Shin Bet chief visits Cairo to address tensions with Egypt over Gaza – report
Ronen Bar reportedly meets Egyptian counterpart, amid dispute over who will control the Philadelphi Route along the Egypt-Gaza border
Shin Bet director Ronen Bar met with the head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate Abbas Kamel in Cairo on Monday amid reported tensions between their two governments over Israel’s war on the Hamas terror group in Gaza, according to an Axios report.
The report cited two Israeli sources as saying that Bar’s meeting with his Egyptian counterpart was meant to address issues not related to the hostages, namely Cairo’s growing concerns as the Israel Defense Forces push toward the Gaza Strip’s Egyptian border.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel must prevent arms smuggling into Gaza across the border, and in December said the Philadelphi Route that runs along the border must be in Israeli hands, though he has since qualified that stance.
Israel’s Kan public broadcaster, which also reported on Bar’s visit to Cairo, said the “security delegation” arrived back in Israel on Monday night.
The Shin Bet declined Axios’s request for comment. Egyptian officials did not immediately respond.
Bar and Kamel’s Cairo meeting followed a joint session attended by both of them, in addition to US and Qatari security chiefs and other Egyptian and Israeli officials, on Sunday in Paris, where a potential deal to release the hostages held by Hamas was discussed, eliciting cautious optimism from some participants.
The meeting in Cairo comes amid a fraught period in Israeli-Egyptian relations, as Egypt has rejected any potential Israeli takeover of the Philadelphi Route, the 14-kilometer (9-mile) strip that separates Egypt from the Gaza Strip.
Israeli leaders have recently talked about retaking control of the corridor — from which the IDF withdrew when Israel left Gaza in 2005 — to prevent arms from being smuggled to Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza overland and via tunnels. Egypt fears that a military operation on the border could push large numbers of Palestinians into its territory.
Egyptian officials have denounced Israeli accusations that weapons were being smuggled from Egypt into the Strip, calling them “allegations and lies.”
Last week, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi reportedly refused to take a phone call from Netanyahu. Channel 13 reported that the president’s refusal was related to the dispute about the Philadelphi route, following Netanyahu’s statement at a December 30 press conference that the route “has to be in our hands” in order to ensure that Gaza is and remains demilitarized.
Earlier this month, Netanyahu qualified that stance: Asked if Israel intends to reestablish control over the border corridor, he said that this was “one possibility for what I call a southern barrier… There are several options and we have not yet made a decision.”
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s brutal October 7 onslaught on southern Israel, which saw some 3,000 terrorists invade the country to kill approximately 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and take over 250 hostages, while committing numerous atrocities and weaponizing sexual violence on a mass scale.
Over 26,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to a tally of Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, which cannot be independently verified, and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The IDF says it has killed some 10,000 Hamas gunmen, who the army believes comprise about 25% of the organization’s operatives.
