Last September Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to finish the project to crack down on cross-border smuggling [GETTY]
Israel has started work on a new high-security fence along the Jordan border in the wake of several cross-border attacks and Israel’s intensifying raids on the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli Defence Ministry said on Tuesday it has begun “detailed engineering planning” on the multi-million-shekel barrier following a directive from the country’s new defence minister, Israel Katz, who accused Iran of attempts to open an “eastern front” from Jordan.
“I decided to intensively promote the construction of the fence on the eastern border between Israel and Jordan,” Katz was quoted by Israeli media as saying on Monday. “We’re going to do it very quickly.”
The preliminary work will cost tens of millions of shekels and take several months to complete, the ministry said.
The New Arab has reached out to the Israeli Defence Ministry for comment.
Plans to construct a new fence along the 309-km-long border have existed since 2015. The following year the governmentbegan reinforcing a 30-km stretch in the country’s north but left the old fence in place along the remainder of the frontier. Last September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to finish the project to crack down on cross-border smuggling.
The issue has received increasing attention in the country in the wake of its devastating war in Gaza, which has fuelled further instability in the West Bank and triggered several security incidents at the border in recent weeks.
Two Israeli soldiers were injured in October during clashes at the border with several gunmen. A month earlier, a Jordanian fighter shot and killed three Israeli civilians at the Allenby Bridge crossing.
Around 740 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the war, according to the most recent UN figures, amid an escalating IDF military campaign against Palestinian armed groups and a surge in settler violence.
Analysts say that relations with its closest ally in Washington may also have played into the decision, which comes less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House.
“It looks as though the announcement is timed to resonate with the incoming Trump administration,” Neil Quilliam, associate fellow of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, told The New Arab. “The construction of a wall will chime well with the new president.”
Since winning the presidential election two weeks ago, the Trump team has nominated a raft of ardently pro-Israel politicians to fill the top foreign policy positions, including Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary and Mike Waltz as national security advisor.
