Samer al-Atrush
Telegraph.co.uk
15 December 09
Trucks filled with contraband trundle along on a road leading to Egypt's frontier with the besieged Gaza Strip. Their cargo will be sorted into bags and then slipped into Gaza through the tunnels.
"That one has concrete," said Abu Khaled, as he parked his mud-camouflaged pick-up by the side of the road. The gaunt, bearded Bedouin operates a tunnel himself, and specialises in supplying the Palestinian enclave with concrete.
For a man wanted by the police for smuggling, Abu Khaled is remarkably upbeat about his prospects. He shrugged off reports that the authorities were constructing an underground barrier to sever the tunnels into Gaza.
"It shouldn't pose a problem," he said.
The smugglers have long been accustomed to outwitting frontier guards. They react to the sight of heavy machinery digging along the border and inserting pipes and metal sheets into the ground with a mixture of amusement and scorn. The barrier will reportedly reach a depth of between 18 and 30 metres (60 to 100 feet), but the smugglers say they can easily burrow beneath it.
"They're taking American money and dumping it into the ground," said one smuggler in the border town of Rafah, giving his name as Mohammed.
No one along the border believes that Egypt will ever be able - or willing - to end the smuggling that provides the people of Gaza with food, fuel and weapons. Israel enforced a semi-blockade of the territory after the Islamist movement Hamas seized it in 2007.
"There's a whole cocktail of reasons why it won't work," said Abu Ahmed, a Bedouin arms trader. The police are corrupt, he says, the Bedouin and other smugglers are resourceful, and if Egypt cuts the underground lifeline to Gaza people there may inundate Sinai, as they did briefly in 2008 after Hamas blasted the border wall.
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