Army speeds up new defense barrier around Gaza
KFAR SIRKIN, Israel — Israel is building another wall to protect itself from its enemies. But rather than a major eyesore, much of this one will be invisible.
In the coming months, military officials say, the army will be accelerating construction of a subterranean barrier around the Gaza Strip, designed to cut off tunnels running beneath the border into Israel like the ones Hamas militants used to ambush Israeli military posts during the summer-long war of 2014.
Challenged by hostile forces on most of its fronts, Israel is already pretty much walled in. Above-ground fences and sections of concrete wall run along and through parts of the West Bank, a legacy of Palestinian suicide bombings during the second intifada. Formidable steel fences also stretch along the northern frontiers with Lebanon and Syria, the southern borders with Jordan and the Egyptian Sinai, and around Gaza, the isolated Palestinian coastal enclave controlled by Hamas, the Islamic militant group, for the last decade.
The approach seems to have caught on internationally. President Trump invoked Israel’s “wall” — without specifying which one — as a model for the barrier he has vowed to build along the United States’ border with Mexico. And the migrant crisis has spurred European interest in Israeli fence-building techniques.
Israeli military officials are being understandably cagey about how the new underground barrier will work, other than to say it will also include an above-ground section and incorporate layers of advanced technological systems. The cost is expected to be more than $1 billion, according to Israeli news reports, which suggest it will plunge to a depth of about 130 feet.
Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the commander of the military’s Southern Command, told reporters this week that it would be completed within about two years.
Military commanders are insisting that the wall is meant only to defend Israelis, and emphasizing that it will be built in Israeli territory, in the hope of removing any justification for Hamas to attack the construction teams and set off another round of fighting.