NEW Gaza tunnels: "we smuggle everything - except weapons" (Feature)

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann Feb 2, 2009, 14:50 GMT

Rafah, Egypt - In the courtyard of Said Khalil's house lies a 20-centimetre long piece of metal shrapnel. 'That's part of an Israeli missile,' he says.

He hasn't bothered repairing the large rip in the plastic roof of his house where the rocket landed - although he has patched up the cracks in the walls with rough cement.

The cracks were caused by the pounding of Israeli rockets landing in the Gaza Strip, the border to which is just 50 metres away.

He lives in a district where many families make their living from smuggling goods into Gaza via a network of secret tunnels.

Many of the daily goods in Gaza's market arrive via these tunnels, whose openings emerge into little outhouses or discreet courtyards.

'In this neighbourhood nearly everyone operates a tunnel,' explains Al-Hajj Fadhel, whose four wives and numerous offspring live in a two-room house.

'We smuggle anything we can sell - everything except weapons,' he says proudly. 'Through these tunnels come chewing gum and biscuits for Palestinian children, plus nappies, chickpeas and tinned foods.'

The white-bearded Al-Hajj Fadhel, who despite his advanced years still occasionally uses the tunnels himself, has no moral objection to those he knows who do smuggle arms - but for him the risk is too high.

The Egyptian tunnel operators certainly find nothing wrong in smuggling in foodstuffs and household goods to their 'business partners' on the Palestinian side of the border.

'If (Egyptian President Hosny) Mubarak were to open the border to traffic, then this smuggling would stop immediately,' one of them points out.

A few days ago, more than 200 fridges were found in one tunnel. The alley where Fadhel lives reeks of petrol, although there is no visible sign of any petrol tanks or cannisters in the neighbourhood. The heavily-armed Egyptian security patrols are known to turn a blind eye to petrol smuggling.

Whilst the Egyptian smugglers may be angry that Israeli attacks have targeted and destroyed many of the tunnels used to smuggle weapons, it is out of the question that the entire network of highly- reinforced tunnels, greatly expanded after the election of the Islamist Hamas in Gaza in 2007, could be sealed off.

But with the arrival of the new US Special Envoy for the Middle East, George Mitchell, the Egyptian smugglers may anyway soon have to find a new source of income.

Mitchell, like his mentor US President Barack Obama, thinks that arms smuggling under control at the Gaza-Egypt border would be easier if the border crossing itself were reopened.

After all, it would then be obvious that the only things being transported by tunnel were ammunition, weapons and rocket parts, rather than nappies and tomato paste.

Then a small deployment of German experts, trained in border security, could be put to use.