Egypt prepares to destroy 1,200 homes for Rafah border zone
Published today (updated) 27/12/2014 15:17
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=749939

CAIRO (Ma'an) -- An Egyptian committee has finished surveying the homes of
individuals living between 500-1,000 meters of the Gaza border in
preparation for the extension of a buffer zone on the border to a width of
1,000 meters, Egyptian military sources said Friday.

The move comes after the destruction of hundreds of homes inside the
500-meter area previously, as part of a wider effort to ensure that the
joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip be fully carried out.

The technical engineering committee that carried out the survey examined
around 1,200 homes in the area in preparation for their demolition in the
13-kilometer long stretch of border territory.

Work on the buffer zone on the Egyptian side began in Feb. 2014, but was at
the time slated to extend only about 300 meters in urban areas and 500 in
rural areas.

After a bombing killed more than 30 Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai in
October, however, the military stepped up the campaign to build the buffer
zone amid accusations of Hamas support for the group that carried out the
attack, which Hamas has strenuously denied.

Both sides of the border are densely populated as the city of Rafah
originally extended in both directions, a growth that was the result of the
Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula for more than a decade following
the 1967 war.

In the early 2000s Israeli authorities demolished thousands of homes in
Palestinian Rafah in order to create a 300-meter buffer zone on the Egypt
border, but after the pull-out in 2005, many moved back into the area.

The Egyptian government, which has actively destroyed smuggling tunnels
underneath the border and directly targeted Hamas since a military coup in
summer 2013, has now promised to uproot as many as possible to ensure the
creation of a buffer zone on its side.

The border area used to be host to hundreds of tunnels which Gazans used to
import goods to get around the seven-year-old Israeli siege of the
territory.
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