Joel M. Margolis
As if the Middle East needed another war, along comes Egypt with a two-part breach of its peace treaty with Israel.
In the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, each party agreed that no “acts or threats of belligerency” would “originate from … within its territory.” Egypt promised to meet that goal by demilitarizing the eastern Sinai Peninsula, which abuts the Gaza Strip. Israel accepted strict limits on the Israeli Defense Forces in the Philadelphi Corridor, the 8.7-mile length of Gaza that faces the Sinai.
Although the treaty produced a “cold peace,” the above-cited commitments broke down. Egypt’s first treaty violation appeared in 1982, when Sinai-based smugglers began supplying terrorists in Gaza with weapons, cash and commercial goods through tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor. The terror shipments clearly amounted to acts of belligerency originating from Egyptian territory.
Thanks to U.S. pressure on Egypt and a donation of multimillion-dollar tunnel detection technology, Egypt took the issue more seriously. Egypt and Israel then signed the U.S.-mediated 2005 Egypt-Israel Philadelphi Accord, which supplemented the 1979 peace treaty by requiring Egyptian border guards to patrol the Philadelphi Corridor more effectively.
Cairo made significant efforts to deter the smuggling. It cleared thousands of Egyptian homes to form a “buffer zone” along the Philadelphi Corridor and used flooding to render many terror tunnels impassable. It was motivated to plug the underground routes because Hamas used them to perpetrate terror attacks in Egypt.
Eventually, the anti-smuggling cooperation faded. Egyptian officers reportedly accepted bribes in exchange for ignoring the smuggling operations. In 2017, Egypt and Hamas struck a deal. Egypt relaxed its terror tunnel policing while Hamas promised to stop attacking Egyptians.
Egypt’s oversight at the Philadelphi Corridor became so lax that in 2024, Israel discovered as many as 180 tunnels under the international boundary. One of them ran directly under an Egyptian army post. The underground pathways empowered Hamas to wage five wars on Israel — the first in 2008 and the latest on Oct. 7, 2023. In effect, Cairo abandoned its peace-treaty obligation to prevent acts of belligerency from originating on its territory.
Egypt began its second violation of the treaty in response to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza following the Oct. 7 slaughter and kidnapping of its citizens. The Egyptian Armed Forces expanded their presence in the eastern Sinai far beyond the limits of the treaty and the Philadelphi Accord. The build-up included battle tanks, other armored vehicles, heavy weaponry and 40,000 troops. The army amassed a position strong enough to launch a blitzkrieg into Israel.
Earlier this month, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared that the threatening assembly in the Sinai would remain there indefinitely.
The stated goal of Egypt’s military maneuver was to block the gateway in the Philadelphi Corridor known as the Rafah Crossing and thereby prevent Palestinians from fleeing the war in Gaza. Forcing civilians to cower in the crossfire of a congested war zone was not justified by the peace treaty or the Philadelphi accord. In fact, the cynical stunt violated the 1969 African Union Refugee Convention, which required Egypt to welcome the noncombatants and grant them asylum.
An essential IDF mission during the Gaza war was to neutralize the smuggling tunnels that Egypt failed to close. In May 2024, Israel took control of the Philadelphi Corridor and began hunting for the passageways.
An honest Egyptian leadership would have cured its two peace treaty violations by assisting the search for terror tunnels and withdrawing its armed contingent from the Sinai. To comply with the African Union Refugee Convention, Egypt should have taken in the civilians of Gaza. Instead, El-Sisi blamed Israel for exceeding the military limits applied by the treaty to the Philadelphi Corridor.
Israel does not disclose the nature or extent of its military presence in Gaza. However, any IDF mission to clear tunnels in the Philadelphi Corridor — even one that exceeds the bounds of the peace treaty — is necessitated by Egypt’s failure to comply with its own tunnel-fighting treaty obligation. The situation implicates the treaty’s “good faith” requirement. Forcing Israel to deploy military assets to an area and then blaming Israel for doing so cannot be considered good faith.
Pursuant to the treaty, Israel must remove terror tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor to prevent acts of belligerency from originating on its side of the Sinai border. The Israeli action is also justified by its right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter, which is incorporated by reference in that treaty.
At any rate, the treaty requires the parties involved to resolve any implementation disputes through negotiation, not scare tactics such as Egypt’s large-scale militarization of the Sinai. Bilateral dialogue is especially appropriate in this case, considering the disputed IDF operation poses no threat to Egypt’s security.
Egypt’s anti-Israeli claim is also legally untenable because it contradicts the Arab regime’s own formal support for the Gaza cease-fire accord of 2025. The agreement, codified in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2803, lets Israel maintain an unlimited IDF force in the Philadelphi Corridor until certain security “milestones” are met.
Instead of flouting good relations and posturing to attack its stable neighbor, Egypt should remember its last real assault on Israel and the results of that month-long confrontation. The 1973 Yom Kippur War caused widespread regional destruction and accomplished nothing.
Joel M. Margolis is the legal commentator of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, the U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.
