Israel's parliament Wednesday approved an historic plan for Egyptian border guards to patrol along the Gaza border after the last Israeli troops leave the Palestinian territory next month.
The deal, which has taken months to negotiate, will see 750 lightly armed officers fan out to stop weapons being smuggled into the Gaza Strip, when all Israeli soldiers are recalled from the territory after a 38-year occupation.
MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deployment after Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz delivered a passionate defence of the agreement with Cairo.
It will be first paramilitary deployment on the border since the 1967 Middle East war when Israel seized Gaza, then administered by Egypt, and the Sinai peninsula.
Mofaz said the Egyptian guards would "pose no threat to Israel" but by allowing troops to leave would not needlessly endanger Israeli soldiers.
Under the so-called Philadelphi agreement, Egyptians will take up position along the 14-kilometre (eight-mile) stretch facing the Philadelphi buffer zone, which flanks the border and is today controlled by the Israeli army.
Among the 28 MPs who voted against the deployment, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's challenger for the leadership of the main ruling Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, slammed the deal for "sanctioning a return to the 1967 borders".
The hard-line chairman of parliament's defence and foreign affairs committee, Yuval Steinitz, dismissed the agreement as a "Trojan horse" for Israel's 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, which stipulates that the Sinai remain demilitarised.
Israel had planned to keep a small contingent of soldiers at the Rafah border until finalising the Egyptian deployment with Cairo amid radically improved relations between the two rather uneasy allies.
Egypt's visiting intelligence chief Omar Suleiman earlier poured over the security specifics of the deal with Mofaz and Sharon, an official said.
Up to 15,000 Palestinian security officers are being primed to secure Gaza's former Jewish settlements, which were evacuated last week, as soon as Israeli troops withdraw by mid-September, the Palestinian Authority said.
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