Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to extend last week’s completed border crossing with Egypt to Israel’s border with Syria, following a series of security alerts in recent months in an apparent spillover from the ongoing conflict in the beleaguered country. At the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem Sunday, the Prime Minister aid the plans to replicate what he described as “one of the largest engineering enterprises in the history of the State of Israel” was motivated by concerns over the increasing grip of terrorist groups on the destabilised Syrian landscape.
"We know that on other side of our border with Syria today, the Syrian army has moved away, and in its place, Global Jihad forces have moved in,” Netanyahu insisted.
Equating the threat posed by such groups to the former militant loophole in the Sinai Peninsula, which was a long-suspected key arms supply route to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he vowed that “we will defend this border against both infiltration and terrorism, just as we are doing on the Sinai border”.
Last week, Netanyahu heralded the release of statistics of the number of infiltrators into Israel in 2012 by the Population and Migration Authority, which found that 36 illegal immigrants seeking work had attempted to cross the border from Egypt into Israel in December alone, all of whom were successfully detained by authorities. The new border between Israel and Egypt which runs from Kerem Shalom to Eilat aims to redress this loophole.
The newly-released figures also found that 9,207 illegal immigrants, including 3,920 from Africa alone were successfully repatriated from Israel in 2012, with the December figure of 36 marking a sharp reduction from the 2m295 recorded in January 2012 alone. Referring directly to the improved figures, Netanyahu declared “we have succeeded in blocking the phenomenon of illegal immigrants”.
Reiterating his concerns about the alleged chemical weaponry capabilities of destabilising forces in Syria, he concluded that a security fence between the two countries’ borders would enable Israel to “be prepared for any scenario and possibility that could arise”.
Netanyahu’s declaration came as authoritarian Syrian leader Bashar al Assad made a rare public address in which he accused the international community of constituting “an external aggression that is more dangerous than any others, because they use us to kill each other”.
Speaking to a crowded Opera House in the capital city of Damascus, the under-fire leader slammed opposition groups as “terrorists who carry the ideology of al Qaeda”, as he insisted that “the first part of a political solution would require regional powers to stop funding and arming (the rebels), an end to terrorism and controlling the borders”. A national dialogue would inevitably form a part of this solution, he added, as he rejected the newly-formed and internationally-backed opposition coalition as viable partners for talks.