This wasn’t my first time in the Gaza smuggling tunnels. Back when the Fatah led Palestinian Authority still controlled the Gaza strip, the police (controlled by Fatah) made an effort to combat the smuggling. So, I had a chance to explore a tunnel after it had been discovered and shut down.

That was more than a year ago. This time, I got into a tunnel that was still active. Smuggling has become a cottage industry on the Gaza/Egypt border. Two factors are causing the business to boom: 1) Hamas benefits from the smuggling and therefore does not stop it. 2) Since Israel has sealed the borders around the Gaza strip, people there need everything from bullets to bandages and boots and the smugglers deliver.

Contacts led me into what looked like a tent city in the no-man’s land on the border with Egypt. Once, inside I realized that each of the tents concealed the entrance to a tunnel. The top of the tunnel looked like a water well. Sandbags at the top kept the sand from eroding and collapsing the entrance to the tunnel. A metal structure held a pulley over the center of the hole. A thin steel cable ran through the pulley. One end was attached to an electric winch. The other hooked to a makeshift boson’s chair in which I sat then swung out over the tunnel. There was a light at the bottom allowing me to see 90 feet down into the desert. The splintered steel cable didn’t give me much confidence but I was committed at that point. A man with a Palestinian kafiyeh wrapped around his face hit the button on the electric winch, and down I went into the smugglers’ workspace. I sent the chair back up and cameraman Chris Jackson joined me.

With no one stopping the smuggling efforts, the tunnels have improved. They are big enough now that you can walk in them crouched over. They have electricity and lighting. There is a telephone and electric winch at each end of the tunnel. Instead of hauling goods across by hand, the smugglers just phone their collegues on the Egyptian side. They hook plastic barrels to the cables load the goods in them, hit the switch and the winches pull the goods under the border. This eliminates the risk of losing people in a tunnel collapse and speeds up the operation.

The smugglers themselves had a very mater-of-fact attitude. They didn’t see themselves as soldiers in the fight against Israel. They are just freelancers making a buck. Someone wants weapons, they’ll haul weapons. Someone wants diesel they’ll haul that as long as someone is paying. The way one of the smugglers put it to me, “There are no jobs on the ground. We have one choice; working in the tunnel to provide people with their needs and to make money.”

They are a complicating factor in the brutal politics of the Gaza strip. Israeli intelligence told Fox News, the smugglers haul tons of weapons, hundreds of thousands of bullets, thousands of guns, rocket propelled grenades and anti-tank rockets. Remember when President Bush was in

Israel a couple of weeks ago and the Popular Resistance Commitee fired a rocket out of Gaza that reached all the way to the Israeli town of Ashkelon? That was a medium-range rocket smuggled through these tunnels.

While Egypt attempts to mediate a cease-fire for the Gaza strip, Israel is demanding that something be done to combat the smugglers. But the smugglers don’t care. I asked one of them what he would do if his tunnel was discovered and destroyed. He said, “I’d dig another.” He then hooked a plastic barrel to the winch cable; ready to be hauled under the border.