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Middle East
What is the Philadelphi corridor, and why is Bibi so fixated on it?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent weeks has repeatedly emphasized the need for Israel to retain control of the Philadelphi corridor. This has emerged as a major obstacle to a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas. Here’s a breakdown of the corridor’s significance and the implications of Netanyahu’s stance.
What is the Philadelphi corridor? It is a narrow buffer zone — roughly 100 yards wide and 9 miles long — that runs along Gaza’s border with Egypt and includes the Rafah border crossing. The corridor was established via a landmark 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Philadelphi is the Israeli code name for the area, while Egypt refers to it as Salah al-Din.
The Philadelphi corridor was under Israel’s control until 2005, when Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza. It then fell under the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority and Egypt — until Hamas took over Gaza in 2007.
As part of a May offensive, Israel seized control of the Philadelphi corridor and the Rafah crossing — moves that raised tensions between the Israeli and Egyptian governments.
As a vital route for aid into Gaza, the Rafah crossing is considered a “lifeline” for Gaza. Before May, it was the only Gaza border crossing not directly controlled by the Jewish state, which has imposed a blockade on the enclave — with Egypt’s support — starting in 2007. Since Oct. 7, it’s become even more difficult for aid to get into Gaza and for people to leave the enclave.
Why is Philadelphi so important to Netanyahu? The PM contends that Israel must maintain a presence in the corridor to prevent the area from being used by Hamas for arms smuggling. “Gaza must be demilitarized, and this can only happen if the Philadelphi corridor remains under firm control,” Netanyahu said Wednesday.
Though the focus on the corridor has intensified in recent days, particularly after the killing of six hostages in Gaza, Netanyahu signaled a desire for Israeli control of the Egypt-Gaza border as far back as late December. The corridor “must be in our hands,” Netanyahu said then.
What do other Israeli politicians say? Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid have both criticized Netanyahu’s stance on the Philadelphi corridor.
“It is too late for the hostages who were murdered in cold blood. The hostages who remain in Hamas captivity must be returned home,” Gallant said in a tweet on Sunday that also called for the security cabinet to reverse a decision to keep Israeli forces in the corridor. Lapid decried Netanyahu’s position as “baseless political spin” that’s “disconnected from reality.”
Top rival Benny Gantz, along with other critics, have accused Netanyahu of prioritizing his political survival over the country’s best interests. The far-right flank of Netanyahu’s coalition has threatened to collapse the government if a truce is reached with Hamas.
What does this mean for cease-fire talks? Hamas says there will be no deal if Israeli forces remain in the Philadelphi corridor. The Palestinian militant group has pushed for all Israeli troops to withdraw from Gaza as part of a cease-fire agreement.
Following the recent killings of hostages in Gaza, mass numbers of Israelis have flooded the country’s streets and demanded a hostage deal. But Netanyahu has refused to budge on an Israeli presence in the corridor. Family members of hostages in recent days have accused him of blocking a deal and condemning their loved ones to die over his refusal to pull troops from the Philadelphi corridor.
The Israeli PM’s public comments on this issue have also reportedly contradicted private indications from Israeli negotiators to international mediators that Israel is willing to withdraw troops from the corridor as part of a phased cease-fire agreement.
And in a sign that the US government is getting fed up with Netanyahu, President Joe Biden on Monday said the Israeli leader is not doing enough to secure a cease-fire deal.
With neither side willing to make significant compromises, talks remain at an impasse, and the war in Gaza is poised to continue for the foreseeable future.
“There’s not a deal in the making,” Netanyahu told Fox News on Thursday. “Unfortunately, it’s not close.”
Students and staff gather next to the football field after law enforcement officers responded to a fatal shooting at Apalachee High School in a still image from aerial video in Winder, Georgia, U.S. September 4, 2024.
4: Four people -- two students and two teachers -- were killed and 30 wounded when a gunman opened fire at a high school in suburban Atlanta on Wednesday. The 14-year-old student accused of carrying out the shooting is in custody, and had been interviewed by the F.B.I last year for making school shooting threats online. For a look at the skyrocketing number of US school shootings over the past decade, see our recent Graphic Truth here.
28:Kamala Harris released her tax policy on Wednesday. In it, she distances herself from Joe Biden by endorsing a lower capital gains tax increase. Her proposal attempts to win over the business community and wealthier Americans by only taxing investment income for Americans earning more than a million dollars a year at a rate of 28%, far below the 39.6% proposed by the president.
72: The deaths of the 72 people killed in the Grenfell apartment tower fire in London in 2017 were the result of “incompetence, dishonesty, and greed” on the part of government officials and contractors. That’s according to the official inquiry on the incident, which was released on Wednesday. The fire was the worst in the UK since World War II.
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As Israel is rocked by protests following the recent killings of six hostages in Gaza, demonstrations surrounding the Israel-Hamas conflict are also returning to US campuses as students return for fall semester.
Protesters were seen on Tuesday at Columbia University in New York City, where some of the most high-profile campus demonstrations over the war occurred last spring. The demonstrators are renewing calls for the university to end relationships with companies tied to Israel. There have also been related protests in recent days at Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and McGill University in Montreal.
We’ll be watching to see if the protests spiral into a larger movement, as they did earlier this year, which could potentially shape conversations surrounding the US 2024 presidential election as Election Day draws closer.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands before a map of the Gaza Strip, telling viewers how Hamas has imported arms into the territory since Israel's withdrawal in 2005, during a news conference in Jerusalem, September 2, 2024.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has thrown cold water on rising calls for a cease-fire deal with Hamas, despite facing mass protests in the wake of the killings of six Oct. 7 hostages in Gaza. “No one is more committed to freeing the hostages than me. But no one will preach to me,” Netanyahu said on Monday.
Netanyahu also said that Israel would not give up control of the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip of land along the Egypt-Gaza border that was created as a demilitarized zone via the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1979. The Philadelphi corridor — which was seized by Israel in May, to Egypt’s dismay — has emerged as a major sticking point in truce talks.
Netanyahu insists that Israel must remain in the Philadelphi corridor to prevent Hamas from using it for arms smuggling. Meanwhile, Hamas says there will be no cease-fire if Israeli forces remain in the corridor.
Benny Gantz, head of the National Unity party and a top rival of the prime minister, on Tuesday pushed back against Netanyahu’s assertion that the Philadelphi corridor posed an existential threat to Israel. Gantz also accused Netanyahu of putting his own interests before Israel’s, an allegation that the Israeli leader has increasingly faced throughout the war in Gaza.
The far-right flank of Netanyahu’s flimsy coalition has threatened to collapse the government if a cease-fire agreement is reached. Critics of Netanyahu, like Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, say he’s standing in the way of a deal to remain in power.
As he faces increasing pressure to bring the hostages home, we’ll be watching to see if Netanyahu is willing to shift on issues like the Philadelphi corridor in the days ahead.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take to kick off your week and the work year. I want to talk about the Middle East and big demonstrations, the largest social dissent we have seen since the October 7th terror attacks, since the war in Gaza has started in Israel. And the proximate reason for this was the Hamas execution of six Israeli hostages in Rafah, likely before those positions were overrun by Israeli Defense Forces. The broader point anger with the way that Prime Minister Netanyahu is continuing to prosecute the war.
And it's a big deal, it's a general strike of the largest labor union in Israel, just as everyone in Israel is coming back from vacation. And so large scale action and certainly has an impact on the economy. The anger in particular with demanding a cease-fire deal and demanding the release of the hostages who have been held now for almost a year.
This has not been seen to be an adequate priority of the Prime Minister by a majority of Israeli citizens. This is not because there are large numbers of Israelis that are in favor of a two-state solution. For the Palestinians, that's not the case. It's certainly not the case that there's any sympathy for Hamas or that the Israelis are angry that a lot of Palestinians have gotten killed. That is not the issue either. It is that they want an end of the fighting, they want the hostages back, and they want a deal done, and they're tired of the way this war has been prosecuted, especially because the Israeli defense minister, the head of the Shin Bet, other senior military officials have broken themselves with the Israeli Prime Minister and said that they do not support what the Israeli leadership is pushing for on the ground in Gaza.
There are other fights about an Israeli budget. There's the long-standing fight that was before October 7th on the independence of the Israeli judiciary itself, very strong in Israel. There's the question of enlistment and the exceptions for the Hasidim, for the far-right Israeli ultra-Orthodox, all of these things in a very divided, very fragmented Israeli political system are creating plenty of folks that are angry with the Prime Minister, but he is still there and there is no way in the near term to take him out.
Now, I don't think this labor union strike matters all that much. It was not on the basis of a labor dispute, it was a political action. And in that regard, the Israeli government took them to court. The courts ruled that they had to shut that action down. The Labor Union agreed and shut it down. There's a lot of Likud, Netanyahu's party, oriented political leaders among the labor union's leadership and so it is unlikely, I think that you're going to see a lot more of this over the coming weeks and months, but you could still see a lot more social instability, a lot more unrest. And now that you've had hundreds of thousands on the streets, which had not been occurring, while the war is on, you've kind of taken off this restriction on, well, as long as there's a war, we all need to be hanging together. We need to be supporting this Israeli war cabinet. The war cabinet's had resignations and society is back to its fractious and very loud and boisterous self in Israel.
Now, the Knesset is coming back in session, the Israeli Parliament in October, and as that happens, there's going to be a lot more fighting against Netanyahu's position, and you could possibly see a no-confidence vote to bring down his government. One of the reasons why we don't have a cease-fire is because Netanyahu understands that the way he stays in power is by keeping his coalition intact with the far right, and they strongly oppose and have consistently strongly opposed any agreement that would allow for long-term ending of fighting on the ground in Gaza. They also want continued control, some level of Israeli occupation over Gaza. They don't want self-governance of the Palestinians there. And again, we're not talking about Hamas, we're talking about any Palestinian organization.
That is, politically, you have to say that Netanyahu has done an extraordinary job in being able, a masterful job politically, in being able to maintain his position under such an extraordinary level of pressure. And with such unpopularity among the Israeli population. More broadly, there's the fact that the United States looks feckless on this issue. Biden has now come out and said that Netanyahu is not doing enough for a cease-fire. And Netanyahu's response was extremely strong, saying, publicly, both Biden and the Secretary of State and others have consistently and repeatedly said that the Israelis have accepted extremely generous terms for Hamas, it's Hamas that's refused and now Biden's saying that they're not doing enough, what's changed? Only that six hostages have been executed, and after that you're putting more pressure on Bibi. You can imagine that that makes Biden look extremely weak. And the issue here is that Biden has not been willing to be critical of Netanyahu publicly, he's only put a little bit of pressure on the Israeli leadership privately, and that makes him look weak publicly when Netanyahu makes those claims.
All of the efforts to try to get a cease-fire by the United States are going nowhere, in part because Hamas refuses the terms, and in part because the terms that the US says Netanyahu accepts he doesn't really accept when they are having private discussions. And so the US is trying to paper over a chasm between the two fighting sides. Everybody else wants to paper that over too. I mean, if you look at who wants a deal here, you would say the majority of the Israeli population, the Gulf States, the Egyptians, the Europeans, heck, the Chinese and the United States, but not Bibi's government and not Hamas.
And that's why we continue to have this level of fighting. That's also why we continue to have the Houthis attacking oil tankers, including a Saudi-flagged tanker, clearly by mistake, in the last 24 hours in the Red Sea. You've got American military, UK military, others in operation across the Gulf, and yet incapable of preventing this ragtag group of militants from Yemen to continue to disrupt global supply chain. You continue to have militants in the So-called Iranian-led Axis of Resistance attacking US and other allied targets across the region. And so it's very hard to see this war coming to an end. It's very hard to see Netanyahu leaving power in the near term. It's certainly hard to see any option for the Palestinians that would de-radicalize them in the near future.
Kamala Harris has been doing her best to say very little on this issue because of course, she is not in a good position to try to carry water for a policy that clearly has failed for the Biden administration heretofore. And that's specifically to end the fighting, to get the hostages freed, to create at least a temporary but hopefully longer-term cease-fire and to create a two-state solution. None of the things that the Biden administration has said that they want on the ground in the region are happening, and that means that Kamala has a lot of vulnerability on that policy. That's interesting because where she would clearly like to be would be in coordination with US allies. And one of the reasons why US policy on Ukraine has been much more successful in the Middle East is because it's been in lockstep with everyone in NATO, sometimes moving too slowly, but nonetheless, all these countries are agreeing on the sanctions, on the diplomatic efforts, on the military support for the Ukrainians, the training, the intelligence all being done together.
That's not true at all. You've got the new Labour government in the UK now saying that a number of weapons systems being provided to Israel would be likely used in the commission of war crimes by the IDF, and so the UK government has said that those specific weapons systems will no longer be provided to Israel. Now, most weapons systems will still be provided by the UK, so it's not like the reality of UK policy and US policy towards Israel are all that different. This is a fig leaf by the Brits, but the point is these countries are all freelancing. They're making policies by themselves, that makes it much easier for the Israelis to focus on the United States and to also take the actions they want to. If you had a more coordinated policy by the United States and all of their allies on Israel, it would be a strong policy and it would be a policy that would protect those countries politically to a much greater degree.
That's not where the US or NATO is right now. I do think that's something that Harris would want to accomplish if she were to become president come January, but we are still many months away from that possibility.
So anyway, a lot going on right now in the Middle East, certainly not working out in America's favor and not working out in the Israelis' or the Palestinians' either. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem, September 2, 2024.
The United Kingdom announced on Monday that it is suspending some arms shipments to Israel, citing a “clear risk” of violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.
The decision was not based on military grounds but on the lack of food and medicine reaching the enclave, and what British Foreign Secretary David Lammy called “credible claims” of abuses of Palestinian prisoners. The suspension affects about 30 out of 350 arms export licenses, including parts for military aircraft, helicopters, drones, and ground-targeting equipment. It does not affect systems related to the F35 aircraft, crucial to Israel’s military advantage.
Lammysaid the UK still supported Israel’s right to self-defense and that Britain would continue to confront “Iranian aggression” across the Middle East. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, however, argued that the suspension sends a “problematic message” to Hamas and “its sponsors in Iran.” It could also encourage other countries to follow suit with similar suspensions.
The UK’s decision comes after a tumultuous two days of mass protests and a general strike in Israel following the discovery of six dead hostages in Gaza, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino. US President Joe Biden criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday for not doing enough to secure a cease-fire that could have saved hostages’ lives. In an emotional televised address on Monday, Netanyahu begged Israelis “for your forgiveness” for not returning the hostages home alive but insisted that Israel must maintain control of the Philadelphi corridor, which he says Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into Gaza.
People walk against strong wind in Kagoshima on Aug. 29, 2024, as Typhoon Shanshan made landfall on Japan's southwestern main island of Kyushu.
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2: Two former editors of the pro-democracy publication Stand News — Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam — were convicted of sedition in Hong Kong on Thursday, in yet another sign of the deterioration of freedoms in the city as Beijing continues to tighten its grip in a territory that was once mostly autonomous. They face up to two years in prison and a fine of roughly $640. This was the first trial involving media in Hong Kong since the handover of the city from Britain to China in 1997.
640,000: It’s far from a cease-fire deal, but Israel and Hamas have agreed to zoned three-day pauses in fighting so polio vaccines can be administered to approximately 640,000 children, a World Health Organization official said Thursday. This process will begin on Sunday in central Gaza, followed by the southern part of the enclave and then the north. The agreement leaves room for the pauses to be extended to a fourth day if necessary. This announcement comes less than a week after the WHO confirmed a baby in Gaza had been paralyzed by polio.
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