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(Reuters) – A third of the houses on the main street of this Bedouin town near Egypt’s border with Gaza look derelict, but inside they buzz with the activity of tunnel smugglers scrambling to survive a security crackdown by the Egyptian army.
Smugglers and tunnel owners, who once publicly advertised their services, have taken over the nearly two dozen single-storey concrete structures and boarded up their doors and windows to avoid the attention of the authorities.
While tunnels used by Gaza’s dominant Hamas militants to infiltrate Israel were a priority target of an Israeli offensive in the Palestinian enclave this summer, many smuggling conduits into Egypt have skirted detection.
That has allowed transports of weapons, building materials, medicine and food to continue to and from the small, coastal territory that is subject to blockade by both Israel and Egypt, tunnel operators say and Egyptian security sources acknowledge.
“During the Gaza war, business has flourished,” said a Bedouin guide who gave Reuters access to one of the tunnels and a rare look at how the illicit, lucrative industry has evolved since Egypt began trying to root out the passages in 2012.
Egypt sees a halt to the flow of weapons and fighters as important to its security, shaken in the past year by explosions and shootings by an Islamist insurgency based mainly in the Sinai Peninsula bordering Gaza and Israel.
Humanitarian supplies and building materials headed in the other direction have provided a vital lifeline to the 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza who have been living under the Israeli-imposed blockade since Hamas seized the enclave in 2007.
Cairo mediated talks this month between Israel and Palestinian factions led by Hamas to try to end the war in Gaza but refused to discuss easing its tight control of the Rafah border crossing as part of the deal Hamas seeks.
A 10-day ceasefire expired on Tuesday without a deal to extend it indefinitely, with Israel resuming air strikes on Gaza and Hamas and other Islamist militants their rocket salvoes into the Jewish state.
The guide who accompanied Reuters and requested anonymity estimated the total number of functional tunnels in about 10 border villages like Al-Sarsouriya at nearly 500 – down from about 1,500 before the Egyptian clamp down began.
Most of the bigger tunnels – the kind that can accommodate cars and even trucks – have been destroyed by the Egyptians, but smaller ones ranging 1-2 meters (yards) in diameter survive.
The guide said that as many as 200 new tunnels had been built in the past two years, dodging Egyptian security sweeps, with new ones coming onboard each week.
Read more about …weapons transit…
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Mayadeen TV (Lebanon) – August 8, 2014 – 03:09
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Harvard University professor, whose ad questioned claims that Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, accuses paper of anti-Israel bias.
The British Guardian newspaper rejected an ad written by Harvard University Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, JNS.org reported over the weekend.
The ad, titled “The Empty Spaces in Gaza,” counters the claims that Gaza is “one of the most densely populated areas in the world,” and is based on a an article of the same name that Dershowitz wrote earlier this month for the Gatestone Institute.
“The fact that these sparsely populated areas exist in the Gaza Strip raises several important moral questions,” Dershowitz wrote: “Why don’t the media show the relatively open areas of the Gaza Strip? … Why doesn’t Hamas use sparsely populated areas from which to launch its rockets and build its tunnels?” and “Why does the United Nations try to shelter Palestinian civilians right in the middle of the areas from which Hamas is firing?” The article ends with a call to the international community to enforce international law against Hamas and put a stop to the use of civilians as human shields.
After the ad was rejected, Dershowitz was quoted by JNS.org as saying that “The Guardian, which holds itself out to be a purveyor of diverse truth, clearly reflects a bias against Israel on its editorial pages, as well as in its presentation of the news. Now that bias has spread to the advertising pages.”
A spokesman for the newspaper told JNS.org that “The Guardian reserves the right to reject any advertisement.”
Last week, The Guardian agreed to run an advertisement accusing Hamas of “child sacrifice” as another British newspaper, The Times, came under fire for refusing to print it.
The ad, written by Nobel prize-winning author Elie Wiesel, calls on U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders to condemn Hamas’ “use of children as human shields.”
On Saturday, British newspaper The Jewish Chronicle apologized for running an advertisement for a charity raising funds for the crisis in Gaza.
The weekly paper said running the ad for the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Gaza Crisis Appeal was “meant as a purely humanitarian gesture.”
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