September 16, 2015: Israel has decided to put a security fence on its last unfenced border, the 307 kilometer Jordanian frontier. This project will take several years and cost $1.6 billion, plus millions a year to maintain. This comes after Israel has nearly completed a 240 kilometer fence along the Egyptian border, mainly to keep illegal migrants (usually from Africa) out. The Israeli security fence with the West Bank will eventually be 760 kilometers long, mainly because it makes so many twists and turns to deal with unresolved territorial disputes and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. But even when it was half finished it was blocking the most easily used terrorist crossings and that caused the Palestinian terror campaign to collapse. The new fence along the Egyptian border not only stopped nearly all the illegal migrants but a lot of the other smuggling (especially drugs).

For such a small country (21,000 square kilometers) Israel has lot of borders; Egypt-208 kilometers, Jordan-307, Lebanon-81, Syria-83, West Bank-330 and Gaza Strip-59. There is also a 273 kilometer long coastline. Since Israel is surrounded by countries that host, tolerate or simply have Islamic terrorist groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the need for the high-tech security fences has become a matter of life or death, especially since the new fence technology works much better than the older ones that did not use a lot of sensors and other electronic devices.

The fence around the West Bank was built first, after the Palestinians began a terrorism campaign against Israel in 2000. The new security fence between soon became a battleground itself. Technicians performing maintenance on the fence (actually a series of obstacles, including a wall) sensors were sometimes fired on by Palestinians, and, in some cases, the technicians are given a military escort. This situation repeated itself, to a lesser degree as fences went along the Gaza, Lebanon and Syrian frontiers.

In addition to barriers (ditches, walls, barbed wire) and sensors there are also remote control machine-guns in some spots. This was used in Gaza where Islamic terrorists inside Gaza are constantly approaching the fence to try or cut their way through or plant explosives to detonate when an Israeli patrol drives by. To deal with that last problem some small towers, with remotely controlled machine-guns and cameras were built in more remote areas. If someone was seen planting explosives or rapidly cutting through the fence (before troops could arrive), the remotely controlled machine-gun could be used to scare them off or, if that didn’t work, to kill. Many Arab states, as well as India, have adopted the Israeli security fence technology for their own borders, usually to keep Islamic terrorists out.