by Daily Sabah with Agencies
Sep 22, 2015 12:00 am
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said last year that he supported Egypt's crackdown on a lifeline for the Gaza Strip, several Arabic media outlets reported on Monday.
According to Al Jazeera, Abbas said, "We didn't miss a chance to urge the Egyptian regime to destroy the tunnels with Gaza, we provided them with maps and suggested projects, such as using water to destroy tunnels or building steel walls on the border lines."
The Egyptian army started flooding tunnels between the blockaded Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula last Friday using water from the Mediterranean Sea, Palestinian sources told Anadolu Agency. Subject to an airtight blockade by both Israel and Egypt since 2007, the Gaza Strip -home to some 1.9 million people - has come to rely on the border tunnels for the importing of food, fuel and medicine. "The Egyptian army started at 1 a.m. local time pumping water from the Mediterranean Sea using huge pipes," Abo Mohamed, a tunnel owner, told Anadolu Agency. Abo Mohamed, who refused to divulge his full name, added that Palestinian tunnels' owners attempted to save dozens of tunnels from collapsing using water suction pumps, but the pumps were not able to handle the large amounts of water being pumped.
Claiming that the tunnels are being used for militant activities, Egypt's military laid enormous pipes to flood tunnels with water after pumping water from the Mediterranean into reservoirs. The mechanism will result in inundating the tunnels with water without having to find their exact location, an anonymous Palestinian source told Anadolu Agency.
Meanwhile, Hamas is calling on Egypt to halt a project aimed at destroying the last remaining smuggling tunnels along the border. Hamas has said that the project further isolates the Gaza Strip, which has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since the militant group seized power in 2007. Hamas said Sunday the project "represents a great danger" to homes on the Palestinian side and to groundwater. Last week smugglers said a tunnel collapsed after it was flooded. There was no immediate comment from Egyptian officials.
The Egyptian plan would also make the underground water 40 times saltier, according to a report, suggesting that 90 percent of the water in Gaza is not drinkable. Reporters from Russia Today traveled to Gaza to confirm last year's report, where they found out that the water throughout the city is dirty, salty and 90 percent of it is undrinkable.
Since Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was ousted in a 2013 military coup, Egyptian authorities have ratcheted up their crackdown on Gaza's cross-border tunnel system, which, Egypt claims, is being used to support militant activity in the Sinai Peninsula. Last year, Egyptian authorities set up a "buffer zone" in the north Sinai city of Rafah following a spate of attacks on army and security forces.
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