description of Egyptian activities against smuggling tunnels
from almost five years ago
+++++++
Egypt’s War against the Gaza Tunnels
Dr. Shaul Shay Israel Defense 4 February 2018
https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/32925
…

The Egyptian security forces developed a comprehensive strategy against the
tunnel network:

The “Buffer Zone”

Following the Ansar Beit al Maqdis attacks of October 24, 2014, President
el-Sisi has ordered the creation of a “buffer-zone” along the Egyptian
border with Gaza in an attempt to quash the illegal tunnel trading between
Sinai and the Gaza Strip. In January 2015, Egypt began work on doubling the
width of the “buffer zone” along the border with the Gaza Strip. The “buffer
zone” was initially planned to be 500 meters wide, but is now being expanded
by another 500 meters.

The Egyptian army gave over 1,100 families who lived within the “buffer
zone” only 48 hours to evacuate their houses. North Sinai’s Governor Abdel
Fattah Harhour has stated that every family will receive EGP300 (US$40) in
housing allowance for three months, and further compensation will be given
for demolished buildings. However, tribal leaders from the region have
expressed their dissatisfaction with the sums offered.

Flooding the Tunnels

Filling the tunnels with sewage: Since 2013, the Egyptian military is
resorting to a new tactic to shut down the smuggling tunnels: flooding them
with sewage. It has since been revealed that this was not a flood of water,
but rather human excrement – hundreds, thousands of gallons of raw sewage
pumped into the tunnels.

Filling the tunnels with seawater: The Egyptians dug a trench on the Sinai
side of the border and then laid pipes parallel to the “buffer-zone” road,
known as the Philadelphia Route. Water from the nearby sea was pumped in,
creating a canal. The water channel flooded the tunnels, causing them to
collapse. The Palestinians are trying to reinforce and waterproof their
tunnels with cement and steel bars, hoping they would be saved from collapse
if more flooding occurred.
+++++++

So on the face of it, it appears that the Egyptians are truly committed to
stopping the smuggling.

But we know that despite the efforts described above, the volume of
smuggling remains so huge that it is readily observable.

After all, you can’t smuggle literally truckloads of shipments through
smuggling tunnels on an ongoing basis without having trucks pull up to the
entrances of the tunnels in Egypt.

The problem is that while President el-Sisi and the heads of the Egyptian
security forces may want to prevent smuggling, the Egyptian security forces
on the scene can enjoy bribes magnitudes greater than their salaries for
looking the other way.

And so they look the other way.

And there is so much money involved that any anti-smuggling program which
relies on the Egyptians for its success is doomed to failure.

Plans for underground walls and other schemes in Egypt to block tunnels may
look good on paper, but that is a ‘paper’ which ignores the reality on the
ground.

We are going to have to control a buffer area between Egypt and the Gaza
Strip and thwart the smuggling ourselves.

The Philadelphi Corridor is such a buffer, but it’s only 100 meters wide,
making it more a shooting gallery for terrorists to murder Israelis than
anything else.

The Egyptians razed a kilometer-wide ‘buffer zone’ on their side of the
border. We need to do at least the same on the Gaza Strip side so that we
can implement an effective anti-smuggling operation.

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IMRA – Independent Media Review and Analysis

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