Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a $270 million plan to link the northern city of
Kiryat Shmona, close to the Lebanese borders, to the Red Sea resort of Eilat in
the far south by rail, at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday.
اضافة اعلان
“My
vision is for every Israeli citizen to be able to travel to or from the center from anywhere
in the country in less than two hours,” he says. “In most cases under an hour,
and even less than that," Israeli media reported.
Aside from swiftly
moving people the approximately 400-kilometer distance, the line will allow the
moving of goods from the Eilat port to terminals on the Mediterranean, the
premier says.
He linked that project
with the potential of an
Israeli-Saudi normalization deal, which is
expected to be part of any deal between Riyadh and Washington that is now under
discussion between those two capitals, The Jerusalem Post said.
“In the future, we will
be able to transport cargoes of goods by train from Eilat to our ports in the
Mediterranean Sea, and we will also be able to connect Israel by train to Saudi
Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula. We are working on that too,” Netanyahu said,
reviving Hejazi-line dreams.
It’s unclear where the
financing for the project will come from. According to the Ynet news site, the
Israeli Transportation Ministry has agreed to fund $54 million over the next
two years for planning the line, which is reportedly expected to include a
bullet-train segment through the
Negev desert.
The announcement comes
almost exactly a decade after a Netanyahu-led cabinet approved a train line
linking the center of Israel to Eilat, which had been the latest in a series of
such decisions that had all gotten derailed once it became time to actually
build the thing.
At the time, the
vaguely
Chinese-funded project was pilloried as costly and environmentally
harmful. It also failed to actually link the Eilat port with the one in Ashdod,
Times of Israel said.
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