The Wall Street Journal-20080126-Politics - Economics- Egypt Relaxes Clampdown at Border
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080126
Politics & Economics: Egypt Relaxes Clampdown at Border
RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- Despite a column of armored personnel carriers, bales of barbed wire and a human chain of riot police, Egypt on Friday had to ease efforts to seal its now wide-open border with the Gaza Strip.
The reason: A small group of militants from Hamas moved in with light weapons and a bulldozer, forcing police to stand down amid a sea of Palestinians seeking to return to a bazaar that has sprouted in the Sinai after months of deprivation.
The episode punctuated a week in which Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, repeatedly embarrassed the region's major powers after symbolically toppling a U.S.- and Israeli-led global siege imposed on Gaza, to the delight of thousands of Palestinians who flooded into Egypt.
To one degree or another, basic items have been blocked from import since Hamas seized control of Gaza last June by routing U.S.-backed forces loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. His political party, Fatah, had lost elections to the Islamists in 2006, but, with U.S. support, never yielded key power centers.
Gazans responded to their unexpected freedom this past week by buying up stocks of everything from potato chips to Chinese-grown garlic and locally produced cement, all of which are being shipped into the Sinai by Egyptian businessmen. Bedouin herders are even selling cows and sheep.
But Egypt, under U.S. and Israeli pressure to restore order, tried to clamp down Friday, as police deployed water cannons and clubs.
Several skirmishes erupted throughout the day, as Palestinian youths occasionally enraged the typically patient police by hurling stones across Egypt's side of the border, which is marked by a relatively short concrete barrier topped with barbed wire. Hamas plowed down sections of the Egyptian barrier Friday, witnesses said, after about a dozen gunmen, some of them masked, moved in. It was this episode that forced the Egyptians to relent, according to witnesses and Egyptian officials.
Egyptian authorities have said they won't fire on innocent Palestinians, with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak facing extraordinary domestic political pressure to help ease the plight of Palestinians.
Hamas forced his hand on the Gaza side of the border, using blowtorches, explosives and bulldozers to bring down swaths of a miles-long, 26-foot-high steel wall that was erected by Israel on Palestinian land before Israeli soldiers and settlers pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
The relative silence this past week from Jerusalem, Washington and the West Bank headquarters of Mr. Abbas, along with the continuing stream of thousands of Gazans into Egypt, illustrates the difficult new realities the Islamists imposed on the strategy of attempting to weaken them through international isolation.
It was also clear Friday that Israeli, American and Egyptian officials still hadn't figured out how they will respond to the latest crisis, which erupted Wednesday.
Even so, Mr. Mubarak, in an interview that was to be published Saturday, offered to host a dialogue between the Islamist group's leaders and the Fatah faction led by Mr. Abbas, according to Moustafa Bakri, an Egyptian newspaper editor who conducted the interview.
The U.S. and Israel have opposed efforts toward Palestinian reconciliation, instead choosing to shower Mr. Abbas with financial and diplomatic support in the West Bank in the hope that Palestinians will abandon the Islamists.
President Bush is pushing peace talks between Mr. Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Mr. Bush had said he was confident a peace agreement can be reached before he leaves office next year, even though control of the Palestinian territories is cleaved between the warring factions.
"The ones more or less dictating events now are Hamas," said Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
Israel refuses to talk to the militant group, saying it hasn't explicitly enough renounced violence, recognized Israel's right to exist or fully agreed to abide by previous peace accords.
While many Palestinians continued to celebrate the breach, it was also clear Friday that sections of Gaza lack crucial supplies. Dr. Abir al-Farra, who works in the intensive-care ward of Nasser Children's Hospital in Gaza City, said four premature babies died in her unit this past week, including one who needed blood-clotting agents that she didn't have.
---
Mariam Fam in Cairo contributed to this article.
