Across Israel’s southern and western peripheries, a slow-motion catastrophe is taking shape. Once separate crises in Sudan and Libya have merged into a single, dangerous front that reaches all the way to Israel’s borders.
Consolidation of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, along with Libya’s enduring political fragmentation and Egypt’s stretched and politically constrained response, have created a durable land corridor for arms, fuel, and fighters.
This corridor is not a distant problem. It is a direct, structural threat to Israeli national security.
The security danger from Sudan, Libya, and Egypt
The core danger is simple and terrifying: high-capacity smuggling routes running through the Sudan-Libya-Egypt tri-border area now offer hostile actors a reliable alternative to maritime and subterranean smuggling.
Those land routes bypass traditional interdiction efforts and make possible the transfer of sophisticated weaponry into the Gaza Strip and Sinai.
Money from gold and oil, routes protected by local militias, and external logistics turn what might have been a regional insurgency into a durable conduit for arms proliferation.
What began as episodic trafficking has become institutionalized logistics: organized convoys, hardened command nodes, and external sponsorship feeding a permanent flow of material. In short, the periphery is being rewired into a war economy.
At the center of this reconfiguration is the RSF. Its battlefield gains have been converted into logistical control. Command hubs such as Bir Mirgui and transit zones around southern Libya and Kufra now function as nexus points linking Darfur, eastern Chad, and northern Libya. These are not accidental transitways. They are the arteries of a new regional supply chain that moves fuel, vehicles, heavy weapons, and crucially, high-end systems, such as man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) [aka “shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.”]
External backers – state patrons and mercenary networks – have turned the RSF into a professionally supplied actor.
Money from gold and oil, routes protected by local militias, and external logistics turn what might have been a regional insurgency into a durable conduit for arms proliferation.
Libya’s collapse is a force multiplier for this threat.
Years of failed UN mediation have left Libyan institutions hollow and competing sovereign claims unresolved. Militia networks in the south, allied with the Libyan National Army (LNA) and figures connected to Haftar, now operate as facilitators. Their commercial relationships with the RSF make Libya both a supply base and a broker.
Turkey’s disruptive maritime maneuvers and the contested 2019 maritime agreement add a second, maritime front to the problem: Energy routes and pipeline projects that Israel depends on are now entangled with the same political fragmentation that fuels the land corridor. The result is an integrated theater of instability linking arms, energy, and politics.
Egypt sits between these threats and Israel’s southern flank, but Cairo’s hands are constrained.
What began as episodic trafficking has become institutionalized logistics: organized convoys, hardened command nodes, and external sponsorship feeding a permanent flow of material.
The refugee influx from Sudan strains resources. Egypt’s pragmatic security calculus – balancing relationships with regional patrons who enable the RSF and Haftar’s LNA – means Cairo often chooses the path of cautious containment over decisive confrontation. Worse, bilateral relations with Israel remain frayed over the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza and the Rafah crossing dispute. That diplomatic rupture weakens intelligence cooperation at precisely the moment when seamless coordination is essential.
For Israel, the implications are immediate and strategic. The southern flank has expanded from Sinai to encompass a vast tri-border area that reaches into the Sahel. Arms smuggling via these land corridors threatens to upgrade the capabilities available to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The potential infusion of MANPADS and other advanced systems into Gaza’s arsenal would be a game changer for both aerial vulnerability and regional escalation risk. The collapse of Libyan stability also jeopardizes Israeli energy partnerships and projects that underpin regional alliances, turning economic leverage into a battleground.
FACED WITH this convergence, Israel must act on three fronts simultaneously: intelligence, diplomacy, and strategic integration.
- First, intelligence fusion with Egypt is non-negotiable. Operational cooperation to map, monitor, and disrupt the Bir Mirgui–Kufra axis must be elevated and insulated from low-level political disputes.
Targeted disruption of the logistical nodes and the financial networks that empower Haftar-allied militias must be prioritized so that the supply chains become costly and unreliable.
- Second, Israel needs a calibrated regional diplomatic campaign.
This is not about isolating partners but about aligning incentives. Pressure on external sponsors who profit from instability – whether they are state patrons or mercenary proxies – must be combined with offers of practical support for Libya’s unification under accountable institutions.
Israel should press the United States, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and other influential actors to recalibrate their Libyan posture toward stabilizing the country and denying safe haven to proliferators.
Israeli security interests require a Libyan polity less amenable to being monetized by warlords.
- Third, the Israeli strategic apparatus must formally integrate the Sahel and North Africa into its Iran-containment calculus.
The RSF corridor is not an isolated anomaly; it is a contiguous element of a broader axis of proliferation stretching from Tehran to Khartoum and across the Mediterranean. Resource allocation, partnerships with Ethiopia and Eritrea, and counter-proliferation investments must reflect that reality.
- Finally, Tel Aviv must repair its diplomatic relationship with Cairo as an urgent security imperative, not a secondary political concession. Stabilizing the bilateral relationship will restore the operational backbone needed to cut the corridor at its most vulnerable points. Without that political trust, intelligence sharing and coordinated interdiction campaigns will remain ad hoc and ineffective.
The strategic triangle of Sudan, Libya, and Egypt is not an abstract academic construct. It is live, lethal geography that now shapes Israel’s security horizon. If left unattended, the logistical networks that have emerged will entrench a new era of proliferation and make crises in Gaza and Sinai more frequent and deadlier.
Israel’s response must be rapid, multidimensional, and unapologetically pragmatic: intelligence first, diplomacy second, and strategic integration third.
Published originally on November 12, 2025.
