[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: The sheer volume of traffic of material going
through the tunnels is such (e.g. visible on the Egyptian side) that if
Egypt wanted to stop the flow they could.]

Inside Gaza's secret smuggling tunnels, the underground route to riches - or
to death
With several tonnes of the world's most war-torn soil between us, the shouts
of the Palestinian smuggling gang at the top of the tunnel's 30-foot deep
shaft had become almost inaudible.

By Colin Freeman, in Gaza The Daily Telegraph (UK)
Last Updated: 5:37PM BST 27 Sep 2008
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/3089367/Inside-Gazas-secret-smuggling-tunnels-the-underground-route-to-riches---or-to-death.html
Colin Freeman takes a 'guided tour' of the smugglers tunnels between Egypt
and the Gaza Strip. ;

Not that their lead tunneller had whispered particularly encouraging words
as he lowered me down.

"The tunnels are very dangerous - they can easily collapse," smiled Ibrahim
Abu Sazzar, 23, whose small, wiry build is just right for digging the 300
yard long passageways underneath the sandy border from the Gaza to Egypt.

"One time a day a tunnel caved in on my body and I was stuck for an hour,
thinking I was about to die. But what can I do - I need the money to feed my
family."
Welcome, if that is the word, to Gaza's "Tunnel Town", where with every
perilous scoop of earth they dig, human moles like Mr Sazzar are quite
literally undermining Israel's economic blockade.

Imposed last year after Gaza fell under the control of the militant
Palestinian faction Hamas, the blockade was designed to make Hamas unpopular
with Gaza's 1.4 million residents by banning virtually all trade with the
outside world.

But deep beneath the watchtowers and fences of Gaza's 10-mile long border
with Egypt, a sprawling warren of hand-dug burrows now supplies everything
from food, petrol and designer jeans through to guns, drugs and black market
Marlboro cigarettes.

Tunnel gangs charge premiums of up to 150 per cent on their cargos, raking
in tens of thousands of dollars a week and making the excavation business
one of Gaza's few growth industries.

"We bring through laptops, clothes, computers, medicines, mobile phones and
even people," said Hisham al Loukh, 23, another tunneller. "There was even a
bride from Egypt who came through one recently to get married to a man in
Gaza."

The first tunnels underneath Gaza's perimeters were dug years ago, when they
were they were primarily to smuggle weapons and explosives for use against
Israel.
But it is during the blockade of the past year that the tunnellers'
hazardous craft has really come to the fore. On some estimates there are now
up to 500 passageways across to Egypt, mostly clustered around the town of
Rafah, which straddles the border.

The tunnels usually surface in the gardens of villas on the Egyptian side of
Rafah, where many residents are either sympathetic to the Palestinian cause
or willing to lend their properties in return for a share of the lucrative
profits.

Each member of a tunnelling gang, usually working in day and night shifts of
10 men each, earns around $15 per metre of passageway dug, which counts as a
decent wage in an area which currently has 80 per cent unemployment. But as
even the briefest of sojourns down into one of the tunnels makes clear, it
is a risky living.

Entering one requires perching precariously on a makeshift wooden chairlift,
which is then lowered down the 30 foot deep shaft by a winch powered by a
sputtering petrol generator.

As in the Second World War film classic The Great Escape, the tunnel's walls
are propped up with makeshift wooden planks, and equipped with ventilation
pumps to freshen the musty, damp air at the bottom.

Diggers then use small electric drills to carve a path through the thick
clay soil, steering their way by hand-held compass.

But otherwise, the engineering expertise has advanced little since the days
of Tom, Dick and Harry. Tunnel collapses have led to dozens of fatalaties -
so many that some local shops honour tunnellers in the same fashion as
"martyred" local militants, displaying pictures of them clutching spades and
drills rather than assault rifles.

The threat is not just from earthfalls. The Egyptian government, which has
traditionally turned a blind eye to the tunnels because of historic sympathy
for Gaza's Palestinian residents, is now under growing pressure from both
Israel and the US to shut them down, and in recent months Egyptian border
guards have started dynamiting any entrances that they discover.

"They also pump in water, poison gas, and even sewage," said Mr Sazzar. "But
they do not stop us. If part of one tunnel gets blocked, we just dig a new
branch in a different direction."

On the Gaza side, little effort is made to hide the tunnels, which lurk
under a network of tents and jerry-built shacks along the border.

Israel, which withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005, has occasionally sent
warplanes to bomb the passageways, but has not done so since striking a
cease-fire deal with Hamas three months ago.

Hamas itself used to impose strict controls on the tunnels' numbers, but has
allowed them to proliferate in recent months, mindful that too much economic
privation will dent its already wavering popularity with Gaza's impoverished
residents.

There are also rumours that Hamas rakes in millions of dollars by imposing
an unofficial "tax" on all tunnelled goods, although Dr Ahmed Yousef, a
senior advisor in Hamas's foreign ministry, denies such claims.

"The tunnels have become a necessity with everybody tightening the rope
around our necks," he said. "It is a safety valve to make goods available,
because we cannot get them from Israel."

Tunnel entrepreneurs are now enjoying such good business, however, that they
now have a vested interest in the status quo.

In recent months a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has raised hopes that
the economic blockade might be eased, but some in Gaza fear that should that
ever look like happening, local tunnel owners will sabotage it by paying
militants to fire rockets into Israel again.

Meanwhile, the list of tunnel "martyrs" continues to grow. The day after The
Sunday Telegraph visited, a neighbouring tunnel at Rafah collapsed, killing
three people and injuring five others.