{"id":14966,"date":"2012-12-17T16:24:59","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T23:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=14966"},"modified":"2012-12-17T16:24:59","modified_gmt":"2012-12-17T23:24:59","slug":"the-tunnels-of-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=14966","title":{"rendered":"The Tunnels of Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

The tunnels of Gaza are a lifeline of the underground economy but also a death trap. For many Palestinians, they have come to symbolize ingenuity and the dream of mobility.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Tunnels of Gaza<\/strong>
\nBy James Verini – National Geographic – December, 2012<\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note: As this issue went to press, the conflict in Gaza escalated. Hamas and other groups stepped up rocket fire on Israel, and the Israel Defense Forces launched an air and sea assault on Gaza, targeting the Hamas leadership and sites containing rockets and other weapons, along with civil government and media offices. Israel also extensively bombed the smuggling tunnels in Rafah.<\/p>\n

For as long as they worked in the smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip, Samir and his brother Yussef suspected they might one day die in them. When Yussef did die, on a cold night in 2011, his end came much as they\u2019d imagined it might, under a crushing hail of earth.<\/p>\n

It was about 9 p.m., and the brothers were on a night shift doing maintenance on the tunnel, which, like many of its kind\u2014and there are hundreds stretching between Gaza and Egypt\u2019s Sinai Peninsula\u2014was lethally shoddy in its construction. Nearly a hundred feet below Rafah, Gaza\u2019s southernmost city, Samir was working close to the entrance, while Yussef and two co-workers, Kareem and Khamis, were near the middle of the tunnel. They were trying to wedge a piece of plywood into the wall to shore it up when it began collapsing. Kareem pulled Khamis out of the way, as Yussef leaped in the other direction. For a moment the surge of soil and rocks stopped, and seeing that his friends were safe, Yussef yelled out to them, \u201cAlhamdulillah!\u2014Thank Allah!\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the tunnel gave way again, and Yussef disappeared.<\/p>\n

Samir heard the crashing sounds over the radio system. He took off into the tunnel, running at first and then, as the opening got narrower and lower, crawling. He had to fight not to faint as the air became clouded with dust. It was nearly pitch black when he finally found Kareem and Khamis digging furiously with their hands. So Samir started digging. The tunnel began collapsing again. A concrete-block pillar slashed Kareem\u2019s arm. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know what to do. We felt helpless,\u201d Samir told me.<\/p>\n

After three hours of digging, they uncovered a blue tracksuit pant leg. \u201cWe tried to keep Samir from seeing Yussef, but he refused to turn away,\u201d Khamis told me. Screaming and crying, Samir frantically tore the rocks off his brother. \u201cI was moving but unconscious,\u201d he said. Yussef\u2019s chest was swollen, his head fractured and bruised. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth. They dragged him to the entrance shaft on the Gazan side, strapped his limp body into a harness, and workers at the surface pulled him up. There wasn\u2019t room for Samir in the car that sped his brother to Rafah\u2019s only hospital, so he raced behind on a bicycle. \u201cI knew my brother was dead,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I was sitting with Samir, 26, in what passed for Yussef\u2019s funeral parlor, an unfinished-concrete room on the ground floor of the apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp where the brothers grew up. Outside, in a trash-strewn alley, was a canvas tent that shaded the many mourners who had come to pay their respects over the previous three days. The setting was a typical Gazan tableau: concrete-block walls pocked by gunfire and shrapnel from Israeli incursions and the bloodletting of local factions, children digging in the dirt with kitchen spoons, hand-cranked generators thrumming\u2014yet another Gaza power outage\u2014their diesel exhaust filling the air.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so scared,\u201d Samir said, referring to the day in 2008 when he joined Yussef to work in the tunnels. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to, but I had no choice.\u201d Thin, dressed in sweatpants, a brown sweater, dark socks, and open-toe sandals, Samir was nervous and fidgety. Like the others in the room, he was chain-smoking. \u201cYou can die at any moment,\u201d he said. Some of the tunnels Yussef and Samir worked in were properly maintained\u2014 well built, ventilated\u2014but many more were not. Tunnel collapses are frequent, as are explosions, air strikes, and fires. \u201cWe call it tariq al shahada ao tariq al mawt,\u201d Samir said\u2014\u201ca way to paradise or a way to death.\u201d …more<\/a><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The tunnels of Gaza are a lifeline of the underground economy but also a death trap. For many Palestinians, they have come to symbolize ingenuity and the dream of mobility. The Tunnels of Gaza By James Verini – National Geographic – December, 2012 Editor\u2019s note: As this issue went to press, the conflict in Gaza more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[3834],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14967,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14966\/revisions\/14967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}