GAZA: A Palestinian youth was killed and two others were injured on Friday in a tunnel collapse under the Gaza-Egypt border, witnesses and medical sources said on Friday.
Medical sources at Abu Yosef Al-Najar hospital told Arab News that the tunnel collapsed when local worker Bassam Mobarak, a 21-year-old from Al-Nussirat refugee camp, was entering the tunnel to start work. His body was brought to the hospital after it was retrieved from under the rubble of the tunnel that collapsed in Al-Barazil neighborhood of Rafah. Two other workers were wounded in the incident.
Residents in the area said the tunnel collapsed as a result of being damaged after the heavy bombardment of Israeli warplanes that targeted the same area three days earlier with three missiles, destroying three other tunnels.
Israel imposed a strict blockade on the impoverished Palestinian ghetto immediately after Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007. Since then Gazans have dug hundreds of tunnels under the border between Gaza and Egypt to smuggle the products and basic foodstuff needed in the enclave where 1.4 million people live. Israel says these tunnels are also being used to funnel weapons used in rocket attacks by militants and periodically bombs areas where the tunnels have been placed.
Gaza-based human rights groups said that 122 local workers have been killed and 560 others injured during the past two years as a result of the periodic bombings in the highly populated areas to destroy these tunnels.
Meanwhile, Israel on Friday closed all crossing points into Gaza, marking the third week of an increased Israeli cordon off the Gaza Strip, causing shortages of fuel and basic goods and increasing use of the tunnels. The Nahal Oz crossing where goods and relief can be brought into the Gaza Strip was only opened twice for short periods of time in the past week.
