Image Credit: White House photo.
Israeli Siege Temporarily Broken as Border Wall Breeched at Rafah
BBSNews 2008-01-23 -- Thousands of supply hungry Gazans with smiling faces streamed over the border today from Rafah in the Gaza Strip into Egypt to buy fuel, food and perishables in the first taste of freedom since the US approved Israeli siege on the troubled occupied land began. Israel and it's supporters are not amused but that mattered little to the stranded Gazans who finally had a taste of long denied freedom.
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Before the unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip, President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during a press conference in the Cross Hall of the White House on April 14, 2004.
Image Credit: White House photo. |
On Tuesday about 70 people were injured when Egypt turned back a huge crowd of mostly women by using water cannons and firing weapons over the heads of the crowd reported Gulf Daily News. But this morning after militants breeched the wall with explosive charges, a sea of boisterous and happy humanity teemed over the border snatching up every bit of basic sundries available in Egypt within six miles of the Gaza border.
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak parried the breech in the wall by proclaiming to reporters at the opening of the Cairo International Book Fair, saying he told border soldiers "I told them: 'Let them come in to eat and buy food', then they go back, as long as they are not carrying weapons."
The BBC reports that Egypt will not use force on Palestinians scrambling for food and much needed supplies "Egypt has said it will not use force to send back Palestinians who crossed from the Gaza Strip in large numbers after parts of the border were breached. Foreign ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said the border would be closed again when all the Palestinians had returned."
The wall was built by Israel in 2004 prior to its unilateral pullout in 2005. The pullout orchestrated by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was seen as a last gasp effort by Sharon to keep control of the huge settlements encompassing at least 40% of Palestinian land in the West Bank not including a huge network of roadways almost all exclusively for the use of Israeli settlers. Indeed, the move was underwritten by an exchange of "letters" from George W. Bush in 2004.
Appearing at a news conference at the time Bush said, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
Often Bush claims that he won't impose any conditions on the two sides but the infamous letter hangs in the air over every negotiation and it was seen as a cynical move then, and now, by the Arab world as simply a stop-gap measure to fix "facts on the ground" and predetermine the final borders of any possible Palestinian state.
The Times Online broke a story about Hamas and the wall breech saying that work had gone on for months preparing a large section of the metal border wall to be breached by cutting the kilometers long wall with oxy-acetylene torches. A Hamas border guard was asked if he reported the efforts at cutting the wall to the government and he said, "It was the government that was doing this. Who would I report it to?"
The ongoing siege of Gaza by Israel, with a nod from the United States, has been termed "collective punishment" by the European Union. Israeli's say the siege is intended to force Gaza civilians to rise up against Hamas to stop home made rockets that are fired haphazardly at Southern Israel, primarily near Sderot.
The rocket and mortar fire intensified after an Israeli infiltration raid by the Golani Brigade resulted in 19 dead Palestinians, three of them civilians and Hussam Zahar, son of Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar, the second of his sons to be killed in the long-running conflict, although Israel claimed he was not a focus of the raid. Hamas had refrained from firing any rockets themselves but after the raid, things changed drastically and there was unleashed many more than normal.
Many observers have recognized the obvious, no peace agreement will ever be viable without including both Gaza and the West Bank together, and Hamas and Fatah will have to paper over their differences. On Tuesday, Lebanon's Daily Star, no stranger to conflict with Israel, editorialized "What better incentive could Hamas and Fatah, the two main players in the Palestinian power struggle, have than Israel's depredations in both of their respective strongholds, Gaza and the West Bank (but especially the former), as an incentive to set aside their differences?"
Hamas should not squander their public relations coup, given that most of the world has now recognized the "collective punishment" of civilians in Gaza (except of course the US and Israel), and they should build on that by stopping all of the indiscriminate rocket fire against civilians in Israel.
By doing so, the onus will be on the Israelis to stop the incursions that they say are only because of rockets being indiscriminately fired into Israel.
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