First there was Al Shifa, the hospital in Gaza City, whose invasion was essential because it concealed an enormous Hamas “command and control centre” underground, which was never found. Then there was Rafah, the missing piece to complete a “total victory within reach”, because the four battalions there could “reconquer Gaza and repeat the massacre of October 7 over and over again”. Ending the war without taking it was equivalent to the Allies stopping at the gates of Berlin in World War II. Now, after eleven months of invasion that have left nearly 41,000 corpses, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has turned the Philadelphia Corridor, the 14 kilometres of Gaza bordering Egypt, into the new touchstone of the country’s future and yet another obstacle to a ceasefire.
Bolstered by the relative failure of a general strike hours earlier, he appeared before the media in Jerusalem late on Monday to defiantly explain the importance of controlling the Corridor once the war is over. “We have to make permanent the fact that we are there.” […] “It’s not a question of military tactics, but of the immense political pressure that the whole world is putting on us. If we leave, we will not return,” he added.
“Our presence [en el Corredor] It is mainly a strategic political issue. They tell me: let’s go out for 42 days [la duración de la primera fase del alto el fuego en negociación] and then we come back […] It is not a question of military tactics, but of the immense political pressure that the entire world puts on us. […] “If we leave, we may not return for 42 years. Because we already left and we did not return for 20 years,” he said.
Netanyahu recalled the four new objectives of the war: “destroy Hamas, bring back all our hostages, ensure that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel and return safely the residents on the northern border.” Three of them, he said, “pass through one place: the Philadelphia Corridor.” “It is Hamas’ oxygen and rearmament channel. We have to control the Philadelphia Corridor. Hamas insists [en rechazarlo] just so that we are not there. And, for that very reason, I insist that we be there,” he added.
An expert at setting the agenda for debate and presenting himself as a strong leader protecting the security of the Jewish state in front of the world, Netanyahu began the press conference by saying that Israel is waging an “existential war” against Iran, a “cruel enemy” that wants to kill all Israelis “without exception.”
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It was then that he resorted to a map – with the entire Palestinian territory of the West Bank marked as part of Israel – to illustrate with a pointer the origin of all evils: the unilateral withdrawal of settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 by Ariel Sharon’s government. Aware that he supported it then with his vote (in Parliament and in the Government) months before resigning and that he has been in power almost uninterruptedly since 2009 and for years without hardly mentioning the Corridor, he insisted that his ideas have not changed, only the circumstances: “They ask me: why, if it was so bad? [la situación]didn’t you reconquer it? […] “We did not have the international legitimacy to go in, conquer Gaza, retake the Philadelphia Corridor and the Rafah crossing,” the response was given.
The corridor, which runs from the Mediterranean Sea to the Kerem Shalom crossing, was born out of the Camp David Accords, under which Israel signed peace with Egypt in 1979 and returned the Sinai, which it had seized 12 years earlier in the Six-Day War. At the time, Israel had troops in Gaza. When they withdrew in 2005, with the enclave a hot potato, the two countries sealed an agreement specifying the tasks, number of soldiers and equipment with which the Egyptians would guard the border.
Israel’s worst fears came true. In 2006, Hamas won the elections and a year later took control of Gaza by force from forces loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the president and leader of the other major Palestinian faction, Fatah. Israel declared Gaza “enemy territory” and placed it under blockade. For the first few years, it was suffocating and in the hands of Cairo. Tunnels flourished under the border. Even donkeys, cars and fried chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken cooked in Al Arish, the Sinai town closest to the border, were brought in. And, of course, weapons, like those Hamas used in its massive surprise attack on October 7.
That is why Netanyahu now insists that there is only one option: Israeli control. A multinational force – not even with the presence of soldiers from his great ally, the United States – would not help, nor would the return of Abbas’s Palestinian National Authority, as Washington would like.
The corridor also includes the Rafah crossing, the only one in Gaza that does not lead to Israel and through which tens of thousands of Gazans escaped the war, enriching an opaque network in Egypt that took advantage of their desperation. Until May, when the Israeli army took over the crossing and flew its flag. If it remained like this after the war, Gazans would only have exit routes under Israeli control.
“Save Hamas”
Netanyahu did not just talk about the Corridor. He also fired at his own and foreigners. He said that Hamas was placing its hopes on Iran and Hezbollah “coming to save it” and is now doing so on “international pressure.” He accused the Egyptian leaders of allowing the smuggling of weapons from their territory for two decades. “Mainly, of course, during the government of [el islamista Mohamed] Mursi, but also later (sic, he was his predecessor), with [Hosni] Mubarak or others,” that is, with the current one, Abdel Fatah Al Sisi.
He also lashed out at his defense minister and fellow party member, Yoav Gallant, for proposing to reverse last week’s decision in the security cabinet to make control of the Corridor a red line in the negotiations. He was the only one to vote against. And he said he was unaware of the blunt “No” with which US President Joe Biden had responded hours earlier to a question about whether Netanyahu was doing enough to close a ceasefire agreement. “I don’t know exactly what he said,” he replied. “I don’t think he really said that.”
The press conference has outraged the Forum of Hostages and Missing Families, the main lobby The Forum, which was very careful not to criticise Netanyahu in the first months of the war and did not even make explicit its position on an exchange, no longer hesitates to name him in the face of the growing certainty that it is he, and not Hamas, who is the main obstacle to an agreement. “The people of Israel, who in their majority support the return of the hostages, will no longer extend their hand to this criminal negligence,” it stressed.
In the same vein, former prime minister and opposition leader Yair Lapid has accused Netanyahu of preferring “an eternal war.” “His words tonight have a terrible meaning: there will be no agreement,” he said in a video. Lapid interprets Netanyahu’s new obsession with the Philadelphia Corridor as a “political smo
kescreen that not even a single professional will swallow” and a “new trick” to keep the coalition he forged in 2022 with the far right and the ultra-Orthodox, the most right-wing in the country’s seven-decade history, standing.
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