Israel announces preliminary work on fence along entire border with Jordan
Defense Ministry ordered by Katz to begin engineering planning, including environmental survey and installation of surveillance infrastructure, along 309-kilometer border
Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent
The Defense Ministry on Tuesday said it had begun carrying out work to establish a fence along the entire border with Jordan to prevent infiltrations into the country — an expensive undertaking that has made little progress in the past.
The move to upgrade defenses along the 309-kilometer (192-mile) border running from Eilat through the West Bank to the tip of the Golan Heights, ordered by new Defense Minister Israel Katz, is the latest attempt by the government to take up the plan, which has long been bandied about but never advanced.
The ministry said Tuesday it was undertaking “detailed engineering planning” for the fence. This planning phase will cost tens of millions of shekels and is expected to last several months.
The work will include mapping out potential environmental hazards, conducting soil surveys, and laying an initial section of the fence with surveillance equipment and networking infrastructure.
The works “are intended to advance the readiness of the defense establishment for the establishment of a barrier on the border with Jordan, in accordance with the decisions of the political leadership on the issue,” the ministry said.
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.
In October, two gunmen breached the border from Jordan and infiltrated into Israel in an area south of the Dead Sea, close to the border community of Neot Hakikar. The Jordanian border in that area consists of just coils of barbed wire piled on each other.
The gunmen, members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, opened fire at IDF troops, lightly injuring two before they were shot dead, having managed to cross a few meters into Israeli territory.
The idea of boosting the fence or building some sort of border wall has been floated repeatedly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others for more than a decade, although many see any such an effort as unrealistic due to the sheer length of the border and the enormous cost.
The announcement on Tuesday appeared to be the furthest that project has advanced thus far.
Last month, as foreign minister, 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.
A 30-kilometer (18-mile) portion of the border with Jordan, near the southernmost city of Eilat and the new Ramon International Airport, was upgraded in a similar fashion to Israel’s border barriers with Egypt and the Gaza Strip in the 2010s.
Israel shelled out NIS 300 million ($88 million) for the small section of the border near Eilat; a project to cover the whole Jordanian border would likely cost billions of shekels.
For years, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials touted its NIS 3.5 billion ($1.1 billion) high-tech state-of-the-art fence along the border with Gaza, which was equipped with a wall of iron, sensors and concrete, as providing the ultimate security protection to civilians in the area.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, the wall was breached by thousands of Hamas terrorists, who disabled its sensors with drones, knocked parts of the barrier down with bulldozers, then drove through the gaping holes while others sailed over in paragliders, ultimately massacring around 1,200 people in Israel and taking 251 hostages to Gaza.
Separately, last month the Israel Defense Forces announced the formation of a new division that will be tasked with defending the country’s border with Jordan.
In a statement, the IDF said the decision to launch the new eastern regional division was made following an examination of the military’s “operational needs and defense capabilities in the area, in accordance with the planning of the IDF’s force build-up, in the light of the lessons of war and the situational assessment.”
The division would be subordinate to IDF Central Command.
At present, the Jordan Valley Regional Brigade, under Central Command, is tasked with defending some 150 kilometers (90 miles) of the eastern frontier, from the northern part of the Dead Sea in the West Bank northward to the Hamat Gader hot springs in the Golan Heights. The Yoav Regional Brigade, under IDF Southern Command, is responsible for the sparsely populated southern section, from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea resort city of Eilat.
