Interview

On Egypt border, senior IDF officer warns quietest ‘front’ has potential to erupt

Col. Shemer Raviv details challenges on 200-kilometer border for which he is responsible, including the increasing threat of drones

Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent

Col. Shemer Raviv, the commander of the Paran Regional Brigade, on the Israel-Egypt border, January 12, 2025. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)
Col. Shemer Raviv, the commander of the Paran Regional Brigade, on the Israel-Egypt border, January 12, 2025. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)

The 200-kilometer-long border Israel shares with Egypt is not considered one of the multiple fronts of the ongoing war sparked by the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught.

Yet, amid the conflict, significant changes have been taking place on the Egyptian border fence. The commander of the regional brigade charged with the border warned in an interview with The Times of Israel last week that there is potential for this “front” to erupt.

“If you ask the IDF chief of staff he’ll tell you we have seven fronts in the war. He doesn’t count this one, despite the situation here,” Col. Shemer Raviv, the commander of the Paran Regional Brigade, said during a tour of the border.

The Israel-Egypt border has been largely peaceful since the two countries signed a peace agreement in 1979, Israel’s first with an Arab state.

By 1982, Israeli forces had withdrawn from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which they had conquered during previous wars, and a border between the countries was established based on an arbitrary line drawn in the sand from Rafah to Eilat, in a 1906 agreement between the British and Ottoman empires.

In 2010, Israel began to construct a large barrier along the border, largely aimed at keeping out African migrants and Islamic terrorists who operate in Egypt’s Sinai.

View of the fence along Israel’s border with Egypt, June 2, 2014 (Flash90/Yossi Zeliger)

“In the years before that, there was a lot of smuggling — drug smuggling, prostitution smuggling, human smuggling. The highlight of it all was the infiltrators who come from Africa,” Raviv said, recalling that when he was a company commander in the Paratroopers Brigade he was dispatched from the border with the Gaza Strip to help handle the thousands of incoming economic migrants and asylum seekers by taking them to Beersheba’s central bus station.

By 2013, the 241-kilometer-long barrier (longer than the actual border due to sections that wind through the mountainous terrain) was completed, and the number of people crossing into Israel dropped drastically.

Still, there were frequent attempts to smuggle drugs over Israel’s tall fence. Such operations generally involve a group of smugglers on the Egyptian side throwing packages of heroin, marijuana, or other contraband over the border, where they are retrieved by Bedouin Israelis in trucks.

“In the following decade, a phenomenon of smuggling developed here. It existed before but now on a [larger] scale. Some of the smugglings were violent smugglings,” Raviv said.

Dozens of Egyptian Bedouin drug-runners on ladders throw bundles of marijuana over the border into Israel, in a massive smuggling attempt that turned into a gun battle on January 21, 2018. (Israel Police)

In January 2024, a group of some 60 smugglers — most of them armed — came toward the Egyptian side of the border in an attempt to send contraband into Israel. According to the brigade commander, 10 of the smugglers ran toward the border, while the other 50 opened fire both on the Egyptian border guards — to cause them to shelter in their positions — and on Israeli soldiers who had been dispatched to prevent the smuggling.

The Israeli soldiers returned fire, killing five of the smugglers, Raviv said. One IDF servicewoman was injured when she was shot in the stomach in the gun battle.

The fact that Israeli soldiers returned fire in this case was not a given. Until the summer of 2023, in most cases of violent smugglings, the IDF would disengage and not get involved, the commander said.

But on June 3, 2023, an Egyptian border guard infiltrated into Israel via a shared opening in the fence and killed two IDF soldiers manning a guardpost. Another soldier was killed in a later exchange of fire with the gunman, who was also eliminated.

After the deadly incident, “we decided to change our policy because we understood that the criminal smugglings are also a security danger,” Raviv said.

During the war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza that began a few months later, the IDF officially changed its open-fire regulations on the Egypt border, allowing troops to use deadly force against smugglers. Top officers instructed the Paran Brigade to prevent all attempts to cross the border or smuggle contraband over it.

This image taken from video shows an IDF post that was attacked by an Egyptian policeman on the border, June 3, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)

“Following a change in the open-fire policy, the enemy also changes. [The smuggler] no longer reaches the fence, because he understands that we will hurt him,” the commander said. “Another phenomenon develops and this is the phenomenon of the drones, which started more or less in May [2024], and began to gain momentum.”

According to Raviv, smugglers on the Israeli side of the border would arrive quietly at areas between a kilometer and five kilometers (half a mile to three miles) from the fence, “without anyone seeing them.”

The smugglers would then fly drones over the border to Egypt, and land them between one and three kilometers from the fence. There, smugglers on the Egyptian side would load the drone with contraband, usually drugs but also firearms, and the smugglers on the Israeli side would pilot the drone back to their possession, the commander said.

Raviv said that the military didn’t even realize that this was happening at the start. “We had for about two months where we were ‘tipsy’ on defeating the smuggling, because they stopped coming,” he said. “But they came from another way.”

The commander said that the smuggling attempts using drones make his job easier to some extent. “Now it is clear that anyone coming [to the border] plans to carry out a terror attack. If in the past I had a dilemma between criminal activity and terror, today it is very clear what is happening on the fence.”

A drone used to smuggle handguns over the Israel-Egypt border on October 19, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)

To prevent drones from being flown over the border, troops are allowed to open fire on them in an attempt to knock them out of the sky. Additionally, the IDF has deployed electronic warfare capabilities that can jam or take control of the drones and bring them down.

“Today we are in a learning competition,” Raviv said. “We understand that the attempts will continue, and our task here is to not allow this phenomenon to develop. We don’t want drugs to be smuggled over. Definitely not weapons, the kind that could harm innocent people.”

The brigade commander said he assessed that Israel’s control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, has led to more smuggling attempts on Israel’s border with Egypt where there are far fewer troops.

But Raviv said he was worried that the smuggling attempts using drones could develop into a far more dangerous threat, such as explosives-bearing drones or aircraft large enough to fly people over the border.

A photo cleared for publication on December 23, 2024, shows a drone used in an attempt to smuggle weapons over the border with Egypt. (Israel Police)

A major challenge for the Israeli side is being able to respond to the attempts, the commander said.

“If someone comes to the fence we can shoot them. But if someone sends up a drone on the other side of the border three kilometers in?” he said, meaning that only Egyptian forces would be able to act in those cases, and not the IDF.

On Israel’s side of the border, a major challenge is being able to use live fire against the smugglers in areas that are not adjacent to the border fence, if attempts to arrest them fail.

“If in the past the answer was to fire warning shots or shoot at the legs, even if it was an Israeli citizen. An Israeli citizen who tried to reach the border, that’s reasonable [to shoot]. But when you go five kilometers deep?” Raviv said.

“There’s a risk of ‘friendly fire’ with my forces here, there are other security forces, and there are hikers. This keeps me awake at night; this is the challenge,” he said.

Troops stand next to drugs seized during a smuggling attempt on the Egypt border, on May 25, 2022. (Israel Defense Forces)

The commander said the Egyptian border is “definitely a front” because of its potential to erupt, but it would always be considered a “secondary” one.

“In the short term, the potential here is the threat of terror, the threat of drones or rockets. Threats that can emerge from Sinai,” he said.

“In the long term, there could be other threats. We have learned recently that the regimes around us can fall,” Raviv said, referring to Syria, where Bashar al-Assad was abruptly ousted in December. “Right now it is coordinated, right now it is stable. I have a dialogue with my counterparts on the other side.”

Raviv had visited Cairo just weeks before our interview in order to coordinate tactical matters with his Egyptian counterparts. “As long as the interest in this context is a shared interest, we take full advantage of it, while safeguarding our own interests,” he said.

Asked what his biggest disadvantage is, Raviv said it was receiving insufficient intelligence, “because the country doesn’t pay very much attention to the [Egyptian] border.”

A view of the Israel-Egypt border south of the Nitzana Crossing, January 12, 2025. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)

But he said that the disadvantage was also his advantage: “Because of that — because I know that I don’t know — I keep that in mind when I approach things.”

“When they tell me there’s an unusual identification” he pays attention, the commander said. “When something moves here, we act.”

Raviv said he has enough troops on the border for the current threats, but “it really matters in which direction this front develops.”

The Paran Regional Brigade currently has just two standing army battalions — the mixed-gender light infantry Caracal and Bardelas battalions — with some reservist units and police backup. The Egyptian border is one of the few areas in Israel with a significant permanent presence of female combat soldiers.

“I do think that it could easily become worse and more serious, and that’s also why we’re working hard to build more outposts here, to be prepared to absorb more forces,” he said.

“In the face of the potential threats, there aren’t enough troops.”

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