Camp David’s Security Annex Was Built for 1979. It Shows. |
Three years ago this month, an Egyptian conscript named Mohamed Salah crossed the border near the Kerem Shalom crossing and opened fire on Israeli soldiers, killing three before being shot dead. The Israeli military has since described the June 2023 incident as a “turning point,” drawing operational lessons that transformed how the Southern Command approaches border security. Ground radars, drone surveillance, tracker units, and composite barriers now line a frontier that once relied on relatively light monitoring. Israel learned. The question is whether Washington has.
The incident exposed something neither Jerusalem nor Cairo has fully acknowledged in public: the security architecture governing the Egyptian-Israeli border, born out of the 1979 Camp David Accords and its associated annexes, is structurally inadequate for the threat environment of the 2020s. The zones established by that framework restrict Egypt to civilian police forces along most of the border, reserving military deployment only for the narrow strip adjacent to Gaza under a separate 2005 agreement. Israel maintains military forces in the corresponding zone on its side. The result is an asymmetric arrangement that made sense in 1979, when the envisioned threat was a conventional Egyptian........