Israel and Egypt are "very close" to an agreement allowing Egypt to move about 100 extra police officers into the border region to stop smugglers moving weapons into the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials said on Monday.
Israeli and Egyptian officials made progress on the security arrangements at talks in Cairo one day after the Israeli cabinet approved a new version of Israel's plan to withdraw from Gaza.
Egypt has its own parallel plan for restoring talks between Israelis and Palestinians, helped on Monday by reports that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat has accepted Egyptian proposals for a reorganisation of Palestinian security forces.
Egyptian co-operation could be crucial for Israel if Israeli forces withdraw from the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, giving the Palestinians unrestricted access to an Arab country for the first time since Israel captured Gaza in 1967.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said deploying the extra Egyptian forces would require no amendments to the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which limits the type of forces Egypt can maintain in the border area.
"We were talking for a few months now about finding the ways how to give Egypt the ability to have more troops in the Egyptian part of Rafah in order to stop those smugglers from smuggling weapons through the tunnels," he told a joint news conference with Egyptian presidential adviser Osama el-Baz.
"We are now very close to implementing this understanding between Israel and Egypt that will allow them to have more than 100 troops, more than 100 soldiers, that will be in the Egyptian part of the border," he added.
An Israeli official said later that Shalom was referring to an Egyptian deployment of some 100 extra police along the eight km (five miles) of border between Gaza and the Sinai peninsula. Baz did not confirm agreement was imminent but said that arrangements could be made to make the Gaza Strip more secure.
"It's not a matter of us doing anything particular for the sake of Israel," he added. Helping Israel disarm the Gaza Palestinians could be a sensitive task for the Egyptian authorities, as well as a possible source of conflict.
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