On September 20, 2020, the sea of Gaza was calm, visibility was perfect, and the sun was beating down on the beaches like in August. In the previous days, the very rough sea had stopped the Palestinian fishermen, who with makeshift, patched-up boats could not risk setting sail in adverse conditions.
It was necessary to wait for the right day and move cautiously in a strip of sea a few kilometers offshore. No further. Further away, Israeli warships are moored, blocking free navigation and the entry of aid, supplies, food and water in an embargo that has lasted since 2007.
As on sea so on land
But the Israeli ships that grip the waters of Gaza are not the only ones that guarantee the embargo. The Egyptian Navy is also involved in patrolling, scrupulously scanning the waters and ensuring that Palestinian fishermen do not cross the maritime border with Egypt. On September 20, Yaser and Hasan Zaghzu set sail with their boat, purchased a few weeks earlier, to collect the day’s fish to resell in the afternoon at the Gaza City market. During the voyage, they entered a few hundred meters into Egyptian waters, at a point where the water is deeper, at the height of the Rafah beach, on the Egyptian side of the border, where, unlike Gaza, fish are abundant.
In an instant, Egyptian soldiers open fire on the vessel. Hasan dies instantly while Yaser ends up in the water wounded among the wreckage of his destroyed boat. Recovered by the Cairo Navy, Yaser and his brother’s body are expelled that day beyond the dividing wall, into the Gaza Strip.
In addition to the sea wall, in fact, there is another wall, made of reinforced concrete, six meters high with barbed wire, guarded by Egyptian soldiers. It is the hermetic barrier that separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt: The Egyptian wall.
A “smart” fence
A first wall was built in 2007 by the authorities in Cairo, after Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian political elections and the subsequent coup in Gaza. The first fence extended from the Rafah border southwards to the Israeli crossing of Kerem Shalom. The second part of the wall, the northern one, was built starting in January 2008, starting from the Rafah crossing to the sea in the north, at the height of the Palestinian town of Tel al-Sultan and ending up at Qarya al-Suwaydya for a total extension of 12 kilometres along the entire Egyptian border with the Strip. President Hosni Mubarak gave the green light to the construction of the separation wall as part of a broader agreement with the Israeli authorities to impose a tight embargo on Gaza in order to put pressure on Hamas to force it to hand over government of the Strip to the Fatah party, present in the West Bank, whose security forces control the territory in close collaboration with Israel. In 2019, the Tel Aviv authorities also began massive construction work on fences and walls separating Gaza from Israel, which were completed in 2022.
It is the “smart” wall: equipped with sensors, radar and cameras, it extends for 65 kilometers around the entire Strip and reaches up to 10 meters in height and six meters underground. It is the same one that will be overcome on October 7 during the Hamas attacks against Israeli settlements.
Since the start of the Gaza blockade in 2007, everything that enters the Gaza Strip through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings is rationed out: basic necessities, gasoline, building materials. According to Francesca Albanese, a jurist and rapporteur for the United Nations for the Palestinian Territories, the Israeli authorities have calculated a specific minimum caloric requirement for each Palestinian based on sex and age as part of an unprecedented operation to register the population of Gaza. The grid of basic necessities that enter the Strip is functional to strict survival and it is on the basis of this calculation that the crossings are opened or closed in collaboration with Cairo.
The Cairo “thermometer”
But the Egyptian separation wall with the Gaza Strip was not always so impenetrable. Mubarak, who adopted a pragmatic policy, aimed at maintaining a privileged relationship with Israel but at the same time having a central role in mediating with Hamas, often allowed the clandestine construction of tunnels under the wall between Egypt and Gaza through which food, basic necessities and even weapons passed.
The flooding of the tunnels by the Egyptian authorities or their allowing them to be built represented in real time the state of diplomatic relations, the thermometer of relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv and at the same time between the Egyptian government and Hamas.
The peak of tunnel development was reached between 2012 and 2013 under the government of Mohamed Morsi, while since 2013 most of these tunnels have been flooded with the arrival to power of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who introduced unprecedented restrictive measures in an attempt to isolate Gaza.
Then, with the outbreak of the ongoing conflict in Gaza, in February 2024 the Egyptian government built a second, parallel and more internal wall to make escape even more complex and potentially fatal, adding watchtowers, cameras and increased armed surveillance by land and sea.
In the hands of traffickers
In the shadow of the wall, between 2012 and 2014, a dense network of traffickers had formed: military, smugglers, small-time criminals who in exchange for money allowed the passage through the tunnels of goods, food, weapons and drugs. Among these, the main boss is Ibrahim al-Organi, who later became an entrepreneur close to General Al-Sisi, who for years managed the trafficking under the wall, sharing bribes with the border guards.
With the flooding of the tunnels by the Egyptian authorities, trafficking has risen to the surface again, concentrating on the Rafah crossing, a multi-million dollar business for the Organi Group which manages access on behalf of the Egyptian government, also taxing humanitarian aid entering Gaza. A straight line divides the city of Rafah: the western part is under Egyptian territory while the eastern part falls within the Gaza Strip.
In 2014, to discourage the creation of new tunnels, General Al-Sisi ordered the demolition of thousands of homes in the western part of Rafah, on the border with the Gaza Strip. Since then, according to Human Rights Watch, Egyptian security forces and the army have systematically destroyed thousands of private homes, shops and schools without any plausible justification, forcibly displacing hundreds of families and arresting those who opposed the measures to seize and demolish buildings. According to the NGO, this is a clear violation of human rights. The hypothesis is that in order to hermetically seal off the Strip from the outside, the Cairo government wanted to create a buffer zone, emptied of its inhabitants in order to better control the border areas where the military has built checkpoints, bases and observation posts useful for monitoring any suspicious movement.
Open-air prison
Since 2007, there is no certain data on how many people have lost their lives trying to cross the Egyptian land and sea wall to escape from Gaza. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, from 2014 to today, there would be about a hundred victims among fishermen and refugees who by sea and by land have attempted to cross the border with Egypt.
Since the outbreak of the war, pressure on the border has increased, with incidents now the order of the day. Last May, the Egyptian military intercepted a displaced person who had managed to cross the separation wall. Captured, he was beaten and pushed beyond the concrete barrier. A month earlier, in April, a young Palestinian camped in Rafah and with mental problems crossed the border by sea, swimming. After reaching the Egyptian beaches, naked and in a state of shock, he was shot dead by border guards who, after killing him, threw his body in a bag and threw it over the crossing, into the Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of the war, along the entire border, thanks to constant Israeli bombing, a huge tent city has been created that houses more than a million displaced people in makeshift shelters in the shadow of the wall, among rubble, garbage, and hunger. Some resist, others try to escape towards Egypt, in the hope of making it.
All the Palestinian Territories have been hit from 2000 to today by an uninterrupted flow of concrete that has locked millions of people inside walls and fences condemning them to poverty, hunger, drugs and death. In the West Bank the Israeli wall splits Jerusalem in two creating apartheid with discriminatory policies that oppress Palestinian citizens in favor of Israeli ones: dividing them into first-class and second-class citizens.
In Gaza, about 2 million people live under the shadow of high walls waiting to die of starvation or under Israeli bombing. Fleeing to Egypt instead means facing certain death under military fire.
The Palestinian people, living inside an open-air prison, yearn for freedom. The freedom to move without fear of a drone or a checkpoint. The freedom to work, to study, to play. The freedom to live, no longer in the shadow of a wall, but in the light of the sun. Who knows if one day there will ever be a November 10, 1989 for the Palestinians too.
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