Visiting Jordan Valley, Netanyahu vows to work with Amman to boost border fence
Days after deadly shooting at Allenby border crossing, PM says ‘stronger barrier’ needed along boundary with Jordan, a project repeatedly promised and scrapped over the years
During a visit on Wednesday to an IDF outpost overlooking the Jordan Valley, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed the joint effort with Amman to secure their shared border.
“In this multi-theater struggle,” he said. “We know that we need to secure our eastern border with Jordan. This is a border of peace. We are partnering with the Kingdom of Jordan to ensure that it remains so.”
Challenges are increasing, said Netanyahu, days after a terrorist attack at the Allenby border crossing with Jordan left three Israelis dead.
“There is an attempt to smuggle both terrorists and weapons across the Jordan into Judea and Samaria and into the cities of Israel,” he said, using the West Bank’s biblical name. “We are working here in cooperation with all parties to stop this.”
Netanyahu said Israel will work to “construct a stronger barrier” to fight smuggling.
“We will do it in coordination with the neighbors,” he promised. “It is important for us to ensure that this border remains a border of peace — peace and security.”
Jordan has been a leading critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, and more recently, of visits by government ministers to the Temple Mount. It has recalled its ambassador but has continued close security cooperation, including during the April 13-14 drone and missile attack on Israel by Iran.
There is an aging fence along the 309-kilometer (192-mile) border that Jordan shares with Israel and the West Bank, though military and police officials say it is sufficient to prevent most gun-smuggling attempts.
The idea of boosting the fence or building some sort of border wall has been floated repeatedly by Netanyahu and others for more than a decade, although many see any such major effort as unlikely due to the sheer length of the border and the enormous cost.
Last month, Foreign 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.
A 30-kilometer (18-mile) portion of the border with Jordan, near the southernmost city of Eilat and the new Ramon International Airport, has been upgraded in a similar fashion to Israel’s border barriers with Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
Israel shelled out NIS 300 million ($88 million) for the small section of the border near Eilat, meaning that a project to cover the whole Jordanian border would likely cost billions of shekels.
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.
Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.
