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Gazans Stream Into Egypt As Border Wall Is Breached
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The blasts snapped concrete barriers and sheared through rusted metal fences. By daybreak, walls lay toppled, felled by men using heavy machinery. Miles of the barricade lay in ruins.
In Gaza City, an hour from the border, Manal Abu Shamalla, 37, answered her cellphone at 6:30 a.m.
"The way is open! Come!" her friends urged her, she said.
Her mother lives in Cairo, but because Abu Shamalla has not been able to obtain from Israel the travel documents she needs to cross the border, she has not seen her mother in 10 years, she said.
Abu Shamalla and her husband filled the tank of their car, using the last of the generator fuel they had saved to power the house during blackouts. She bundled her three children into winter coats and raced with thousands of other Gazans to the border.
By midday, the family was making its way among the Palestinians streaming sidewalk-to-sidewalk through the dirt streets of the Egyptian side of Rafah, which is split by the border wall. With thousands more Gazans arriving each hour, all with the hope of pushing deeper into Egypt, Abu Shamalla's family could find no taxis to take them to her mother, and their spirits flagged.
"We only brought milk for the baby," she said, rocking her 3-month-old in her arms on a street corner.
Gaza City's men piled onto flatbed trucks to rush to the border. City streets quickly emptied of operable cars. Desperate men clustered at intersections. "Where are you going?" they shouted at passersby, hoping for rides. "Rafah?"
At the border, fathers handed toddlers over sections of the wall, so whole families could have reunions in Egypt with relatives kept out of Gaza for years by border restrictions. A housewife in a wool coat and carrying a large purse struggled atop one section of the wall, unable to heft herself over but peeling off the fingers of those who tried to pull themselves up and climb past her.
Along one teeming road in the Egyptian part of Rafah, a Hamas security official who had been stranded on Egypt's side of the border since June -- fearing arrest by Israel during a crossing if he tried to return -- met his mother and sisters in the surging crowd. "Eight months I haven't seen him!" his mother exclaimed after a flurry of hugging and kissing.
The man excused himself for not talking. "I'm on the wanted list," he explained.
Israel accuses Egypt, increasingly sharply, of allowing smugglers to bring arms and explosives into Gaza. It was clear Wednesday that contraband and gunmen could cross the border that day with little chance of being stopped.
