Israel’s defence ministry said Wednesday it had begun demining the border area with Jordan as part of construction works for a new barrier it says aims to stem weapons smuggling.
“A total of approximately 500 old anti-tank mines, which had been laid in the area since the late 1960s, were destroyed,” the ministry said in a statement.
Footage from the ministry showed workers setting up and detonating a linear explosion to take out mines in the Jordan Valley, along an already existing border fence.
In a previous statement, the ministry said the new border barrier would run roughly 500 kilometres (310 miles) from the southern Israeli-annexed Golan Heights to Samar Sands, at Israel’s southern tip.
The first phase of works will focus on the Jordan Valley, including the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.
A barrier runs along nearly all of the West Bank’s border with Israel, including sections along which an eight-metre concrete wall has been built.
When construction in the Jordan border area officially began in December 2025, Major General Eran Ofir, the defence ministry official in charge of the project, said the finished barrier would be “a smart border”.
He said the barrier would include “both a physical fence and collection systems, radars, cameras, and advanced communications systems”.
Currently, a simple fence topped with sensors is visible from the West Bank’s route 90 along the border with Jordan.
Planning for the border barrier began in November 2024, shortly after Defence Minister Israel Katz was sworn in.
Katz said after the project was officially approved in May 2025 that the barrier was a “critical strategic step against Iran’s attempts to turn the eastern border into another terror front”.
Katz and other Israeli political figures accuse Iran of smuggling weapons across the Jordanian border to supply Palestinian groups in the West Bank’s refugee camps.