On August 23, 2011, I wrote an article in Israel National News titled, The Philadelphi Corridor; Take it back and very soon.

Now in the year 2025 I am filled with a mixture of anger and deep anguish for I knew 14 years ago that a terrible mistake by Israel was taking place and that it might result in a national future tragedy. And so it did when on October 7, 2023 Hamas monsters invaded Israel and committed a barbaric massacre of 1,200 Jews, a horrific crime not committed like it since the Holocaust.

But let us go back to Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, who at the time of writing my article in 2011 was still clinging to power. For all any of us knew, he may have already been forced out of office and a new hostile Islamist regime installed. Mubarak was a dictator, which in the Arab and Muslim world is par for the course. Some believed the 83-year-old Egyptian president had billions stashed away in overseas and offshore bank accounts. That, too, was common in the corrupt Arab world. Yasser Arafat stole vast sums from his fellow Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, which his widow still enjoys.

Whatever any new Egyptian government would call itself, it would not be a free and democratic government as in Israel or throughout the Western World.

Ahmed Qurei, the former P.A. prime minister, once asked Tzipi Livni, Israel’s erstwhile and left-wing foreign minister, if Israel would repossess the Corridor to seal the border and cut off supplies to Hamas, the P.A.’s deadly rival. Apparently, Livni did nothing, and Hamas was thus greatly strengthened militarily. It was, nevertheless, crystal clear to me that failure to repossess this vitally strategic area then, or very soon, would spell dire security problems for Israel.

I then knew when writing that article in 2011 that soon there would be no more need for there to be smuggling tunnels beneath the Egyptian – Gaza border. Instead, endless fleets of trucks would bring into the Hamas occupied Strip from Egypt, the big Muslim Brotherhood, the most sophisticated weapons and missiles needed for both the PA and Hamas, the little Muslim Brotherhood. Only by possessing the Philadelphi Corridor again could Israel hope to stem the lethal Muslim tide.

The question was, would Israeli leaders continue the same fearful and timid policies that too many of its leftist politicians had shown when dealing with the Quartet, the U.N., the Obama Administration, the EU, ad nauseum.

I feared that Israel would soon find that the Gaza Strip became again an appendage of the new Islamic Republic of Egypt. Gaza has always been a perilous finger pointing into the very heart of the Jewish state since Egypt had first occupied it in 1948.

Now it would become even more so, backed by an Egyptian hand armed with enormous and highly lethal amounts of weaponry supplied over many years. The only hope was that an Israeli leader with foresight and intestinal fortitude would finally put Israel’s needs above all else.

I knew that repossessing the Philadelphi Corridor would no doubt evoke screams of rage from the morally compromised world, but they would always condemn Israel however peaceful the Jewish state acted. So, with that truism, it was surely better to be hung in the media and the international corridors of power as a lion than a sheep.

Gaza, is the land given by God to the Biblical Jewish tribe of Judah some 3,500 years ago as an everlasting and eternal possession.

When a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979, the 14 km long security and buffer zone known as the Philadelphi Corridor was under Israel’s control. Its purpose was to prevent the illegal importation from Egypt into the Gaza Strip of weapons and terrorists to be used against Israel.

The deeply compromised Oslo Accords, signed in 1995, allowed Israel to retain the security corridor along the border but it soon became apparent that Sinai Bedouin and the Palestinian Hamas Arabs were digging ever more sophisticated smuggling tunnels under the border.

But then came Condoleezza Rice who, as Secretary of State, urged Israel to vacate the vital security strip separating Egyptian Sinai from the Gaza Strip as a peaceful gesture to the Palestinian Arabs – another “land for peace” disaster in which the Arabs received land, but the Israelis never received peace.

Following the tragic disengagement from Gaza in 2005, forced by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon upon the Jewish villagers in Gaza’s flourishing Gush Katif farming area, Israel also gave up control of the Philadelphi Corridor to the so-called Palestinian Authority (PA) in September of that year. Meanwhile, massive smuggling of missiles into Gaza from Egypt continued with hundreds of Israeli civilians killed from relentless rocket attacks upon Israeli farms, villages and towns bordering the Hamas occupied Gaza Strip.

It was only a matter of time before Hamas, the little Muslim Brotherhood, evicted their Fatah rivals in a bloody coup in 2007. Hamas, with its charter calling for Israel’s extermination, has now ruled the Gaza Strip since then, including occupying the Philadelphi Corridor.

According to an earlier poll in the Israeli newspaper ,Yediot Achronot, some 65% of Israelis admitted that the fall of Hosni Mubarak would pose a direct danger to Israel and a majority believed that a Muslim Brotherhood regime would take power in Gaza.

Even the Palestinian Authority, according to David Poort reporting in the Al Jazeera Arab propaganda news outlet, pleaded with the Israeli government to “re-occupy the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, in order to tighten the siege on Hamas-run Gaza.”

“On January 23, 2008, masked Arab gunmen had demolished the steel wall alongside the Philadelphi route in Rafah. Less than two weeks later, in a meeting in West Jerusalem, Ahmed Qurei, the former Palestinian Authority prime minister, asked Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister, if Israel could re-occupy the Philadelphi corridor to seal the border and cut off supplies to Hamas.”

Whether one accepts the deep concerns expressed by the Palestinian Authority leadership regarding its deadly Hamas rival, its urging of Israel, namely of Tzipi Livni at the time, to re-possess the Philadelphi Corridor, it nevertheless was crystal clear to me that not to do so then or soon, would bring dire security problems for the Jewish state.

The then left-wing Israeli government did not act to do the right thing and the dread year inevitably arrived on that fateful date of October 7, 2023.

That is why I knew so early on that time was most assuredly not on Israel’s side and why all those years ago I had to write my article pleading to take back the Philadelphi Corridor. I did so with these opening words.

“Take it back and very soon, for the Muslim Brotherhood neither sleeps nor rests, and time in this instance is most assuredly not on Israel’s side.”

The rest is tragic history.