The 7.5 miles that could reshape trade between India and Europe

You can't see it from the Beit She'an railway station, but Israel's border with Jordan is only 7.5 miles away.

The tracks behind the platform run all the way to Haifa, on Israel's Mediterranean coast. And if a handful of ambitious plans come together, those same tracks could one day carry goods from India to Europe.

That's the promise of IMEC, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. It sounds abstract until you're standing in this quiet, unassuming town in Israel's north, where the missing piece of the puzzle turns out to be startlingly small.

A valley built for crossing

To understand why Beit She'an matters now, it helps to understand why it has always mattered. The town sits at the bottom of the Jordan Rift Valley, where the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys meet, bounded by Mount Gilboa to the west and the Jordan River to the east.

Since ancient times, the valley has functioned as a natural crossing point for movement across the Middle East, and the sheer number of ancient settlements and roads that pass through it reflects just how much traffic it has carried over the centuries.

Locals now call the area the Valley of Springs, a rebrand that leans into its defining feature: dozens of natural, year-round freshwater springs bubbling up from a basalt landscape that also happens to be one of the hottest, lowest-lying places in Israel. It's a strange contradiction, harsh climate, abundant water, and it's exactly what allowed a regional capital to flourish here in antiquity.

Beit She'an itself is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the region, with archaeological layers stretching back roughly six thousand years.

It has gone by several names over the millennia, including Scythopolis, Tel el-Husn and Beisan. Under Rome and Byzantium it thrived as Scythopolis, the leading city of the Decapolis, a league of ten Greco-Roman cities east of the Jordan. Today its ruins, colonnaded streets, a 5,000-seat amphitheater, sprawling bathhouses, are one of the most complete ancient sites in the country, and a reminder that this small town was once a genuine regional capital.

There's a railway thread running through that history too. A station opened here in 1904 as part of the Jezreel Valley line, itself an extension of the old Hejaz Railway, before closing along with the rest of the line in 1948.

The valley railway was rebuilt between 2011 and 2016, and the new Beit She'an station, sitting on the same site as the historic one, now connects the city to Afula, Haifa and everything in between, carrying both passengers and freight. In other words: this isn't a new idea. It's an old crossroads, waiting to be reopened.

A city that wants to be a hub again

At the Beit She'an railway station, trains still pull in and out on tracks that once carried Ottoman-era traffic through the Jezreel Valley. "We are in a very, very strategic location," said Noam Jumaa, mayor of Beit She'an. "Right next to the border with Jordan. We have the ability to become an inland port city, a global trade hub, which is what Beit She'an always was."

This is Beit She'an's mayor, a small Israeli town of about 21,000 people today, but one whose location has made it strategically important for thousands of years. Beit She'an is now part of Haifa Bay 53, an initiative bringing together 53 municipalities across northern Israel to push for regional development and a role in the future IMEC corridor.

"Throughout history, Beit She'an was a city where all traffic passed through the region," Jumaa said.

The gap he's talking about is small, but it's the whole ballgame. "The border itself is actually only 3 kilometers (1.8 miles), but to get to Jordan, we need to build another 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) of railway track," Jumaa said. "It's very, very close. This could be done tomorrow morning."

For context, that 7.5 miles gap is genuinely tiny by infrastructure standards. Some competing regional rail proposals call for hundreds of miles of brand-new track across multiple countries. Israel's side of the IMEC route, by contrast, is often described by regional analysts as close to shovel-ready, with the missing link being that short connector between Beit She'an and the border itself.

"This railway will give us so many things," Jumaa continued. "It's not just about the economy. It's also about security, shared culture, and peace."

More than trade

Beit She'an's population is projected to grow to nearly triple within the next ten years, and that's largely because of the plan to develop the IMEC corridor. Instead of shipping everything by sea around the Arabian Peninsula and through the Suez Canal, some cargo could be moved overland across the region. Under the corridor's original design, goods would sail from India to Gulf ports, move by rail across Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and reach Europe through Haifa, whose port is now partly owned by India's Adani Group, a detail that gives New Delhi a direct commercial stake in the Mediterranean end of the route.

Israel's advantage is that much of the infrastructure is already here, creating jobs and economic opportunities for locals. But the mayor sees it as a way to transform the region as a whole, and to rebuild something that existed long before any of today's borders did.

"When my mother was a child here in the Jordan Valley, she and her friends would stand on this side of the border, and Jordanian friends would come from the other side, and they would shout to each other," Jumaa said. "They would talk and build real connections. And I think that what this railway can do for Jordan will be no less than what it does for Israel."

"We know that ultimately, security is connected to shared interests," he added. "And when there is something here that everyone has an interest in protecting, then everyone really does protect it."

The other side of the border

I wanted to see the border myself, so I met up with Itamar Matiash, mayor of the Valley of Springs regional council, who took me into a military zone just southeast of Beit She'an, one that's slated to become a hub of transit between Jordan and Israel.

Just southeast of Beit She'an, right on the border with Jordan, sits what's known as the Jordan Gate, the crossing point where the IMEC corridor is meant to pass. Nearby, a bridge leads directly into Jordan, but it's currently sealed off by a concrete barrier.

"Yes, right now it's blocked," Matiash confirmed. "But we're here at a place whose vision was established 30 years ago by the former Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, and we're going to turn that vision into reality."

The regional council actually built this bridge five years ago. It leads directly into Jordan. No one has crossed it since.

"The idea is to have an area where the two sides work together: an industrial zone on the Jordanian side and an advanced employment zone on the Israeli side, in our area, which we're currently promoting," Matiash explained. "There is already a budget for the road we drove here, which will lead to the industrial zone. We'll develop the entire area for factories, research centers, and so on."

The hope is that Jordanian and Israeli workers will one day use this bridge to cross and work in factories built on both sides of the border.

"This also serves the vision of IMEC," Matiash said, "because ultimately the entire corridor that starts in India and goes all the way to Europe passes right through this geographic area."

But there's a reason this bridge is still empty. Near the crossing, soldiers keep smoke grenades on hand, used to fog up the area for security purposes when people attempt to cross the border illegally. Until IMEC and the surrounding area are developed, this will remain a security zone, and the army will need to stay.

"Development here was stopped because of the security and geopolitical situation between Jordan and Israel and the poor relations we had," Matiash said. "This was put on hold, and now, fortunately, we're getting it out of the mud."

"It all depends on the State of Israel," he added. "The land is ready for a tender, developers want to come here, and we as a council are advancing everything we can. We're ready. We just need to get started. It's a matter of months."

Infrastructure is ready. Politics isn't.

The railway may be close, but the politics around it are much harder to build. Israel and Jordan have had a peace treaty for more than three decades, but relations have become increasingly strained during the war, and commercial crossings along the border have slowed rather than grown. The main truck crossing further south, at Sheikh Hussein, now processes roughly half the traffic it did before October 7, 2023.

"The Jordanians today aren't really in contact with us in any meaningful way," Matiash said. "There is political sensitivity, and we're also still in the middle of a war."

Even so, he doesn't see it as a reason to wait.

"This is simply an enormous opportunity for our regional economy," he said. "Every day that passes is a waste, it's a missed opportunity. We need the State of Israel to run at full speed to make this happen."

It's a tension playing out well beyond the Valley of Springs. Regional analysts have pointed out that Jordan still lacks a functioning national railway of its own, a gap that would need to be closed for any version of the corridor to actually work end to end. Israel's stretch of track is the easy part. What happens on the other side of that concrete barrier, and in the diplomacy surrounding it, is the harder question.

For now, the railway is already here. The bridge is already here. The vision is already here, one that traces back decades, to a time before smoke grenades and blocked crossings, when families on both banks of the Jordan River could still call out to each other across it. What's missing is 7.5 miles of track, and the political will to lay them.