Israel will work ‘quickly’ to build separation fence on border with Jordan

The fence on the border between Israel and Jordan is going to be built “very quickly,” Israeli Defence Minister Yisrael Katz said on Monday. Katz made his comment during a visit to the Israeli army’s central command headquarters in occupied Jerusalem, Channel 7 has reported.

Talk about building a separation fence along the border has increased since an incident at the Allenby Bridge Crossing on 8 September, in which three Israelis were killed by Jordanian truck driver Maher Al-Jazi, who was shot and killed by Israeli security forces. Another incident took place near the Dead Sea on 18 October, when two Israelis were injured and two Jordanians, Hussam Abu Ghazaleh and Amer Qawas, were killed.

“Given the entry of infiltrators, the smuggling of illegal weapons and hostile operations, I will work in the government to accelerate the construction of a fence along the border with Jordan, similar to the fence that was built on the border with Egypt,” said Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen after the Dead Sea incident. “This is not an option, it is a must.”

In early September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his intention to build a fence on the border with Jordan like the one on the border with Egypt. Two weeks later, Israel Hayom newspaper reported that the army was digging a trench on the border with Jordan.

Channel 7 quoted Katz as saying that work will begin very quickly on the “wall” along the border with Jordan as part of a plan to intensify Israel’s border defences.

“We see a relentless and institutionalised Iranian effort to establish an eastern front against the State of Israel,” he claimed. “We cannot lose in this campaign against the establishment of the eastern front, and we will have to do root cause treatment in some places to prevent Judea and Samaria [sic] and the refugee camps from copying Gaza.”

Jordan’s border with Israel and the occupied West Bank is 335 kilometres long, of which 97 kilometres are with the West Bank, and 238 kilometres with the occupation state.

Jordan is connected to Israel by three border crossings: the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge, the Wadi Araba Crossing/Yitzhak Rabin Terminal, and the Sheikh Hussein/Jordan River Crossing. The three crossings operate regularly, and their closure is linked to the security conditions inside Israel and is a rare occurrence. However, they have been closed at times during the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

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