Egyptian forces sealed the last breach in the border with the Gaza Strip on Sunday, stopping an influx of Palestinians into Egypt across a frontier blown open by Hamas Islamists defying an Israeli-led blockade.
It is closed. Go home, a militant from Hamas, which was cooperating with Egypt in holding back Palestinians wanting to leave Gaza, told the crowd gathered at the border. Many began to leave the area.
Egyptian forces used barbed wire and metal barricades to seal the only remaining gap on the Egyptian side of the frontier at Rafah, a town straddling the border.
An Egyptian officer said Gazans on the Egyptian side of the frontier and Egyptians who had been visiting the Gaza Strip would be allowed to return home.
Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip by force in June, has been under pressure from Egypt to stop the flow of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have crossed over since members of the group blew open the border on Jan 23.
Gazans flocked to the Egyptian side of Rafah to stock up on goods that were in short supply in the Gaza Strip after Israel tightened border restrictions in a declared bid to pressure Palestinian militants to halt rocket attacks.
The season is over. We came to buy cigarettes and resell them, but we were surprised when the gates were closed in our faces, Mohammed Al Masri, a Gaza resident, said on Sunday.
An Israeli defence official said it was too early to tell whether Egypt had managed to choke off the movement of people into its territory. He said that, in any case, weapons smuggling was continuing, through tunnels running into the Gaza Strip.
There is a difference between putting up some fencing in front of a bunch of TV crews and truly restoring a reliable barrier, the official said.
According to Israeli estimates, 100,000 Palestinians crossed from Gaza into (Egypt’s) Sinai (peninsula). We are not convinced that the 750 border police which Egypt deploys are enough to physically return those people, the official said.
The Rafah crossing, once controlled by the Palestinian Authority and overseen by European monitors, had been largely closed since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in fighting against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah group.
At the border on Sunday, Palestinian families reunited by the fall of the Rafah wall faced separation again.
This is not right, this is injustice, said Jamil Toman, a 63-year-old Palestinian and Cairo resident who had been visiting relatives in the Gaza Strip.
Toman left the Gaza Strip before the 1967 war in which Israel captured the territory, and has not been able to get an Israeli permit to return for the past 40 years.
After talks with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Saturday, leading Hamas official Mahmoud Al Zahar said the group will restore control over this border, in cooperation with Egypt, and gradually.
Egyptian security sources said hundreds of Egyptian security men had deployed along the border. A Hamas member at Rafah said it could take 48 hours to get the border back to normal.
Hamas has demanded a central role in controlling the border with Egypt. Talks in Cairo on Saturday between Khaled Meshaal, a Hamas leader who lives in exile, and Egyptian officials ended without a formal agreement on frontier arrangements.