The border is not just empty, it is barren.
On all sides, an ultra-still, uniquely desert quietude and tranquility surrounds the sand dunes we are standing atop, spoiled only occasionally and briefly by the sound of gusts of wind.
This area – the Bar-Lev Lookout Point – is Israel’s most peaceful border, the border with Egypt.
And yet, a bit northeast of Ezuz and a bit southeast of Nitzana and Kadesh Barnea, it is far less peaceful than it was in the past, leaving the IDF, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), and police to play catch-up against the latest dangerous trends.
From 2010-2013, Israel built a new, tougher fence to better defend its border with Egypt, especially from illegal African migrants who had come into Israel in recent years – estimated at more than 60,000.
The hope was that this new fence would also reduce all kinds of cross-border smuggling.
It did, briefly.
Smugglers learned that they could outsmart the IDF
But then the smugglers learned from Hezbollah and Hamas that they could outsmart the IDF using cross-border tunnels and a variety of hard-to-track tactics to restore their smuggling operations – if not persons who were harder to move around fast, then drugs.
Israel’s security forces adjusted again. The country improved when it came to finding tunnels, and Egypt also, at times, put more effort into thwarting them.
In February 2023, the IDF and police managed to foil an attempted drug-smuggling operation over the Egyptian border worth about NIS 50 million. The suspects were spotted by IDF surveillance trying to smuggle 120 kilograms of drugs over the Egyptian border.
That bust was one of several notable stings carried out by the IDF and police during that period.
However, all of that progress was lost at some point during the past two years of war in the Middle East.
The IDF was too distracted with Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran, and several other threats to spend much time worrying about drug smuggling from Egypt. In the interim, drug smuggling evolved from tunnels, ladders, and cars to drones.
The Sinai smugglers saw that Hezbollah was achieving more direct hits against Israel using cheap drones than Iran and the Yemen Houthis were achieving using advanced ballistic missiles.
The drone threat
Retro threats with a low radar signature were more challenging to detect and track, let alone shoot down, compared to large, expensive missiles, which could be intercepted with large, expensive air-defense systems.
Gradually, the IDF started to adjust to the drone threat as well. But then the smugglers overwhelmed Israel with too high a volume of drone threats.
On some days, as many as 20 drones might fly across the Egyptian border into Israel from different points. It does not matter that much if Israel shoots some of them down or uses electronic warfare spectrum weapons to get others to crash or land in an open field to be seized. As long as a certain percentage of the cargo gets through, the smugglers can make millions.
THE SMUGGLERS also learned that they could send a vast amount of weapons across the border. Some of these weapons might be for Arab Israelis or Bedouin. Still, others might be eventually destined for Hamas or even for being transferred to terrorist groups in the Palestinian Authority-controlled portions of the West Bank.
When the army increased its drone patrols, the drone launchers simply moved farther back from the border to areas where it would be too hard for the IDF to patrol.
Even the mountainous terrain, which generally makes portions of the border safe because it is mostly uncrossable, was now crossable for drones, as they can fly over the mountains and valleys, IDF sources said.
Some launched drones as far back as nine km. from the border on the Israeli side or as far as two km. from the border on the Egyptian side to avoid detection.
This means that even when the IDF, or very occasionally, Egypt, downs drones, the success is usually tactical, not strategic. In other words, they catch the drone, not the drone’s launcher; that person is nowhere near the scene.
The distance of nine km. also raises a different, uncomfortable reality.
What has turned into a significant national security threat is that Egyptian smugglers may be sending hundreds of drones per month into Israel with weapons.
Still, IDF sources mind-blowingly have said the original creation and flight of most of the drones comes from the Israeli side. Israelis are buying the drones and sending them to Egypt, where Egyptian smugglers can fill them with weapons, or sometimes drugs, and then send them back.
This means that despite Israeli anger at Egypt for doing an insufficient job at shooting down drones crossing into Israel, the whole business is a bit awkward – because Israel is failing to prevent those drones from flying into Egypt from its side of the border in the first place.
Some recent incidents of drone-based weapons smuggling or attacks from Egypt into Israel or into Gaza received enough notoriety and public attention to yield more attention, resources, and energy from Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir.
Last week, they declared the expansion of closed military zones to make it easier to fire on or arrest smugglers who might come too close to the border. Katz said there would be changes to the open-fire rules, which will also give the IDF more tools to prevent smuggling.
But The Jerusalem Post understands that neither the new, broad, closed military zones nor changes to the open-fire rules have gone into effect yet, and they may take time to implement.
EVEN ONCE they do, IDF sources indicated that they will have a limited impact on drone launchers who send their drones off kilometers away from the border.
Instead, these IDF sources on Monday said the new success that they have had against drones – shooting them down or capturing 130 of them over the past month – relates to additional technological weapons and resources.
The Iron Dome has gotten better at tracking and shooting down drones, the Iron Beam is now in the mix for specific border threats, and a variety of electronic-warfare weapons and other similar technologies are now available to down or hack and take control of enemy drones.
One existing problem is that the IDF does not know how many drones it is failing to detect.
That may seem like an obvious statement, but there could be an intermediate state of defense in which the IDF was tracking all or nearly all drones, but simply not tracking them soon enough to stop them – somewhat better than missing them altogether.
Military sources said they recently improved their interception of smuggling efforts by about 50%, which means it is easily possible that the 130 drones stopped last month were out of 260, or more, since the 50% is a best guess.
The IDF sources were upfront about their limits, saying they invest more resources in guarding villages on the border than in protecting portions of the border where there are no villages nearby.
Likewise, one of the lessons from an incident in the summer of 2023 – when an Egyptian border policeman who turned terrorist penetrated Israel and killed IDF soldiers who were watching the border without any backup – is that all IDF soldiers on the border are now supposed to be accompanied by a whole platoon. The point of this is to avoid a situation in which the army can easily be overwhelmed by one rogue intruder.
It is far from clear where this leaves Israel in the fight to secure its border with Egypt and the battle to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt into Gaza using drones.
But at least regarding smuggling back and forth between Israel and Egypt, IDF sources said the next most important thing to do might be out-of-the-box legislation targeting drones of a specific size and cost in Israel to better track down the initial drone launchers.
If they can be caught, arrested, or otherwise neutralized, there will be fewer drone threats coming in from Egypt in the first place.
But no one in Israel has even started talking about regulating drone use, which is a less sexy solution and would also likely be less popular, because it has a negative impact on law-abiding Israelis as well.
So, Israel has made significant strides in setting back the drone weapons-smuggling threat from Egypt. But the battle is far from won, and there are systemic root causes that Jerusalem has still not begun to confront.