Hossam el-Hamalawy
From AFP…
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak during talks with President Hosni Mubarak on Tuesday voiced rare praise for Egypt’s efforts to stem weapons smuggling into the Islamist-run Gaza Strip.
Barak hailed Egyptian efforts along the porous border which “have visibly been effective,” said a statement from the Israeli defense ministry after the talks at one of Mubarak’s palaces in Alexandria.
Via the Daily News Egypt:
Israel has offered to assist Egypt in building a technologically advanced wall along its border with the Gaza strip, the Israeli press reported Monday.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz cited an Israeli defense source as saying that fears of another breach like the one in January, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured into the Egyptian side of Rafah, prompted the Israeli offer.
The newspaper also reported that Egypt is reticent about the idea for fears of inflaming domestic criticism, but has agreed to discuss the issue following US pressure to prevent arms smuggling through tunnels beneath the border.
Israel is proposing a three-tiered wall with concrete walls, an electronic fence and tech-savvy system able to locate tunnels under the ground.
According to the paper, Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad and a senior Shin Bet (the Israeli Security Agency) official will travel to Cairo next week to discuss arms smuggling across the border with Intelligence chief Omar Suleiman.
From the Daily News Egypt…
Two Egyptian teenagers suspected of trafficking fuel and food through tunnels into the impoverished Gaza Strip were wounded in a shootout with police on Thursday, a security official said.
The two youths were spotted by a police patrol near one of 20 tunnels between Egypt and Hamas-ruled Gaza that a security official said had been discovered this week and were now being destroyed or blocked.
A gunfight broke out in which Hatem Mohammed Ahmad, 18, and Ahmad Naim Awad, 15, were seriously wounded, while a third suspect was arrested.
However, other news reports say that there were four smugglers, three of which were injured.