Egypt is still key ally for Israel despite guard’s gun rampage

The only question Israeli officers had regarding the motive of Mohamed Salah Ibrahim, the Egyptian border guard who entered Israeli territory last Saturday morning and killed three IDF soldiers, was whether he was connected to a drug-smuggling network acting out of anger at the thwarting of a deal from which he was to get his cut — or whether he had been “radicalised”.

Of course, it could have been both. No one for a moment was taken in by the official Egyptian statement that Ibrahim had been “in pursuit of drug smugglers” and somehow found himself, by mistake, on the Israeli side.

That was for official consumption and the Egyptian officers who joined their Israeli counterparts for a full debriefing said in private that Ibrahim was apparently an Isis sympathiser.

In a different climate perhaps there would have been an attempt to get the Egyptians to own up in public, but that’s not how Israel’s most important relationship with an Arab neighbour works.

Mourners react as they lay wreaths by the coffin during the funeral of Lia Ben Nun, GettyImages-1258431131

Family mourn murdered IDF soldier Lia Ben-Nun at her funeral in Rishon LeZion this week (Photo: Getty Images)

“My job is to make sure we have excellent cooperation with the Egyptian army,” says a senior officer in the IDF’s Southern Command. “To make sure it stays that way, I can’t tell you just how excellent it is.”

Forty-five years since the countries made peace, Egypt remains a society where the generals get along with their Israeli counterparts but very few of the respective citizens have ever met — and Egyptians are still fed a steady stream of anti-Israeli rhetoric, although nowadays it’s more likely to be from Islamist websites than the government media.

These are the first Israeli deaths on the Egyptian border in over a decade. Is it a harbinger of worse things to come or a freak incident?

Egypt, despite the parlous state of its economy and society, remains by far Israel’s most powerful neighbour.

More Israeli soldiers were killed on the Egyptian front in the five wars fought between the two countries than any other.

Peace with Egypt has not only saved countless lives, it has freed the Israeli economy from having to spend a much higher proportion of its GDP on defence. Instead of maintaining entire armoured divisions with hundreds of tanks on the border, today just a handful of light-infantry battalions are deployed.

Saturday morning’s incident was an operational failure for the IDF. A lone gunman remained within Israeli territory for hours until he was detected after having killed three soldiers. Procedures will be examined and beefed up.

Officers will be reprimanded and may even be replaced. But there could be more ominous implications if this is not just a one-off. For now, preserving the valuable peace is paramount and the hope is that the Egyptians can get their own house in order, even if it means allowing them to lie.

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