Analysis // By Ben FrankelGaza cease-fire depends on Egypt's commitments

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which was supposed to be announced Tuesday at 21:00, is on hold because Israel was unsatisfied with the mechanisms aimed to prevent the rearmament of Hamas by Iran.

Egypt’s commitment is key here. Israel does not trust Hamas and regards formal agreements with the organization as worthless. Every single agreement or understanding reached in the past with Hamas has been violated by Hamas the minute the militant organization thought it was in its interest to do so.

Since Israel does not trust Hamas and does not put any value in agreements Hamas signs, there is a need for other players to monitor and guarantee agreements reached with Hamas.

Egypt is in a perfect position to be the guarantor of any agreement with Hamas, for two reasons:

• Egypt and Israel control what goes in and what comes out of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Navy stops and checks every ship arriving in Gaza port to makes sure it does not carry armaments for Hamas. Israel also controls its land border with Gaza. This leaves the 14-kilometer border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt as the only way through which arms and contraband can reach Gaza.
  Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, this border was, for all intents and purposes, open. The Egyptians had a nominal border control monitoring the border, but this monitoring was a sham, for two reasons. First, the vast Sinai peninsula had become a no-man’s land, allowing a network of Bedouin smugglers to ferry tons of Iranian arms and munitions to Gaza. Second, Hamas operatives, helped by Iranian engineers, have dug hundreds of tunnels under the border with Egypt, allowing the free flow of arms – and anything else – into Gaza.
  The only way to prevent Iran from rearming Hamas and Islamic Jihad is for Egypt to become more committed to preventing such rearmaments.
• Egypt is now run by the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is an off-shoot of the Brotherhood. In the past, however, the Brotherhood, public utterances notwithstanding, has proved itself more dedicated to Egypt’s national interest than to ideological sentiment. Egypt has no interest to see Hamas again accumulate the kind of military might it had been allowed to accumulate in the last two years. First, Egypt is dependent on the United States for economic and military aid, and has no interest in jeopardizing this aid because of Hamas. Second, Hamas may be an off-shoot of the Brotherhood, but it has proved itself a fickle disciple, associating itself with two of the Brotherhood’s fiercest enemies – the secularist Assad regime in Syria, and with the Shi’a ayatollahs in Iran. In the last two years in particular, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have turned the Gaza Strip into a forward military base of Iran. Third, Egypt is the largest Arab country, with eighty-two million people. Hamas controls a tiny speck of desert inhabited by 1.6 million Palestinians. In a perfect example of a tail wagging the dog, Hamas, time and again, has dragged Egypt into conflicts in which Egypt was not interested in participating. Preventing the rearmament of Hamas and Islamic Jihad would be one way to weaken Hamas’s “wagging” power over Egypt.

Israel feels it needs this Egyptian guarantee because of its experience with Hezbollah. In the summer of 2006 Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war, which ended with a UN Security Council resolution stipulating that in order to prevent such outbreaks in the future, Hezbollah should not be re-armed. Iran and Syria ignored this UN resolution, and within months Hezbollah was not only re-armed, but re-armed with much larger quantities of much more sophisticated arms. The Lebanon government, divided and ineffective, could do nothing about it.

Israel is determined to not to see a replay in Gaza of the 2006 Hezbollah scenario.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire