Good article, as always, by Robert Fisk in today's UK-based Independent newspaper, on the role of the tunnellers keeping a lifeline open for the besieged people of Gaza.
They are threatened with drowning by the Egyptians and punitively taxed by Hamas. Our correspondent meets the Palestinian smugglers bringing oranges, car batteries and bottle tops to a territory under siege.
They are the real resistance. They are the lung through which Gaza breathes. True, missiles must pass along their subterranean tracks, Qassam rockets, too, Kalashnikov ammunition, explosives. But by far the greatest burden of the tunnellers of Gaza is the very life-blood of this besieged little pseudo-Islamic statelet: fresh meat, oranges, chocolate, shirts, trousers, toys, cigarettes, wedding dresses, paper, entire motor-cars in four bits, car batteries, even plastic bottle tops. The tunnellers of Gaza are bombed by the Israelis, they die in their own collapsing tunnels – and now they face a new Egyptian wall, even the fear of drowning. Terrorists they may be to the Israelis – the promiscuous use of this word makes it fairly meaningless these days – but heroes they are to the Palestinians of Gaza. Rich ones, too, perhaps.
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