By Reena Ninan, Middle East correspondent

I could never be a good smuggler.

I once tried to smuggle ten souvenir lighters on a flight from Baghdad to Amman.

The lighters had a picture of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein with an F-16 above their heads.  I bought them at Baghdad airport.  Airport security yelled at the man who sold them to me and forced him to return my money.  He did.  I gave back most of the lighters but was allowed to keep two.

Smuggling is a profitable business–especially in Gaza.  But it’s not lighters they’re after.

This week Hamas’s Gaza spokesman Ayman Taha was busted trying to carry $11 million in cash ($9 million in U.S. dollars and $2 million in euros) through the Rafah crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border. Taha was coming back to Gaza after ceasefire talks in Egypt.  But before those talks, he made a stop in Tehran along with Hamas’s leader Khaled Meshaal, who is based in Syria.  Gazans believe he picked up the money in Iran.

It’s not the first time Hamas leaders have tried this route. When the Islamists took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, the international community launched an economic boycott.  Hamas Leader Mahmoud Zahar travelled to several countries, including Iran and Indonesia.  He successfully brought back bags of cash via Egypt–$35 million worth.

If it worked back then, why not now?

To start, Egypt appears to be making a more serious effort to crack down on the smuggling. So why not use the underground tunnels–the same tunnels that are also used to bring in rockets?

Maybe it’s become harder to do after Israel bombed hundreds of tunnels recently.  Or perhaps Hamas wanted to see if the Egyptians would really follow through on their pledges to patrol the border.

Either way, with $2 billion dollars in estimated reconstruction costs for Gaza, the Islamists will need to find some way to get fresh funds in if they expect to maintain their grip on power.