Egypt’s soldiers permitted Gazans and Egyptians who had crossed into each other’s territory to go home but blocked crossings into Egypt by Palestinians and by Egyptians into Gaza.

The Palestinian Hamas movement helped to re-establish Egyptian control along the frontier on the understanding that its closure would be temporary while Egyptian officials found a way to re-open the border on a permanent basis.

Last Friday when Egyptian troops attempted to erect a fence along the 11 km frontier, Hamas activists made a fresh opening with a bulldozer to make the point that the border could be closed only with the aid of the Muslim resistance movement.

On January 23, militants destroyed the iron wall that Israel had built along the frontier allowing Palestinians to cross into Egypt to buy desperately needed supplies.

The wall and a fence constructed by Israel along the border between Gaza and Israel enabled Israel to blockade the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in the strip and to deny them electricity, water, food, and medications.
Cairo was able to close the final gate because it had concluded a deal with senior Hamas figure Mahmoud Zahar during talks with Egyptian officials last week.

e made it clear that there could be no restoration of the regime at the Rafah crossing whereby Palestinians were permitted by European and Israeli monitors to leave and enter Gaza. Rafah was closed at Israel’s insistence once Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip last June.

New border fence
Although Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak urged the immediate construction of a new border fence between Gaza and Egypt it is unlikely that Cairo can agree or that Hamas would permit this to happen.

Hamas favours joint Hamas-Palestinian Authority control over the Rafah terminal and the free flow of goods and people in both directions. Hamas also wants Egypt to provide electricity, foodstuffs, medications, building materials which have been supplied intermittently by Israel since it occupied the Strip in 1967.

Punitive blockade
Egypt cannot be seen to be helping Israel impose a punitive blockade on the Strip, depriving Palestinians of essentials with the aim of compelling them to overthrow the de facto Hamas government in power there.
Meanwhile a human rights agency reported that Israel killed 96 Palestinians during January. Seventy-one of the 87 who died in assassination operations in Gaza were civilians while three of the nine who were killed in the West Bank were civilians.