Smuggling tunnels.

The Philadelphi Corridor is a 14 kilometers strip of land along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The Corridor was under Israeli control until the evacuation of the Jews from Gaza.
I could not believe my eyes when I watched the IDF withdrawing from this piece of land in 2005. It was more than obvious to me that this would be a security threat to Israel.

Just a few months earlier I had been driving through this area on my way to the Egyptian border at Rafiah in order to cross over into Egypt. I was on my way to Cairo with my eldest daughter. It was her Bat Mitzva trip and I had decided for us to go to the Egyptian capital by bus. In those days busses were connecting Tel Aviv and Cairo three times a week.
We went during the Jewish Passover holiday. Half of the travelers were Arab men from Israel. As I spoke to some of them I understood that they were going to visit their wife and children in Egypt. They had another “set” of wife and children in Israel. (Moslems are allowed to marry more than one wife) The other half were either Israeli Jews or foreigners.
We had joined a bus which brought us to the entrance gate to the Philadelphi Corridor. As the army had to clear the way for us to reach the Border Station we had to wait.
Driving through the Corridor took about 10 minutes. It was a “no-mans-land” with border on both sides.

During the time when Israel controlled this strip of land they destroyed 90 tunnels made for smuggling between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Most of the entrances to these tunnels were from houses alongside the border. During an army operation in 2004 these houses were destroyed.

When Israel withdrew from the Sinai in the late seventies and the beginning of the eighties lots of Bedouin tribes were left in a vacuum. They were no longer under the protection of the Israeli society and the Egyptians didn’t consider their needs when they started introducing new people to the area. Many Bedouins had lost their source of income and were desperately looking for ways to survive. Some had already been involved with the smuggling of drugs and prostitutes into Israel so the idea of doing the same into Gaza was not a “far thought”.
During the last war in Gaza the IDF claims to have destroyed 240 of 300 smuggling tunnels. Smugglers from the area say that 9 out of 10 tunnels have been destroyed but claim that there were as many as 1000 tunnels before the operation.
A smuggling tunnel starts with a shaft opening going 15 meters down and continues running several hundred meters underneath the border. The tunnel itself is 1,5meters high. Some of the stuff being smuggled are innocent and even necessary supplies for the people such as food and medicine, but as the business is risky the smugglers like to earn as much as possible. This causes the prices for regular goods to go up. On the other hand, however, it makes it more attractive to smuggle weapons and ammunition.
Egypt is supposed to control this industry from their side, but as it keeps whole tribes in business they most likely won’t. It would cause “humanitarian” problems on their side of the border if they do.

Smugglers claim that they are back in business and that they are repairing the ones which were damaged. Some say Hamas used to have their own tunnels, but as they have been destroyed they have now taken over all the others and have made arms import a priority.

So where exactly are we at considering a peaceful near future?

Elin Elkouby