News / Palestine

Palestinian killed as Gaza tunnel collapse

Monday, 08 February 2016 2:21 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 08 February 2016 2:22 PM ]

AP’s file photo shows a Palestinian man moving a sheep through a tunnel from Egypt to Gaza under the border at Rafah.

A young Palestinian man has died after a lifeline tunnel he was trying to restore collapsed near the besieged Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt.

The incident took place on Monday after a tunnel used to bring basic commodities like construction material, food, and fuel into Gaza caved in.

The victim was identified as 24-year-old Mussa Jaber al-Ma’adi from the city of Rafah in southern Gaza.

The death brings to ten the number of Palestinians killed in three separate tunnel collapses over the past two weeks.

Israeli and the Egyptian army forces have launched a campaign to destroy the tunnels.

A picture taken from the southern Gaza Strip shows diggers used by the Egyptian army working on the border between Egypt and the Palestinian territory on September 1, 2015. (AFP photo)

Egypt set up a buffer zone on its border with Gaza and has destroyed hundreds of lifeline tunnels since Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was toppled in a July 2013 military coup led by Sisim, the then army chief and the current president.

In September 2015, Egypt built huge pipelines along the Gaza border and flooded the last remaining tunnels.

On February 6, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said that the tunnels were flooded at the request of Tel Aviv, adding that “security coordination” between Cairo and Tel Aviv is at its best.

Also on Monday, Naeem Ghul, an official with Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, said that the situation at the Egypt border was "getting worse day after day.”

Ghul said Egypt pumped “large quantities of sea water” into the ground and thus made soil prone to collapse.

The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli siege since June 2007. The blockade has caused a decline in the standards of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.

The Israeli regime denies about 1.8 million people in Gaza their basic rights, such as freedom of movement, jobs with proper wages as well as adequate healthcare and education.

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