Egypt has placed its forces on the Gaza border on high alert, suspecting that Gaza Arabs will once again overrun the border. More than 2,000 Arabs in Hamas-run Gaza held May Day demonstrations on Saturday, protesting both Israel’s and Egypt’s tight border crossings. The protests were held near the Erez crossing with Israel and the Rafiah border with Egypt.
In January 2008, hundreds of thousands of Arabs in Gaza – between 200,000 and 700,000, according to various reports – overran the Rafiah border with Egypt, after having destroying the border fence.
Resentment at Egypt
Though Israel has received much of the blame in the international media for Gaza’s partially-closed borders, local Arabs are very resentful and angry at Egypt for the lockdown and for its use of poison gas against tunnel smugglers.
Four Gaza Arab smugglers were killed last week when Egypt gassed a tunnel under the Rafiah border. Adham Abu Salaimeh, spokesman for the Gaza military health services, said that Egypt continually violates international law by using lethal gas among citizens. “This is murder in every sense,” he told the PA’s Maan news agency. Nearly 40 smugglers have been killed in this manner, he said. More than 100 have died in the tunnels from other causes, mainly tunnel collapses.
Hamas, which conquered Gaza from Fatah in 2007, issued a statement urging Arab and Islamic nations to pressure Egypt to reopen the Rafiah crossing.
Demonstrators waved red, green and black Palestinian Authority flags near Erez, in northern Gaza, in response to a call from the DFLP and other leftist factions, while a smaller-scale sit-in was held at Rafiah. "We call on the world to stop the siege of Gaza," said Ramzi Rabah, a protest organizer with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Rocket Industry and Employment
A careful reading of international media reports concentrating on poverty in Gaza indicates that the dependence on the rocket-making industry is a strong factor in this issue. A Shanghai site, for instance, reports on an unemployed man named “Abu Nahel” who worked in a workshop until “Israeli warplane missiles targeted these workshops, claiming that they helped militants in making homemade rockets that they fired at southern Israel.” Some 23 people have been killed by such rockets.
During the year between June 2007 and June 2008, Hamas constantly fired rockets at Israel; more than 30 were fired on some days, and 18 Israelis were killed. A total of some 8,000 rockets fell on Israel between Israel’s retreat from Gaza in the summer of 2005 and December 2008. Israel left Gaza in 2006, expelling some 8000 Jews from their homes to do so. |The subsequent Gazan elections which led to Hamas' government and the increased rocket fire led to closing of the crossings to Israel. Israel does allow massive amounts of humanitarian aid through the crossings.
