After repairing their tunnel on Thursday, workers for Abu Wahda the smuggler were hoisting loads of prized cargo out of the narrow shaft: potato chips, a minor luxury for Gazans tired of bland UN humanitarian rations.
All around, smuggling crews were busy getting merchandise flowing again through dozens of similar tunnels only days after a ceasefire in Israel’s devastating Gaza offensive.
The air reeked from spills of newly smuggled fuel being poured in to plastic barrels as winches powered by noisy generators hauled goods out of wood-lined openings in the earth. Others were still producing only dirt as workers underground dug out cave-ins from Israeli bombardment.
The tunnels linking the Gaza Strip with Egypt are back in business, despite the hundreds of tonnes of bombs and missiles Israeli dropped on them.
Their fast recovery only underlines the difficulty of stopping the smuggling and reinforces Israel’s fears that Gaza’s Hamas rulers will use the tunnel network to bring in weapons to rearm after the blows it took in the onslaught.
“I fixed the damage in three days, we’re functional since this morning,” said Abu Wahda, who like others involved in the trade refused to be identified by anything but his nickname because of his smuggling activity.
By noon, the winch had pulled out 12 refrigerator-sized sacks of chips. Abu Wahda said the 1m high passage under Gaza’s soft sands was not fully reinforced yet and was dangerous for his eight workers currently undergound shuttling the cargo from the Egyptian side.
“But the worst danger comes from the sky, if they bomb again,” he said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Thursday that Israel was willing to reopen hostilities if the bombings weren’t enough to stop the smuggling.
Ending the smuggling — along with stopping Hamas rocket fire on southern Israel — was a key Israeli objective for its offensive, which killed 1,285 Palestinians, most of them civilians, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights counted.
The Israeli military said it destroyed 60 to 70 percent of the tunnels before Sunday’s ceasefire. Israel estimates there were about 300 tunnels before the offensive.
Smugglers in Rafah, a southern Gaza border town where nearly all tunnels are dug, said that there had been about 1,000 tunnels operating before the bombardment, and that up to 90 percent of them were destroyed.
Most tunnels were dug after Israel and Egypt sealed off Gaza following Hamas’ violent takeover in June 2007. While Hamas is believed to use tunnels to bring in weapons, most tunnels are used to get around the Israeli blockade and import scarce commodities — fuel, clothes, building supplies, cigarettes and even potato chips.
The tunnels, about 14m under the surface, usually run for up to 730m from Gaza into Egypt, where their entrances are usually hidden in homes.
Abu Wahda and other smugglers said on Thursday they had never brought weapons for Hamas. They said Hamas directly operates its own tunnels in areas unaccessible to outsiders.
One smuggler, Abu Bilal, said he’d be happy to bring Hamas weapons, “but frankly, the resistance never asks us to.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS