Egypt floods Gaza tunnels, cut Palestinian lifeline

Up to 200 smuggling tunnels shut since Egyptian President Morsi took office; some 30% of all goods reach Gaza through tunnels.

Egyptian forces have flooded smuggling tunnels under the border with the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip in a campaign to shut them down, Egyptian and Palestinian officials said.

The network of tunnels is a vital lifeline for Gaza, bringing in an estimated 30 percent of all goods that reach the enclave and circumventing a blockade imposed by Israel for more than seven years.

Reuters reporters saw one tunnel being used to bring in cement and gravel suddenly fill with water on Sunday, sending workers rushing for safety. Locals said two other tunnels were likewise flooded, with Egyptians deliberately pumping in water.

"The Egyptians have opened the water to drown the tunnels," said Abu Ghassan, who supervises the work of 30 men at one tunnel some 200 meters (yards) from the border fence.

An Egyptian security official in the Sinai told Reuters the campaign started five days ago.

"We are using water to close the tunnels by raising water from one of the wells," he said, declining to be named.

Dozens of tunnels had been destroyed since last August following the killing of 16 Egyptian soldiers in a militant attack near the Gaza fence.

Cairo said some of the gunmen had crossed into Egypt via the tunnels - a charge denied by Palestinians - and ordered an immediate crackdown.

The move surprised and angered Gaza's rulers, the Islamist group Hamas, which had hoped for much better ties with Cairo following the election last year of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, an Islamist who is ideologically close to Hamas.

A Hamas official confirmed Egypt was again targeting the tunnels. He gave no further details and declined to speculate on the timing of the move, which started while Palestinian faction leaders met in Cairo to try to overcome deep divisions.

Hamas said on Monday the Egyptian-brokered talks, aimed at forging a unity government and healing the schism between politicians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, had gone badly but had not collapsed.

While Gaza's rulers have been reluctant to criticize Morsi in public, ordinary Gazans are slightly more vocal.

"Egyptian measures against tunnels have worsened since the election of Morsi. Our Hamas brothers thought he would open up Gaza. I guess they were wrong," said a tunnel owner, who identified himself only as Ayed, fearing reprisal.

"Perhaps 150 or 200 tunnels have been shut since the Sinai attack. This is the Morsi era," he added.

The tunnellers fear the water being pumped underground might collapse the passage ways, with possible disastrous consequences.

"Water can cause cracks in the wall and may cause the collapse of the tunnel. It may kill people," said Ahmed Al-Shaer, a tunnel worker whose cousin died a year ago when a tunnel caved in on him.

Six Palestinians died in January in tunnel implosions, raising the death toll amongst workers to 233 since 2007, according to Gazan human rights groups, including an estimated 20 who died in various Israeli air attacks on the border lands.

Israel imposed its blockade for what it called security reasons in 2007. The United Nations has appealed for it to be lifted.

At one stage an estimated 2,500-3,000 tunnels snaked their way under the desert fence but the network has shrunk markedly since 2010, when Israel eased some of the limits they imposed on imports into the coastal enclave.

All goods still have to be screened before entering Gaza and Israel says some restrictions must remain on items that could be used to make or to store weapons.

This ensures the tunnels are still active, particularly to bring in building materials. Hamas also prefers using the tunnels to smuggle in fuel, thereby avoiding custom dues that are payable on oil crossing via Israel.

Ummmm...so stay out of the tunnels?

Once upon a time, my little sonny, the faux-"Palestinian" people had a very nice living doing jobs Israelis didn't want to do. These workers had jobs, had money coming in, had a regular life. Then, the average worker discovered that the leaders they had voted in (who, incidentally, were VERY rich by stealing money given in good faith from my pocket) were sending trained killers into Israel to blow up schoolchildren in pizza parlors. And then, the then-wise rulers of Israel said, "Well, fine. We're closing the borders for our own safety, and we will let Israelis earn a nice living instead."

And then,Achmed, Mohammed, and his million brothers screamed "LOOK AT WHAT A HORRIBLE THING THE PIG_DOG JOOOOOOOOOOOSE DID!"

Dumbass, it is your own damn fault you are squatting in the dust, hungry, poor, and stupid. Here in America, even with an idiot in charge, we are still about a billion times richer than you will ever be, because we spend LESS of our time ranting about who killed whose great-great-great grandfather.

Let me tell you about MY God. America was founded, despite what the Liberals long to believe, as a Christian nation, a “city on the hill” for the world. It was based on freedoms that had never existed in a society before, of personal liberty and prosperity, of freedoms of speech and association. Our Founders decided to TOLERATE, that is, not destroy but not respect, all manner of foreign, pagan and silly philosophical nonsense, on the basis that here you had the right to live your own life as long as you didn’t go out of your way to be a jackass or hurt anybody. Because God planted us and we watered the soil with self-sacrifice, America stopped the Kaiser, Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, Stalin, and before long YOU from taking over the world.

HERE IN AMERICA…our scientists split the atom, cured most disease, invented air conditioning, created penicillin, built dams and powerplants to light the night and keep us warm at night in the winter, and cool in the summer. The poorest of our poor are fat. Heck, we are so rich that most of us can eat for entertainment. Seriously, we don’t settle down to a bowl of soggy rice for dinner, we decide where to make reservations. We invented TV and the internet. In a hundred years, we went from horseback riding to walking on the moon. Our farmers, guided by science, feed the world. (Well, when crazy-eyed maniac Muslim warlords aren’t busy starving their own people by stealing the food we send for free, at least.) We have, for now, the best healthcare on the planet. We don’t have to worry, generally, about somebody else being in charge of the country when we go to sleep at night, and if we don’t like whose in charge, we get to send them packing every four years, peacefully. Well, unless they lie so well that idiots vote them back in...for a while.

HERE IN AMERICA…we only have arguments that go back about two hundred and forty years, max. The reason we are rich beyond all imagining, aside from the fact that at one time we actually listened to our loving God and praised him, is that we don’t waste our time killing each other over who killed whose great-great-great-great grandfather. We have better things to do than hate each other for a living, and spend our lives trying to actually make, produce, sell, or invent something. A Japanese kamikaze killed my uncle in WWII, and today, I buy electronics from them, no problem. The English turned my Irish ancestors off their lands, and today, I laugh at their Britcoms. Hatred is an ingestive poison, and nothing good comes of it. Move on.

HERE IN AMERICA…We have stood at the edge of today, and decided, hey, let’s invent tomorrow rather than live in yesterday. We may all not be brothers, but we try not to waste our time killing each other. Thanks to the Christian God and the love he teaches, we are all mostly too fat, we all mostly have at least one car, we have a longer lifespan than you, and I am hugging my kids at night, rather than using them to blow up complete strangers because some idiot madman Mullah told me to. We invented computers, airplanes, rockets, and incidentally, you might want to consider that in light of what hitting something with a shoe means in your culture, our astronauts WALKED ALL OVER the symbol of your religion forty years ago.

IN MUSLIM LAND…you have a million low-level religious Imans who may, at any time, radically change their minds on what Allah wants according to their own whims and desires. (“Allah says pancakes are a sin, your whole family dies!”) or several high-level religious madmen who are more concerned with killing the JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE than you having food in your belly that they WILL blow up your kids to somehow hurt the infidels, and tell you to be proud. And where we would laugh at a pastor who would suggest that our deity demanded silly things, you nod your heads and believe them!

IN MUSLIM LAND…The last thing of value you invented was the Zero, and that was a thousand years ago, and you may have lifted that from someone else. You export only terror and death, and have done very little creative in the meantime. I know of no Muslim science awards in that time. You treat your women like cattle; no, actually worse than cattle, and yet assume that they are of such value that you would kill someone for seeing their bare ankle. You would also kill your wives or daughters for the same “crime”. At one time or another, some of your leaders killed people for whistling, or kite-flying.

WHAT WE LEARNED…Having done almost nothing but kill for a thousand years, you have the arrogant gall to think that if you didn’t, by accident, own most of the worlds oil, we would even care about you. Pal, if you didn’t, we would have turned Mecca into green glass on 911. You attacked us in outrage over America disrespecting your “god” and you…what chumps. Pal, before 911, America didn’t even care enough about you to have an opinion. Over here, we figure, if you don’t kill people for your faith, hey, do whatever you want. Muslims? Aren’t they the guys who run the convenience stores and smoke a lot? We knew nothing about you and didn’t care one way or another. But on 911, you really did show us! Now, almost all of us know that you are wild-eyed madmen who hate life, kill their own kids, beat their wives, and are really dangerous morons trying to live in yesterday but sharp enough to use our technology and freedoms against us.

On 911, we learned that your own “holy” book says you can lie to us, then you whine about us not believing you when you say you are oppressed. We learned that your own “holy” book says you can kill us, or enslave us. We learned that your twenty supposedly holy warriors went to strip clubs and drank the night before they killed 3000 innocent Americans whose only crime was going to work in the morning. We learned that in a thousand years of time you’ve done hardly anything at all but kill each other and those around you, and that you are somehow magically cheesed off that the rest of the world thinks that for this, you are little better than animals.

But the subject was Allah, wasn’t it. Well, to wrap up…We are supposed to be a Christian nation, and we were more of one once. But even today we eat well, we sleep well, when we choose to we order the world around, we are prosperous, and I will hug my kids and put them to bed tonight rather than send them out to be bomb carriers. You guys? Allah does so much for you…keeps you hungry, hits you with Tsunamis, earthquakes, wars against your own Arab brothers, insane leaders like Saddam feed you into plastic shredders, crazy Imams tell you how to live every aspect of your life, and nutballs like Mr. Dinnerjacket spend more of your money to threaten the Jews than to help your life in any way. Your own royalty won’t share any of the money with you, but tell you those evil Americans are hurting you. In the imaginary “Palestinian lands” you had a succession of leaders who took all of the money the world gave you and put it away in their own Swiss accounts, and told you those evil Americans were hurting you. You KNOW the world is laughing at you, and rather than invent something or work hard to feed your families, all you have left, all you can come up with is to try and make the world fear you. And above it all, you’re cowed into submission, respecting your crazy leaders, because they tell you “Allah” says kill the infidels.

From an outside perspective, the REALLY worst thing the world can say about you is you are the most gullible SOB’s in the history of eternity. You are left with three possible conclusions…

1) ALLAH ISN’T THERE because if he were, your lives would assumedly be far more nice.

2) ALLAH IS THERE, BUT REALLY DOESN’T CARE FOR YOU MUCH because, seriously, what a cruel beggar. He asks everything of you, even your children, and he can’t even manage to see that you eat well or have nice houses, or good medical care. You would think that the next tsunami would splatter Jerusalem and leave your guys untouched, but no…they always seem to smash Muslim villages.

3) ALLAH IS A POWERLESS LITTLE NOTHING because for all the times that you guys get offended, and I mean, really, you go jihad if somebody blinks funny, Allah can’t manage to do anything on his own. I mean, really, your WORST successful hit used aircraft...and it sure wasn't Allah doing squat on his own.

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