Egyptian Denial - A Way of Life

I agree with Obama on one thing - aid to countries who are not friendly and too stupid to be friendly needs to be reevaluated.

These people are not like - men are from mars, Women are from Venus - they people are from another solar system.







Jan 26, 2009 3:02 Updated Jan 26, 2009 3:03

In Egypt's Rafah, tunnel denial is the way of life

By BRENDA GAZZAR, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT

Rafah, Egypt

All was quiet on the streets of this sleepy Sinai town on Saturday, just one week after Israel's three-week offensive against Hamas ended on the other side of the border.

Beduin in Egyptian galabiyas (caftans) and head coverings milled around the half-paved streets in small groups. Most shops were closed for the weekend and few customers were in sight.

Scores, if not hundreds, of armed soldiers and policemen were stationed at checkpoints all around the city, closely eyeing and checking cars that drove by.

But it is around here, practically underneath the feet of this rural border town, that the lucrative, underground world of smuggling into the Gaza Strip has flourished for the past several years.

It is hardly a secret that hundreds of tunnels were used to transport everything - livestock, fuel, home appliances, viagra, weapons and explosives - into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, which has faced a tight Israeli blockade for 18 months.

On Sunday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the cabinet there was a build-up of arms in Sinai destined for Hamas, and that Egypt was working to prevent their transfer.

One of the goals of Operation Cast Lead was to halt the smuggling through these tunnels.

Also on Sunday, a US official confirmed that a member of its defense attache's office in Cairo visited Egypt's border with Gaza on a routine and previously scheduled trip.

In Egyptian Rafah, one gets the sense that denial is more than just a river.

"The executive [security] forces are in complete control," insists Rafah Mayor Gen. Sameh Issa Abdul Wahab, who entered his post less than two months ago. "Any [tunnel] that is discovered, the authorities destroy it immediately."

Regarding the sensitive issue of weapons' smuggling, he said, "We have great control in completely preventing it... because if weapons were being smuggled, they would be discovered... All the smuggled items are medicine and food."

Abdul Wahab even denied that Egyptian border guards had ever been bribed.

"It's not possible that there would be a bribe," he said. "There is nothing like that; maybe between the smugglers themselves, but an official? No."

Yet Rafah's top city official also acknowledges the difficulty in locating the tunnels.
"You walked on the street. Did you see tunnels?" he asked a foreign visitor rhetorically.

When told that some were reportedly connected to people's homes, he responded: "It's not possible to enter your home, and open your door and damage it... What can we do?... Will we go to every house and try to enter it?"

Egypt claims that most of the weapons smuggled into Gaza come by sea, something that Israel disputes.

A front page article on Friday in Al-Ahram cited an Egyptian official who said there was evidence that most of the smuggling of weapons into Gaza was done through Israel by Israeli citizens. He did not detail the evidence, however.



[To read the rest of the article, click on the title link]

We should provide the city official with the photo of the Hamas member and his close friend - the sheep - IN A TUNNEL.

It is impossible to begin with the Egyptians.

If you cannot see the tunnels, there are not any. We need all the soldiers and police because the Bedouin are committing crimes.

If there are tunnels they are used to transport only food and medicine (which includes the sheep) BUT NOT weapons. Why not weapons? because Hamas wouldn't do that - they would only send in food and medicine. The weapons arrive in Gaza by sea, which is much harder and trickier but the medicine has to go via the tunnels that do not exist, because if weapons were sent in the tunnels then that means the weapons have to get to our city from somewhere and all the soldiers on the streets would see them. if they saw them, they would of course stop the vehicles carrying the crates of weapons and arrest the bad people, and because we have not arrested any bad people - they are not transporting weapons. Because if they were, that means the soldiers and police are abetting the illegal arms trafficking into Israel via tunnels that do not exist and the entire judicial and military system along the border would be in jeopardy - and that is just not the case.

Brilliant people. They deserve the logic award. And we should keep our $3 billion in aid, and use it for people who are worth our time.








Egyptian denial