Witnesses said that six other workers managed to survive the collapse of one of the tunnels and found their way to the Egyptian side of the border.

Local media sources confirmed that the Hamas government in Gaza city made contacts with the Egyptian officials who confirmed the safety of the six workers.

Dozens of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were killed in repeated collapse incidents, while a number of them were killed by Israeli aerial attacks that targeted the tunnels area in Rafah city.

Since Hamas movement took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Israel imposed a crippling blockade on the territory and closed all the commercial border crossings into Gaza, which forced Palestinians there to dig a huge network of underground tunnels to bring goods from Egypt.

Several months ago, Egypt started to construct a steel wall along the Gaza-Egypt borderline in an attempt to curb smuggling operations along the border. In the same context, the Lebanese newspaper, Al-Akhbar, cites security sources as well as operators of underground smuggling tunnels as saying that the Egyptians have already completed extensive portions of the steel partition, and are being helped by the US and French security experts.

A security source said that over the past ten days, the Egyptians have begin building the partition west of Salah al-Deen Gate of the borderline where many of the smuggling tunnels are concentrated.