Gaza Will Become a Worse Nightmare Without Its Tunnels

Last updated on: October 8, 2015 at 10:42 pm by Kermit Zarley

Gaza Will Become a Worse Nightmare Without Its Tunnels 2015-10-08T22:42:45-07:00 Kermit Zarley

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In 2006, Israel finally relented and unilaterally relinguished possession of the Gaza Strip to Palestinians. But Palestinians were becoming more divided between the secular Palestinian Authority, which operated mostly in the West Bank, and the fiercely religious Hamas that operated almost entirely in the Gaza Strip. Thus, a battle broke out between them in 2007, and Hamas emerged victoriously in control of Gaza, which remains so to this day.

Prior to this, Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip had free access to the transportaion of goods accross its southern border with Egypt. These goods now included weapons with which to use against Israel. So, Israel quickly enclosed the Gaza Strip with a fence, thereby prohibiting both people and goods from entering the Gaza Strip without Israel’s approving inspection at stations. Israel also prohibited Palestinians in Gaza from using their airspace and access from the coastal border along the Mediterranean Sea.

The result of this enclosure of Palestinians was that poverty increased drastically in the Gaza Strip. It now has some of the highest density of population and unemployment in the world. Yet Palestinians as a whole are quite educated largely due to UN efforts to aid them, primarily in the UN refugee camps that date back to the very formation of the State of Israel, in 1948.

Israel’s lockdown of Gaza caused its inhabitants to become as resourceful as possible to overcome their tragic circumstances. An important activity has been the constuction of tunnels underneath the fence on the Gaza/Egypt border for smuggling goods into Gaza. (Actually, when Israel forfeited Gaza the city of Rafah became divided, so that part of Rafah is located in the Gaza Strip, and that consists of part of the Gaza border with Egypt.) Egyptain authorities, who with their people sympathized with the plight of the Palestinian people, largely looked the other way regarding these tunnels.

But when Adel Fattah el-Sisi became president of Egypt, in 2013, Egypt’s attitude about Palestinian tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border, which numbered over a hundred and some as deep as 35 feet, began to change. Relations between Egypt and Israel improved, and Israel got Egypt to begin destroying those Palestinian tunnels, which Israel had always been trying to do. So, Egypt began to destroy tunnels and built a wall along its Gaza-Egypt border for the purpose of also trying to prevent Islamic terrorists from enter Egypt’s North Sinai and causing much havoc there.

Egypt’s latest effort to stop Palestinians from transporting weapons through these tunnels into Gaza has been to build a wide canal along the Gaza-Egypt border on the Egyptian side and fill it with seawater from the Mediterranean. With it Egyptian authorities sometimes flood these tunnels and otherwise weaken them to eventually collapse. Palestinians then try to strengthen them with iron rods and concrete, but it seems to be a losing battle. But Eygpt will be a loser with this effort as well. The seawater is seeping down into the aquifer that nearby farmers use to irrigate their crops. That will contaminate the fresh water and make it useless for both farming and immediate human use. Gaza already has a shortage of water.

I think this recent development regarding Egypt’s efforts to eliminate Palestinian tunnels from Gaza is just one more reason why my proposal for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the way to go: let Israel have all of the West Bank and let the Palestinians have a very enlarged Gaza Strip to include the North Sinai stretching southward to El Arish in which to create their long hoped-for, independent, sovereign State of Palestine. (See my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia (1990), and updated articles about it at kermitzarley.com.)

Many of the builders, owners, and users of these Gaza tunnels depend upon them for their living. And the city of Gaza collects needed sales taxes from goods transported into Gaza through them. But the future of these tunnels is now in serious doubt due to this flooding.

The New York Times reported yesterday about these tunnels. It said Gazan Abu Rabah’s tunnel has been idle for the past month due to this flooding. Envisioning a possible end of these tunnels, Mr. Rabah spoke of other options, such as going over the fence, or flying through the air, or sailing the Mediterranean. Gazan tunnel guy Abu Jazar then said, “Or maybe we should just give up and go fishing.”

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