November 28, 2007	Wednesday	Ziqa’ad 17, 1428

RAFAH: Fresh milk is impossible to find but TNT, dates or bullets are readily available. While the Gaza Strip is being squeezed by Israeli sanctions, the border town of Rafah has become an unofficial free trade zone where goods are smuggled from Egypt through an ever increasing number of tunnels. While many commodities are unavailable in the rest of Gaza, a variety of imports can be found in Rafah. Towers of cartons of Egyptian cigarettes are for sale on pavements, the price having risen from $2 to $8 a packet since Israel stopped imports. Other imports are more dangerous: one teenager showed off a fist-sized lump of chalky TNT, which militant groups grind down to make the explosive for the rockets they fire into Israel.

Along the no man’s land by the border, once patrolled by Israeli tanks and bulldozers, there are dozens of encampments housing tunnel shafts in clear view of the Israeli surveillance drones overhead, and Egyptian border posts.

The smugglers are almost always private entrepreneurs, although it is rumoured that militant factions now have their own tunnels. First they select a piece of land close to the border and excavate a large hole with a mechanical digger. They then enclose an area of dozens of square metres and begin digging, filling the first hole with the earth from the tunnel. A telltale sign is clay, which is normally found several metres below the surface, on top of the sandy ground. The tunnelers map the length and direction of the tunnel using satellite pictures from Google Earth.

Recent footage shows one tunnel equipped with a fuse box, lighting and telephones. Air is provided with pumps, and mechanical winches drag trains of jerry cans over the smooth clay surface of the tunnel floor and lift items up the 12-metre shaft to the surface. Goods or people are dropped down the shaft to an antechamber before entering the tunnel, a Hamas official said. The journey from one end to the other takes around 40 minutes.

Abu Adnan, 21, has worked in four tunnels since he was 14, each of which took between three and four months to complete and were up to 800 metres long. “It’s dangerous work but I have been able to provide for my family, build a home and buy a car. In the beginning we could make $14,000 each with every shipment, but now it is more like $6,000,” he said.

Since Hamas took control of Gaza in June its police have been taxing the income of smugglers who cooperate with them and destroying the tunnels of those who do not.

“Hamas always seem to know when we have a shipment coming through and they arrive and they take half the proceeds,” said Abu Adnan.

Israel has always claimed that the tunnels represent a strategic threat to its security. When its forces controlled the “Philadelphi Road”, the narrow strip between Egypt and Gaza, it launched raids and demolished houses to locate tunnels. Troops flooded areas with water to disrupt smuggling and placed large bombs underground.

A spokesman for the Israeli army said that since Israel withdrew from settlements in the Gaza Strip it expected the Palestinian Authority to take responsibility for smuggling, although it would continue to take action against tunnelling unilaterally when it had intelligence about it.

The price of guns in Gaza has fallen, but Israel’s closure of the strip has created new opportunities for the smugglers.

Some are planning to put petrol pipelines in the tunnels to import cheap Egyptian petrol which will become even more lucrative if Israel restricts the flow of fuel into Gaza, as it has threatened.

Another popular import is a converter kit that allows cars to run on cooking gas rather than petrol.

Drivers say that running a car on cooking gas is 50 per cent cheaper than petrol at current prices. —Dawn/Guardian News Service