Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Egyptians, with US Assistance, Building Wall Under Ground at Gaza
Egyptian officials yesterday confirmed that Cairo is covertly constructing an underground steel barrier along the border with Gaza to cut smuggling into the Strip.
A Palestinian lowers himself into a tunnel between Egypt and Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday. Gaza has been blockaded since Hamas seized power there in 2007, and residents use tunnels to access supplies from Egypt. (Photograph: Eyad Baba/AP) They contradicted a report in the Cairo daily Al-Shorouk quoting an unidentified source who said, "Egypt is dealing with smuggling seriously and is capable of stopping it without [a] wall."
When completed in 18 months' time, the impenetrable and indestructible wall will be 10-11km in length and will extend 18-30m below the surface along the 13km-long border.
Four kilometres have, reportedly, been completed north of the town of Rafah, which is bisected by the border that also divides Palestinian families - many of whom are involved in the illegal cross-border trade.
Over the past year the number of tunnels has doubled from 750 to 1,500. They carry essential goods, household appliances, fuel, medicines, fertiliser, seeds, clothing, motorbikes, and even the occasional car.
If the flow of goods is impaired or interdicted, the 1.5 million Gazans would be reduced to reliance on the ration package con- taining flour, pulses and tea distributed by UN agencies.
Only basic supplies are permitted to enter the Strip through goods crossings controlled by Israel, which tightened its blockade of Gaza following the seizure of power there by Hamas in June 2007.
Israel routinely bombs tunnels it claims are used for explosives and weapons traffic, while Cairo tries to tackle smuggling by arresting dealers, closing down warehouses on the Egyptian side of the frontier and blowing up tunnels.
Last March, the US provided Egypt with $32 million (€21.75 million) to install electronic surveillance devices and other equipment to prevent smuggling.
Since these efforts have failed to halt or seriously limit commerce, Cairo is said to have come under pressure from the US and Israel to agree to the sinking of an underground barrier.
US army engineers have designed the wall, modelled on structures used to reinforce levees in hurricane-prone New Orleans. US firms have manufactured its sections, which fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Farmers and herdsmen have remarked on the clearing of land near the border, and local municipal official Suleiman Bair said farmers would be compensated for the loss of fruit and olive trees. Shoot-outs have erupted between Egyptian police and Bedouin tribesmen involved in smuggling and tunnel protection.
Confirmation of the construction of the underground wall coincided with an appeal issued by dozens of UN agencies, inter- national organisations and national non-governmental bodies for $664.4 million to finance humanitarian programmes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and areas of the West Bank where the Palestinian economy has been devastated by Israel's settlements, separation wall, checkpoints and restrictions on movement.
UN humanitarian co-ordinator Maxwell Gaylard asserted: "The continued erosion of livelihoods and the denial of basic human rights together are compelling Palestinians to become more and more dependent on international aid."
A wall between Egypt and Gaza is likely to deepen the distress and dependence of Palestinians trapped in the Strip.
- Posted in
24 Comments so far
Show AllGaza, the world's largest prison/concentration camp;
Built and administered by Israel, the US, and the US backed puppet government of Egypt.
This may be the most technologically-advanced genocide in human history. The gas ovens look so quaint and archaic compared to these high teck underground walls and DU weapons.
We are the good Germans, financing and enabling this slow-motion holocaust of the Palestinians by Israel.
More US complicity in zionist crimes. If there is a hell, it's going to be full of Americans and Israelis.
q
please do not forget their "brothers in arms" Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, ....
So the Israelis have their own Warsaw ghetto. And we are complicit. And like the good Germans, the American public doesn't even notice what's going on. They just believe what they're being told. The Palestinians are the bad guys, the Israelis are just defending themselves. Facts, which are not being brought up, have nothing to do with it.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
so the wall will be sunk 30 meters deep. the palestinians' tunnels will be 32 meters deep.
seriously, folks. what did the palestinians do to deserve this? it's been going on my entire lifetime and i'm almost sixty years old... (shaking my head in despair)
What did the Palestinians do to deserve this? They lived in a land that the Zionists coveted! Be thankful it wasn't your land.
Excellent-looking, but economical, shoring system in that shaft. Arabs are some of the best civil engineers. When Clinton would bomb Iraqi bridges over Tigris, they would be rebuild them 10 times faster and at a tenth of the cost, compared to those the occupation built. And few materials would be available due to the sanctions.
Yeah, but that's only because they didn't have Halliburton doing the job.
Soooo, Obama and those middle Earstern thugs are building Gaza into the world's biggest graveyard?
Now That will be really Peaceful....
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down...." Robert Frost
A wall is man's pathetic attempt to keep a problem out or in, as the case may be. In actuality, trying to make a problem go away by building a wall-- physical or diplomatic--will fail because the problem is within the societies that are the builders. Wall or not, those societies are sick and will not survive unless they treat their own internal diseases.
Sadly, Palestinians and others like them-- Iraqis, Afghans, Armenians--are the initial sufferers in the disintegration of empire.
P.S.
Re: the photo accompanying the article-- an error. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections because of the long history of Fatah's corruption and collaboration with Israel and the U.S. (by the way, the U.S. pushed for those elections, being absolutely convinced that Fatah would win. If we hadn't meddled, the elections would not have happened).
After the elections, Fatah tried to accomplish a coup (? U.S. involved, you think?)and displace Hamas, but failed.
So saying that Hamas 'seized' power in 2007 is inaccurate.
You are correct in pointing out out Hamas won those elections and about Fatah's attempt to overthrow Hamas (Also after the election, Israel started capturing and imprisoning the Hamas elected leaders). There was a little bit of MSM reporting of the truth at the time of the elections and coup attempt; however, it seemed very shortly afterwards MSM started following a set of talking points (distortions and general outright lies) that they've been repeating since.
Goes back to the same old propaganda routine: Throw enough lies out there and repeat them enough, the public gets exhausted with lies and starts to accept them.
"So saying that Hamas 'seized' power in 2007 is inaccurate."
'inaccurate' is inaccurate, 'a standard MSM propaganda lie' works, though.
Industrial genocide 2.0. Guess you can't stop progress.
you know how Israelis have been saying "Hamas (or fill in the blank)wants to drive us into the sea" for so long? ok well this is meant to divert our attention from what they are doing. What they are doing is driving the Palestinians into the sea. Except they really, literally are. look at the maps and tell me what the next one will look like.
Mubarack is such a US whore!
Hamas "seized" power thru election - a fit American leaders might find restrictive.
So this is under O-bomb-a (yes i voted for him)? Change we can believe in? He supports Netanyahu and Mubarak in genocidal actions against the long-suffering Palestinians. And this is reported where in mainstream mass media?
Yes, Hamas "seized" power through elections. Bad! While fraudulent "elections" in Afghanistan and Honduras are supported. Obama seems to value democracy no more than Bush and Cheney. So, he continues to support the Orwellian-named National Endowment for Democracy in their creation of mayhem in Latin America and around the world.
Does Obama oppose any prosecution of the Cheney/Bush administration because he views them as kin?
So, we taxpayers continue to commit moral suicide.
Us Brits thought up the idea of Concentration Camps to deal with the Boers and it didn't work. Hitler developed it and it didn't work. Now the Zionists are seeking to perfect it - with the help of the good old USA of course - will it work - doubt it?
...the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded-counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred -- including women and children -- and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States........Mark Twain on the U.S. Army massacre of the Phillipine Moros.....
Is this any different from Gaza?
Can someone help clarify this? The article says that there are now 1500 tunnels along the 13 kilometre long border. Even at 750 tunnels, that would place them at roughly 17 metres apart!