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Patrolling Egypt-Gaza border at heart of truce talks

AFP, Jerusalem
I low to prevent arms smuggling along the porous border between Gaza and Egypt is at the heart of talks that Cairo is conducting on ending Israel's deadly war on Hamas, officials say.
Israel has repeatedly made clear that it would not stop its deadly offensive on Hamas in Gaza until it received guarantees that the smuggling through the hun dreds of tunnels snaking from Egypt into Gaza would stop.
"Halt the arms smuggling from Sinai into Gaza and the Israeli combat will stop," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said last week.
Several options on how to do that are currently on the table.
The Egyptians are proposing to deploy forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas - whom Hamas ousted from Gaza in June 2007 - on the Gaza side of the border and boost Egyptian troops on the other side, several Israeli officials have told AFP
The Egyptian proposal is an "upgraded version" of the 2005 deal for the Rafah border crossing that required the presence of Palestinian Authority forces and European Union observers, they said.
"The Palestinian force would be larger
and have more authority in the crossing and along the entire border," said one defence ministry official.
At lire same time, Cairo is proposing that it deploy more forces along its border with Gaza, a mow, which would require amending the 1979 Israel Egypt peace deal which limits the number of Egyptian troops in the Sinai peninsula.
The Egyptian forces would work in coop -eration with a foreign engineering corps, which would locate and destroy smuggling tunnels along tlic border, he said.
Europe, meanwhile, has proposed sending international troops to patrol the border, with Denmark and the Netherlands offering to send forces to the Sinai peninsula, a senior Western diplomat in Israel told AFP.
That plan however is unlikely to get off the ground as "Egypt will never accept foreign forces on its side of the border," according to a European official in Cairo.
Meanwhile Abbas has also called for international troops, but on the Gaza side of the border.
"We want an international presence in the Gaza Strip and not on the Egyptian border. " he said in Cairo on Saturday.
Israel is favourable both to the Egyptian and Abbas proposals, officials have told AFP.
Israel "would consider favourably the
deployment of Palestinian Authority forces along the Philadclphi Route." as the 15-kilometrc (nine-mile) border between Gaza and Egypt is known, a senior official told AFP.
"Israel wants calm and an end to weapons smuggling into Gaza, if such a solution would answer these requirements, Israel will be satisfied," he said, adding that this included the deployment of foreign troops along the border.
Hamas however adamantly opposes any foreign deployment on tire border or in Gaza and on Saturday Hamas political supremo Khaled Meshaal said the Islamists would view any international troops as an "occupation force."
He was joined by the leaders of nine other Syrian-based Palestinian factions, who issued a joint statement rejecting "any international forces or observers in die Gaza Strip or any security arrangements that undermine the resistance” against Israel.
The exiled leaders also said they "reject any initiative or proposal that aims to achieve the goals which the enemy failed to achieve through the barbaric military offensive."
Israel has said it aims to wipe out Hamas's ability to fire rockets from its Gaza stronghold and its ability to smuggle weapons into the territory.