Israel aims to begin building new $1.4b border barrier with Jordan within months
Long-promised fence to stop frequent gun- and drug-smuggling will run from Golan Heights down to Ramon airport, hewing close to border, with remainder to Eilat already upgraded
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
Israel intends to begin building a long-promised new fence along the border with Jordan in June, The Times of Israel learned on Monday. The work was expected to take three years.
The fence will run from Hamat Gader at the southern edge of the Golan Heights to the Ramon International Airport north of Eilat. A 30-kilometer (18-mile) portion of the border with Jordan, from Eilat to Ramon Airport, was already upgraded in a similar fashion to Israel’s border barriers with Egypt and the Gaza Strip in the 2010s.
The new fence will cost NIS 5.2 billion ($1.4 billion).
Israel will aim to build the fence as close as possible to the actual border with Jordan, keeping in mind security and topographical considerations. The current fence leaves some 170 square kilometers between it and the border.
It also has plans to develop new towns along the border.
There is an aging chain link fence equipped with sensors along some of the border that Jordan shares with Israel and the West Bank. Other sections are only equipped with barbed wire.
The border’s porousness has made it a site of frequent gun- and drug-running. Officials say that weapons that have made it over the border — likely tens of thousands over the past decade — have fueled a surge in violence in the Arab community in Israel, and have been used by Palestinian terrorists.
Last August, then-foreign minister and now-Defense Minister Israel Katz called for a security fence to be built “quickly” along the Israel-Jordan border, accusing Iran of attempting to establish an “eastern terror front” against Israel by smuggling in weapons via Jordan.
In November, the Defense Ministry said it had begun preliminary work on the project.
The idea of boosting the existing fence or building some sort of border wall has been floated repeatedly by Netanyahu and others for more than a decade, although many have seen any such major effort as unlikely due to the sheer length of the border and the enormous cost.
In September 2023, Netanyahu once again floated the idea of building a fence along the entire length of the border to “ensure that there will be no infiltration.” The prime minister also ordered IDF and Defense Ministry officials to start planning in 2012, touted the start of construction of a sensor-laden fence on the southern border with Jordan in 2015, and announced in 2016 that he planned to “surround the entire State of Israel with a fence.”
For years, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials touted its NIS 3.5 billion ($1.1 billion) hi-tech state-of-the-art fence along the border with Gaza, which was equipped with a wall of iron, sensors and concrete, as providing ultimate security to citizens in the area.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, the wall was handily breached by thousands of Hamas terrorists, who disabled its sensors with drones, knocked parts of the barrier down with bulldozers, then drove right through the gaping holes while others sailed right over in paragliders, ultimately massacring around 1,200 people in Israel and taking 251 hostage in Gaza.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
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