Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Wednesday he had given his security forces orders to let Palestinians in from Gaza to buy food and then go home.
”I told them: ‘Let them come in to eat and buy food’, then they go back, as long as they are not carrying weapons,” Mubarak told reporters at a Cairo book fair.
Mubarak’s remarks were the first indication from the Egyptian authorities on how they intend to handle the sudden influx of tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since about June last year.
”Those people are hungry for freedom, for food and for everything,” said an Egyptian shopkeeper who gave her name only as Hamida, as she surveyed shelves that had been emptied swiftly by Gazans paying with Egyptian pounds and Israeli shekels.
Residents of Rafah, a town straddling the Egypt-Gaza frontier, said militants set off explosions overnight that demolished about 200m of the now-rusting, six-metre-high metal dividing wall erected by Israel in 2004, a year before it pulled troops and settlers from the territory.
The fall of the Rafah wall was a new challenge to Israeli efforts to keep pressure on the Gaza Strip in the face of an international outcry over shortages in the territory Palestinians call a giant jail.
A border terminal in Rafah, once a main avenue to the outside world for Gazans, has been largely closed since Hamas Islamists opposed to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s peace efforts with Israel violently took over the Gaza Strip in June.
Egyptian riot police sent to reinforce the border mainly stood aside and let the Palestinians through, witnesses said, a day after they drove back Gazans who stormed the Rafah crossing.
”I have bought everything I need for the house for months. I have bought food, cigarettes and even two gallons of diesel for my car,” said Mohammed Saeed, who was pushing a trolley.
Israel, saying it hoped to curb militants’ rocket attacks, tightened its Gaza border closure last week, cutting fuel shipments to a main power plant and petrol stations and stopping aid that included food and other humanitarian supplies.
Balancing act
The flood of people into the Egyptian part of Rafah — some on donkey carts and carrying luggage to fill with consumer goods — also forced Israel into a delicate diplomatic balancing act with its first Arab peace partner.
”We expect the Egyptians will solve the problem,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said, steering clear of any criticism of the Jewish state’s southern neighbour, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.
Recent Israeli criticism of Egypt’s failure to curb weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip through tunnels running under Rafah drew angry words from Cairo, a key supporter of United States-spurred peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hossam Zaki said authorities planned to ”contain” the situation at Rafah and were holding inter-agency consultations.
”You have to deal with this situation very carefully with the usual understanding of the suffering of the Palestinian people, who have gone through a long ordeal,” he said.
Israel resumed fuel supplies to Gaza’s main power plant on Tuesday, offering limited respite from the blockade that had plunged much of the territory into darkness.
The European Union and international agencies have called the closure collective punishment on Gaza’s 1,5-million people.
”The bakeries are not working and there are difficulties in getting the things we need,” said a 42-year-old Gazan housewife who gave her name as Umm Raid and crossed the border with two of her children.
”I came to buy milk for my children and to get medicine for diabetes.”
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said Israel has no intention of causing a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, but it would deny Palestinians in the territory ”luxuries” as long as rocket attacks continued.
The Israeli army says about 250 rockets and mortars have pounded Israel since last week, amid an escalation of violence in which Israeli troops killed more than 30 Palestinians.
In new bloodshed, Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian farmer in the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical workers said. Militants frequently launch rockets from the area. – Reuters