January 23, 2008

Gazans Pour Into Egypt

UPDATED.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians entered Egypt today, after bombers destroyed a seven-mile stretch of wall separating the country from a Gaza Strip border town. Israel has been stopping the flow of supplies into the area in response to continued rocket attacks from militants, and many Palestinians in Rafah and other Gaza cities have gone without adequate food, electricity and medicine from Israel for five days.

The U.N. Security Council convened an emergency session yesterday, one day after Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "to express concern about the situation," Bloomberg News reports. The U.N. has been much more critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians than the U.S. or its Western allies.

About a million and a half Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, which is currently controlled by the militant group Hamas. Although Hamas didn't take responsibility for knocking down the wall, the group expressed tacit approval for its destruction by controlling traffic across the border and not making a move to prevent people from moving back and forth. Egypt had previously refused to open the Rafah crossing, but after the wall was destroyed, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said he had ordered the military not to stop the Palestinians immediately.

"I told them to let them come in and eat and buy food and then return them later as long as they were not carrying weapons," he told reporters in Cairo.

Gunmen began assaulting the metal wall before dawn this morning -- not long after Israel had begun re-supplying Gaza's power plant with fuel last night in an effort to avert a humanitarian crisis.

Posted at 12:24 PM
Posted to: Hamas, Israel, Middle East, Palestinians
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