RAFAH, EGYPT -- It began almost four months ago, a stealth operation in broad daylight to destroy the rusty iron wall that separated the Gaza Strip from neighbouring Egypt.
That act, the toppling of the border barrier, has not only sparked a two-day shopping spree by hordes of desperate Palestinians, it looks set to alter the power dynamic in this volatile corner of the Middle East.
But the man who oversaw the systematic effort to weaken the base of the wall says that while he and his fellow militants are proud of having given Gaza at least a temporary way around a punishing Israeli blockade, their work originally had a very different aim.
Abu Uday, a 23-year-old member of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, said in an interview yesterday that the initial reason they weakened the border fence was to ambush Israeli tanks if and when they ever moved to reoccupy southern Gaza. The plan changed this week, he said, only when Israel escalated its blockade of already impoverished Gaza, and Egypt refused to open the Rafah crossing itself, pushing residents toward desperation.
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Back in October, men from the al-Qassam Brigades, along with fighters from the loosely affiliated Popular Resistance Committees, began cutting through the base of the 11-kilometre-long metal wall using oxyacetylene cutting torches. Most of the work was done in daylight so that the sparks caused by the cutting would be less visible to the Israeli aircraft that patrol the sky, and the base of the wall was left intact at intervals so that it wouldn't fall down until the right moment.
"We did these things so that if Israel entered the Philadephi Corridor [a narrow stretch of no-man's land between Gaza and Egypt] it would be easy to enter and attack them," said Abu Uday, using a nom de guerre. Referred to by other participants as the brains of the border-busting operation, he was unarmed yesterday, but clutched a walkie-talkie and new Motorola mobile phone together in his right hand.
The plan changed on Tuesday, after Egyptian riot police used batons and water cannons to repel a group of Palestinian women who had marched on Rafah hoping to convince the Egyptians to open the crossing. Hours later, Abu Uday was among the group who placed 17 charges along the base, setting off predawn explosions that caused much of the wall to fall over neatly into Egypt.
"Our message to the world is that it's unacceptable to starve the Palestinian people. You can't do it, you can't destroy our nation," he said.
It's a declaration of defiance that has set the status quo in and around the Gaza Strip spinning. Israel, which initiated an economic blockade of Gaza last June after Hamas seized internal control of the strip, and escalated it last week in response to rocket fire targeting Israeli towns, suggested yesterday that it now considered Egypt, which controlled Gaza before 1967, responsible for providing for the territory's 1.5 million citizens.
"We need to understand that when Gaza is open to the other side we lose responsibility for it. So we want to disconnect from it," Israel's deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, told Army Radio. He said Israel wanted to "stop supplying electricity to them, stop supplying them with water and medicine, so that it would come from another place."
A spokesman for Egypt's Foreign Ministry said that the idea of Cairo taking responsibility for Gaza was "not serious." Although Israel pulled its soldiers and settlers out of Gaza in 2005, it still has responsibility for Gaza under international law because it continues to control the airspace and coastal waters. The United Nations still formally considers Gaza to be an Israeli-occupied territory.
But Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad said that Gazans were ready to sever ties with Israel and embrace greater ties with Egypt if Israel was ready to let Gaza go.
"We don't need Israel. If the border is open, we can bring anything in from Egypt," he said in an interview at his Gaza City office. "If Israel is really interested in staying out of Gaza, we want this too. We ask for it all the time."
Mr. Hamad also said that Hamas might accept a return of officials from the rival Fatah movement to provide security at the Rafah crossing, although he insisted that Hamas should also have a role. He expressed hope that Egypt might mediate between Hamas and Fatah, which have been violently at odds since the Hamas takeover of Gaza.
What happens next is unclear, although it looked last night as though Egypt was preparing to eventually reseal the border. Additional Egyptian riot police and armoured personnel carriers could be seen in the Rafah area, although the soldiers made no move yesterday to intervene as Palestinians continued to flood back and forth, stocking up on goods that have been scarce because of the blockade.
Egyptian police also established a line in the Sinai Peninsula to prevent Palestinians from travelling farther than the city of el-Arish, about 30 kilometres from the Gaza border, and Palestinians there were verbally told it was time to start heading home.
"I think tomorrow, maybe the day after, they will close the border," said Ahmad Abu Jamal, a 30-year-old Palestinian who had parked his Volvo truck at the border and was loading it full of bags of newly bought cement, something that Israel has prohibited from entering Gaza since last summer. "We have to buy these things while we can."
