GAZA

One useful place to mull Israel’s siege of Gaza is from inside an 800-foot-long smugglers’ tunnel burrowing under the Egyptian border.

The tunnel, well ventilated and well lit with wooden supports, is big enough to walk along with a wheelbarrow full of contraband. But it’s more mechanized than that. A crew on the Egyptian side loads a large gurney with bags of cement, totaling one ton, and then an electric winch tows the gurney by cable through the tunnel to the outlet on the Gaza side. Another crew then loads the sacks onto a truck for delivery around Gaza.

This tunnel operates around the clock, and all around me I saw other tunnel entrances  some big enough to drive cars through so that they end up in dealerships in Gaza. They were covered but weren’t seriously hidden, and nobody objected to an American journalist scrambling around  even though tunnels were everywhere.

“I’d say there are 800 to 900 of these tunnels,” one tunnel owner told me. “They employ an average of maybe 30 people each.”