A narrow strip of no man’s land has become the chief sticking point in cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, many officials from mediating countries say. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that Israeli forces must remain in the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border. That’s been a nonstarter for Hamas, and Egypt says the Israeli troop presence violates a peace treaty between the two countries. Here’s what to know.

       The Philadelphi Corridor runs along the Gaza-Egypt border, stretching nine miles long and with a width of roughly 100 meters, from Gaza’s southernmost tip to the Mediterranean Sea. It includes the Rafah border crossing, which became a lifeline to the enclave after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the invasion of Gaza that followed. Some aid flowed in, and critically sick and wounded people were evacuated through the crossing until Israeli forces captured and shut it in May.

       But Israeli officials say Hamas also uses the corridor as a key conduit for the transfer of weapons and funds to militants. Netanyahu has called it “the lifeline of Hamas by which they arm and rebuild themselves.”

       Egypt has repeatedly denied the claims, insisting it maintains tight control of the border and has worked to prevent smuggling.

       The 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel defined the border between them and limited the military equipment and forces the countries could deploy on either side. A further agreement signed in 2005 was specific to the portion of the border that edges the Gaza Strip. Egypt was allowed to bolster its border patrols, while Israeli forces withdrew. The Palestinian Authority took over administration of the border as well as the Rafah crossing under the watch of European Union monitors.

       Just two years later in 2007, Hamas took over Gaza, and Israel, aided by Egypt, imposed a blockade that severely restricted the movement of goods and people across the border. That blockade was tightened after Oct. 7. In a May offensive, Israeli forces captured the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah border crossing.

       At a news conference Monday, the Israeli prime minister pointed at a map of the Gaza Strip marked with icons of missiles, money bags and masked men. “The Axis of Evil needs the Philadelphi Corridor, and for the same reason we must control the Philadelphi Corridor,” he said.

       He has made the security argument before. But he added that after the discovery of six more hostages’ bodies in Gaza on Saturday, withdrawing from the corridor would send Hamas a message: “Murder more hostages, you’ll get more concessions.”

       Privately, however, Netanyahu’s negotiating team offered to pull out troops as part of a phased agreement, according to three current and former officials from countries involved in the talks, in a move that confused mediators during the diplomatic effort. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, the officials said that on Monday, a senior Israeli negotiator told U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators that Israel was willing to pull all of its troops out of the corridor during the proposed agreement’s second phase.

       Israel’s spy chief David Barnea delivered the message, according to an Israeli official and another official from a mediating country briefed on the talks.

       At a news conference for international media Wednesday, Netanyahu reiterated that an Israeli presence in the corridor was central to Israeli security goals. He said the conditions for a permanent cease-fire must include a situation where the corridor “cannot be perforated,” and briefly suggested he was open to other alternatives to a security presence there.

       “Somebody has to be there. … Bring me anyone who will actually show us — not on paper, not in words, not in a slide — but on the ground, day after day, week after week, month after month, that they can actually prevent the recurrence of what happened there before,” Netanyahu said. “I don’t see that happening right now. … Until that happens, we’re there.”

       Other vocal figures within Israel’s political and security establishment have downplayed the need for an Israeli presence in Philadelphi. They say the government should prioritize the return of the remaining hostages — and that Netanyahu’s demands reflect an effort to derail an agreement that could weaken him politically.

       Last week, the Israeli cabinet voted in favor of an ongoing military presence within the Philadelphi Corridor, over the objections of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

       “The cabinet decision indicated that Netanyahu is not interested in bringing the hostages home,” said Ephraim Sneh, a retired Israeli brigadier general and former deputy defense minister with the center-left Labor Party. “There is no other interpretation.”

       Cease-fire talks have stopped and started and failed for months. In May, they restarted again, with President Joe Biden announcing what he called an Israeli proposal for a three-stage process that would include the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners during a six-week cease-fire. It aimed to eventually pave the way to a permanent end to the war. The United Nations Security Council endorsed the plan. The Biden administration accused Hamas of holding it up.

       In early July, Hamas dropped some of its hard-line demands, and Biden expressed confidence that a deal was near.

       But later that month, Israeli negotiators formally introduced new requirements, including that Israeli troops remain in the Philadelphi Corridor and at the Rafah border crossing.

       Hamas has called that a nonstarter. “Without the withdrawal [of Israeli forces], fully, from the Gaza Strip and especially from Netzarim and Philadelphi, there is no agreement,” Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

       On Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said he was “not going to get into a debate” with Netanyahu over his recent comments about the corridor.

       The deal put forward in May that Israel agreed to, Kirby said, includes the removal of the Israel Defense Forces from “all densely populated areas,” including those around or adjacent to the Philadelphi Corridor.

       Although Egypt has played a mediator role in the Gaza cease-fire talks, “now, we’re part of the problem,” said a former Egyptian official familiar with negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

       Egypt feels slighted by what it sees as an Israeli effort to unilaterally change the terms of the peace treaty, said Ayman Salama, an international law professor in Egypt and a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, which advises the president.

       Egypt also has its own national security concerns about an Israeli presence on the border, including that Israeli forces there could push Palestinians into Sinai, said H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East security analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Royal United Services Institute.

       When Israeli security agency representatives visited Cairo two weeks ago, they spent a day meeting with Egyptian spy chief Abbas Kamel to discuss only the Philadelphi Corridor issue, rather than specifics of the hostage-for-prisoner exchange, the former official said. At one point last month, Egyptian mediators refused to pass along Israel’s latest proposal to Hamas because they objected to the border provisions so strongly.

       Cairo has reacted angrily to Netanyahu’s suggestions that it has turned a blind eye to weapons smuggling across the border. Egypt says that under President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi over the past decade, it has destroyed more than 1,500 smuggling tunnels and cleared an entire city to create a more than three-mile-wide militarized buffer zone on the Egyptian side of the border.