Hamas and leftist groups are livid over reports that Egypt is constructing an underground steel wall to stymie attempts to dig smuggling tunnels into Gaza.
Hamas organized demonstrations of hundreds of people who gathered Monday on the northern side of Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, protesting the underground barrier and chanting slogans against what they call an Israeli "blockade" imposed more than two years ago. Several days ago, gunfire from the Gaza border was aimed at the Egyptian construction crews.
Several organizations of Arabs from the Palestinian Authority published a statement Wednesday attacking Egypt, accusing it of "strangling and starving" the Arabs of Gaza and building a wall "that serves the Israeli occupation." The statement calls upon the Arabs in the Palestinian Authority and outside it to take action against the "illegal, immoral and inhuman" wall.
Boycotts on Egypt?
Hamas leader in Damascus Khaled Mashaal called the wall "a new war against Gazans." In a statement on the Al-Quds satellite channel, Mashaal repeated claims by United Nations Relief and Works Agency Commissioner-General Karen Abu Zaid, who said that the wall was "more dangerous than the Bar-Lev Line" – a line of defensive military outposts that Israel built along the eastern coast of the Suez Canal after 1967.
Leftist groups have also threatened action against the underground wall. A group called the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza announced Wednesday that several activists intend to carry out protests in several European countries, in a demand to boycott goods imported from Egypt and stop tourism to Egypt.
There is divided opinion regarding the efficacy of the steel barrier in preventing smuggling through tunnels. Sources involved in running the tunnel network told Arab website Falastin Al-Yom that the tunnel diggers had already succeeded in cutting through the wall. Other experts said that the diggers could burrow beneath the wall with relative ease.