Just when I thought I’d seen every surprise the Middle East had to offer, I showed up on the Gaza/Egypt border.  To understand why this is such a surprise you need to remember that Israel said the war in Gaza had two goals: 1) To stop the rocket fire and 2) To stop the smuggling of rockets into the Gaza strip and close the tunnels through which they are smuggled from the Egyptian side.

So, I arrive at the border and find an entire community digging away like prospectors during the gold rush.  It was all out in the open. They were pulling broken wood out of the opening of tunnels. Diggers, most of them kids, were covered from head-to-toe with sand having done the labor of re-opening the tunnels Israel had just closed with 22 days of a withering air campaign.

One of the first I visited needed just a little patch up work and was back in the business of running goods underground from Egypt. I asked the owner of the tunnel if I could have a look at it he said, “Ahlan wa Sahlan,” welcome to everything.

The problem is that the entrance of the tunnel had been hit. It was about 90 feet down and the ladder was broken away in the middle. One of the little diggers offered to haul my camera and shoot pictures himself but I had a couple of problems with that: 1) He didn’t know how to shoot for TV and 2) I can’t keep a clear conscience and send some kid down to do the dangerous work while I sit up top and wait for the video.  So, down I went. It was really treacherous.  None of the steps on the ladder seemed like they were nailed in and secured very well.  When I got to the broken part, I shot my foot out to little nubs of wood on the opposite site of the chute and climbed like spider man keeping enough pressure to keep from falling.  The fall would have been accented by the exposed nails and broken wood on the way down with a final compliment of digging tools lying at the bottom.

I got down and there was the corridor in the sand. The only thing separating me from Egypt was the darkness of the tunnel and the knowledge that the ground above it had been softened for the past 3 weeks by Israeli air strikes.

The owners of the tunnels never admit they smuggle weapons. They will only tell you they smuggle food and basic necessities like fuel and clothes. But they are capitalists.  When a load shows up on the Egyptian side of the border, they don’t ask what’s in it.  They ask how much they can get to pull it through to Gaza.

For all of Israel’s effort and bloodshed, the smugglers are back in business.   I asked one of them what would it take to stop them from digging. He said, “We’ll stop when the borders open.”