Egypt steps up its war on Gaza
2008-08-24 11:11
Rafah - Hidden in the shadows of a Rafah residential zone, two Egyptian border police and their attack dogs stand guard at the entrance to a smuggling tunnel to the besieged Gaza Strip.
The discovery of the tunnel, only metres from the garden of a house where young children are playing and giggling near a flock of chickens, shows the latest success in Egypt's war on smugglers.
Army chief Lieutenant Colonel Yasser Ali proudly showed a group of foreign journalists the tunnel but refused to give details of what - if anything - had been found inside.
"We discovered it this morning. It is the 452nd we have found in the last three years," he said.
Crippling blockade
The United States and Israel have frequently accused Egypt of failing to halt the smuggling of weapons into the Strip, which has been under a crippling Israeli blockade since Hamas seized control of it last year.
In June this year, Cairo appealed to the United States for help in locating the tunnels and US authorities responded by sending a team of specialists.
"We need their experience. After all, they are experts. They have to combat tunnels dug by Mexicans to cross into the United States," Ali added.
A team of US engineers from the Department of Defence is already on site, but is keeping a low profile, working to support and train Egyptian forces in the battle against the smugglers.
"We are already finding more tunnels ourselves; more than 200 this year. But we want to use their more successful methods of tunnel detection and destruction," Ali said.
In addition to training border guards, the United States has promised to give Egypt $33m to buy new technology to uncover tunnels.
Authorities said the equipment had been dispatched and had yet to arrive in Egypt, but they refused to give details regarding the nature of the hardware.
Several times a week, border guards blow up, collapse or fill in freshly discovered tunnels, but there are always more in this frontier region; sometimes in gardens, houses or even school yards.
Since the Israeli army withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, 750 Egyptian border guards plus police officers have been deployed along the 13.5 kilometre-long frontier, which stretches from the sea to the desert.
The border zone is a barren, sandy wasteland of searing heat and choking dust that is deserted except for the coils of barbed wire and the concrete barrier wall dividing the two regions.