Why is Israel Demanding Control Over 2 Gaza Corridors in the Cease-Fire Talks?

Israel's demand for lasting control over two strategic corridors in Gaza, which Hamas has long rejected, threatens to unravel cease-fire talks aimed at ending the 10-month-old war, freeing scores of hostages and preventing an even wider conflict.
Officials close to the negotiations have said Israel wants to maintain a military presence in a narrow buffer zone along the Gaza-Egypt border it calls the Philadelphi corridor and in an area it carved out that cuts off northern Gaza from the south, known as the Netzarim corridor.
It's unclear if Israeli control of these corridors is included in a US-backed proposal that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called on Hamas to accept to break an impasse in cease-fire talks. Blinken, who is back in the region this week, said Monday that Israel had agreed to the proposal without saying what it entails.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says control of the Egyptian border area is needed to prevent Hamas from replenishing its arsenal through smuggling tunnels and that Israel needs a "mechanism" to prevent militants from returning to the north, which has been largely isolated since October.
Hamas has rejected those demands, which were only made public in recent weeks. There was no mention of Israel retaining control of the corridors in earlier drafts of an evolving cease-fire proposal seen by The Associated Press.
Hamas says any lasting Israeli presence in Gaza would amount to military occupation. Egypt, which has served as a key mediator in the monthslong talks, is also staunchly opposed to an Israeli presence on the other side of its border with Gaza.
What are the corridors and why does Israel want them? The Philadelphi corridor is a narrow strip — about 100 meters (yards) wide in parts — running the 14-kilometer (8.6-mile) length of the Gaza side of the border with Egypt. It includes the Rafah Crossing, which until May was Gaza's only outlet to the outside world not controlled by Israel.
Israel says Hamas used a vast network of tunnels beneath the border to import arms, allowing it to build up the military machine it used in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. The military says it has found and destroyed dozens of tunnels since seizing the corridor in May.
Egypt rejects those allegations, saying it destroyed hundreds of tunnels on its side of the border years ago and set up a military buffer zone of its own that prevents smuggling.
The roughly 4-mile (6-kilometer) Netzarim Corridor runs from the Israeli border to the coast just south of Gaza City, severing the territory's largest metropolitan area and the rest of the north from the south.
Hamas has demanded that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled the north be allowed to return to their homes. Israel has agreed to their return but wants to ensure they are not armed.
Why are Hamas and Egypt opposed to Israeli control? Israeli control over either corridor would require closed roads, fences, guard towers and other military installations. Checkpoints are among the most visible manifestations of Israel's open-ended military rule over the West Bank, and over Gaza prior to its 2005 withdrawal.
Israel says such checkpoints are needed for security, but Palestinians view them as a humiliating infringement on their daily life. They would also be seen by many Palestinians as a prelude to a lasting military occupation and the return of Jewish settlements — something Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners have openly called for.
Hamas has demanded a total Israeli withdrawal and accuses Netanyahu of setting new conditions in order to sabotage the talks.
Egypt says Israel’s operations along the border threaten the landmark 1979 peace treaty between the two countries. It has refused to open its side of the Rafah crossing until Israel returns the Gaza side to Palestinian control.
Are these new demands by Israel? Israel insists they are not, referring to them as "clarifications" to an earlier proposal endorsed by President Joe Biden in a May 31 speech and by the UN Security Council in a rare cease-fire resolution. Israel also accuses Hamas of making new demands since then that it cannot accept.
But neither the speech nor the Security Council resolution made any reference to Israel's demands regarding the corridors — which were only made public in recent weeks — and both referred to a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces. The US has also said it is against any reoccupation of Gaza or reduction of its territory.
Previous written drafts of the cease-fire proposal stipulate an initial Israeli withdrawal from populated and central areas during the first phase of the agreement, when the most vulnerable hostages would be freed and displaced Palestinians allowed to return to the north.
During the second phase, the specifics of which would be negotiated during the first, Israeli forces would withdraw completely and Hamas would release all remaining living hostages, including male soldiers.
The most recent drafts of the proposal — including one that Hamas approved in principle on July 2 — contain language specifying that displaced residents returning in the first phase must not carry weapons. But they do not specify a mechanism for searching them.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt, which have spent months trying to broker an agreement, have not weighed in publicly on Israel's demands regarding the corridors.
An Israeli delegation held talks with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Sunday focused on the Philadelphi corridor but did not achieve a breakthrough, according to an Egyptian official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door meeting.
What happens if the talks fail? Failure to reach a cease-fire deal would prolong a war in which Israel's offensive has already killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, displaced the vast majority of Gaza's 2.3 million residents and destroyed much of the impoverished territory.
Palestinian militants are still holding some 110 hostages captured in the Oct. 7 attack that started the war, in which they killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel has only rescued seven hostages through military operations. Around a third of the 110 are already dead, according to Israeli authorities, and the rest are at risk as the war grinds on.
A cease-fire deal also offers the best chance of averting — or at least delaying — an Iranian or Hezbollah strike on Israel over last month's targeted killing of a Hezbollah commander in Beirut and a Hamas leader in Tehran.
Israel has vowed to respond to any attack, and the United States has rushed military assets to the region, raising the prospect of an even wider and more devastating war.

For months, Safaa Yassin has dressed her child in the same white bodysuit, an all-too-familiar tale in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by 10 months of war.

"When I was pregnant, I dreamed of dressing my daughter in beautiful clothes. Today, I have nothing to put on her," says Yassin, one of thousands of Palestinians displaced from Gaza City.

"I never thought that one day I wouldn't be able to dress my children," says the 38-year-old, now living in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area designated as a humanitarian zone by Israeli forces.

"But the few clothes I found before evacuating to the south were either the wrong size or not suitable for the season," she adds, as Gaza bakes in summertime temperatures of 30-plus degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) every day.

Finding clothing -- any clothing -- has become increasingly difficult for the 2.4 million people living in the territory besieged by Israel.

Gaza once had a thriving textiles industry but since the war began on October 7 with Palestinian group Hamas's unprecedented attack on Israel, it has received just a trickle of goods.

Faten Juda also struggles to dress her 15-month-old son, Adam, who is squeezed into ill-fitting pyjamas, his bare arms and legs sticking out from the tight fabric.

"He's growing every day and his clothes don't fit him anymore, but I can't find any others," the 30-year-old tells AFP.

- Same headscarf -

Children are not the only ones suffering from the lack of clothing in the Gaza Strip, which counted 900 textile factories in the industry's heyday in the early 1990s.

The sector employed 35,000 people and sent four million items to Israel every month. But those numbers have plummeted since 2007, when Hamas took power and Israel blockaded Gaza.

In recent years, Gaza's workshops had dwindled to about 100, employing about 4,000 people and shipping about 30,000-40,000 items a month to Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

By January, three months into the war, the World Bank estimated that 79 percent of Gaza's private sector establishments had been partially or totally destroyed.

Even the factories that are still standing have ground to a halt, after months without electricity in Gaza. Any fuel that arrives for generators is mainly used for hospitals and United Nations facilities such as warehouses and aid-supply points.

In these conditions, finding new clothes is a rare event.

"Some women have been wearing the same headscarf for the past 10 months," Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, posted on X.

Wearing the same clothes all the time is not just unpleasant, it is a health hazard. With limited water to wash them, disease-spreading lice abound.

Ahmed al-Masri, 29, left his home in the north of Gaza at the start of the war.

Today in Khan Younis, in the south, he says he does not have any spare shoes or clothes.

"My shoes are extremely damaged. I've had them repaired at least 30 times, each time paying 10 times more than before the war," he says, his gaunt face burnt by the sun.

- Walking barefoot -

With two-thirds of Gaza's population living in poverty even before the war, many people were forced to sell their clothes once the conflict broke out and tanked the economy further.

But "there are no more shoes or clothes to sell", says Omar Abu Hashem, 25, who was displaced from Rafah, on the Egyptian border, to Khan Yunis further north.

Abu Hashem left his home in such a rush that he was unable to take anything with him. He has been wearing the same pair of shoes for five months, but only every other day.

"I share my pair of shoes with my brother-in-law," he explains.

On the days when he goes barefoot, he fears the worst, tiptoeing around the waste and rubble that carry diseases and contamination of all kinds.

Ahmed al-Masri, meanwhile, just wants some soap to wash his only T-shirt and pair of trousers.

"I have been wearing the same clothes for nine months. I have nothing else. I quickly wash my T-shirt and then I wait for it to dry," he says.

"And all this, without soap or detergent."

Why is Israel Demanding Control Over 2 Gaza Corridors in the Cease-Fire Talks?