Underground lifelines used by residents of the town of Rafah are being flooded by Egypt, worsening existing isolation.
© Reuters
Palestinian children played in water after Egyptian forces flooded the tunnels dug beneath the Gaza-Egypt border.
Seventy-three year old Mansura Abu Shaar was more than happy to talk to strangers. People rarely came this far, she told us, and it seemed to her that very few of those that did, cared enough to ask how they were doing. "Not well at all," she said needing little prodding. "Not well at all."
Mansura was clearly exhausted from having stayed up the night before. Fearful for her family, she sat outside her makeshift house just a few hundred metres from the border between Gaza and Egypt, on guard until dawn. "We're used to the guns and the rockets and the explosions," she said. "But now - water?"
Her voice trembled, and tears began to pool in her eyes. "This is our life," she said hopelessly. "We are so, so tired." Mansura lives in Rafah, the town divided between Gaza and Egypt by international political agreements in the 1980s. With Israel the only other way in or out, Gazans saw the border with fellow-Arab Egypt as the "friendly" alternative.
It was a pressure valve when all else around them seemed to be closing in. But the "friendly border" closed when Hamas took control of the government in Gaza in 2007. At least in theory. Underground, an entire network of smuggling tunnels was fully operational. As it had been for years, allegedly with Egyptian border guards looking the other way.
Comment: This refugee crises in Europe is spiraling out of control.