BICOM

Two years after building began, Israel’s government announced that construction has finished on all but twelve miles of a fence along the country’s 150-mile border with Egypt.

The project, which has an estimated cost £265million, will prevent the “unfettered flow of illegal infiltrators, the smuggling of drugs and weapons,” according to Israel’s Defence Ministry. The country’s Prime Minister’s Office says that more than 10,000 migrants, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan entered Israel illegally in 2012, seeking refuge or better economic conditions, but that the newly constructed fence reduced this number to just 36 during December.

Construction of the border fence was accelerated by Israel’s government after August 2011 when a terrorist attack launched from the Sinai Peninsula killing eight Israelis. It was followed by further attempted terrorist infiltrations from Sinai. Touring the newly constructed border fence yesterday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it the largest engineering feat in Israel “since the days of Herod,” and said “I think that the success here tells us that we need to complete the work on the other borders.”  Indeed, Deputy Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh said that a similar barrier is in the process of being built on Israel’s border with Syria and should be completed in the summer, to “pre-empt the possibility of terrorist attacks against communities on the Golan Heights.” Israeli leaders have repeatedly warned of the dangers of a chaotic power vacuum in the event of the Assad regime’s collapse.

Similarly, Bezalel Treiber, head of Operations, Logistics and Property at Israel’s Defence Ministry said that Israel may also look to upgrade the fence on its lengthy border with Jordan.