Egypt Floods Gaza's Smuggling Tunnels
Egypt's decision to flood some of Gaza's tunnels last week caught local Palestinians by surprise, Abeer Ayyoub reports.
Business was quiet at the smuggling tunnels in the al-Salam neighborhood, which straddles Gaza’s border with Egypt, unlike other border areas where bulldozers and young workers loaded construction materials and food products onto trucks.
For two weeks, Egyptian security forces have been flooding dozens of tunnels in al-Salam with waste water. Palestinians fear this will turn into a systematic crackdown that will continue in other neighborhoods and paralyze the tunnel business.
Abu Ahmed, 31, who worked as laborer before turning to smuggling, said that the tunnel where he works was pumped with waste water from the Egyptian side two weeks ago.
Abu Ahmed works as a shift supervisor for a gravel tunnel, where he supervises 18 employees who pull out the gravel in baskets and pile them in a deep, wide hole next to the tunnel's exit shaft. A bulldozer later loads the stones onto trucks.
