Bloomberg
January 24, 2010, 07:01 PM EST
By Daniel Williams
Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Three construction drills that look like giant corkscrews pierce the ground close to Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip, part of an effort to disrupt smuggling tunnels that has led to shootouts.
Smugglers and sympathizers of Hamas, the Islamic movement that rules Gaza, say pipes inserted into the holes will house motion sensors to detect underground traffic. Residents of the Egyptian border town of Rafah say the Egyptians are also constructing a subterranean wall made of steel panels to block tunnels at a depth of 18 meters.
The moves reflect a new determination by Egypt to control smuggling into the coastal enclave, which Hamas has ruled since 2007. Israel and the U.S. regard Hamas as a terrorist organization and have pressured Egypt to block the contraband, which includes rockets that have been fired at Israel. Though Egypt supports Palestinian independence, it opposes Hamas, which wants to create an Islamic state.
“This is a sensitive problem,” said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “Egypt looks like it is doing Israel’s bidding and the Egyptian people don’t like that.”
The construction has set off violence along the 14- kilometer border. On Jan. 6, an Egyptian border guard was killed by a Palestinian sniper a day after a clash between participants of a private aid convoy and Egyptian police over delivery of goods to Gaza. On Dec. 18, shots fired from the Palestinian side hit construction equipment, Rafah police officials said.
Criticism
Opposition parties at home and detractors in other Arab countries have criticized Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for sealing his border with Gaza since the 2007 Hamas takeover. Israel has also shut its frontier with Gaza.
The blockade has crippled the economy in the coastal enclave, where 80 percent of the factories and shops are closed, according to Hamas officials. Palestinians rely on smuggled goods brought in through the tunnels for everything from cement to cigarettes to meat.
Egyptian Cabinet spokesman Magdi Radi declined to answer questions yesterday about the construction. He referred instead to remarks made by Mubarak to a police gathering.
“Egypt does not allow chaos on its borders,” Mubarak said yesterday in a speech broadcast on state-run Nile TV, according to the BBC monitoring service. “The engineering works and fortifications on our eastern borders are an act of Egypt’s sovereignty, about which we do not accept any arguments or interference from anyone, whoever he is,” he said, referring to the region that abuts Gaza.
He also warned against “targeting” of soldiers and facilities at the frontier.
‘Death Wall’
Hamas has rejected “the death steel wall that Egypt is constructing under the borders of the Gaza Strip, and calls on Egypt to stop building it because it suffocates the Gaza Strip,” spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
The Israeli army invaded Gaza in December, 2008, in a move it said was aimed at stopping Hamas rocket fire at its southern towns and cities, and has frequently bombed the frontier to destroy the tunnels.
The Israeli army has said that more than 10,000 projectiles were fired from Gaza into Israel since 2001 and that 21 civilians and four soldiers have been killed by the rocket and mortar fire. The Hamas Health Ministry in Gaza said that 1,450 Palestinians were killed during Israel’s invasion while Israel puts the number at 1,166.
In 2007, the U.S. government earmarked $23 million for “sensors, surveillance cameras, remote controlled robotic devices, seismic-acoustic tunnel detection equipment and the computers to process seismic data,” the Congressional Research Service wrote in a September 2009 report. The CRS is a research branch of the U.S. Congress.
U.S. Threat
Last January, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was “providing technical expertise.”
The U.S. Congress had threatened to reduce monetary assistance to Egypt because of alleged lax border control. The U.S. provides about $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt each year. Egypt stations 750 border guards along the frontier. Phone and e-mail requests to the U.S. Defense Department in Washington requesting information on American involvement were unanswered.
An Egyptian smuggler and Hamas supporter in Rafah, who would only identify himself as Islam out of fear of being arrested, said holes are being dug at intervals of about 50 meters and surveillance equipment is being lowered into the ground through the pipes.
“This is an escalation in technology,” said Islam. “Hamas will look for its own technology to defeat it.”
Egyptian police at Rafah declined to comment on the construction.
Sardines
Residents of the area just south of Rafah said Egyptian police have been cracking down on smugglers who sometimes earn 50 percent of proceeds from goods tunneled into Gaza.
“We can tell by the price of sardines,” said Ashraf, a smuggler who didn’t want to give his full name. “When smuggling is going well, there are almost no sardines in stores and if you can find them they cost 60 pounds ($11) instead of the usual six. There are plenty of sardines around now, so you know smugglers are having a hard time.”
--Editors: Louis Meixler, Peter Hirschberg.
To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Williams in Rafah at +2-010-330-2417 or dwilliams41@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at +972-2-640-1104 or phirschberg@bloomberg.net
