Border residents along Gaza strip fear stray bombs
Monday January 12, 2009
Reporting from Rafah, Egypt
SHAHANAAZ HABIB
THE six-hour journey from Cairo to Rafah, the town bordering Gaza, went smoother than I thought it would.
I heard of numerous checkpoints and passport checks allowing only foreigners with all the necessary documentation and approval through, but no one stopped me or even asked for my passport.
Maybe it was because I got in after dark (or maybe I didn’t look so foreign) but the guards at the checkpoints just waved us (my driver, interpreter and me) through.
If they had asked, it wouldn’t have been a problem, because I do have a business visa with approval from the Egyptian embassy to get to Rafah to report on the Gaza conflict.
Because it is winter, it was dark when I got to Rafah at 7pm on Saturday.
We drove to the closed walled border crossing and nothing was going on there.
The aid organisations had already sent in medical and other supplies earlier in the day and injured Palestinians, who were lucky enough to make it to the border, had already been brought out.
We drove around the area.
There were people walking about and I stopped to chat with some of them.
They said they could see the bombings very clearly from where they were. Each time a bomb fell near the border, their homes on this side shook like it was an earthquake.
Saad Hamdan, 39, a father of eight, fears that the bombs are falling so close to the border that one might accidentally fall on the Egyptian side.
In some parts, the border dividing Rafah from the Palestinian side is only about 250m away. And shrapnel has come flying across.
“The walls of some of our homes have cracked. Some of the windows are broken. And the ‘voice of the bomb’ makes us so afraid.
“Our children can’t sleep when the bombs drop non-stop,” Saad said.
Although Saturday saw one of the heaviest bombings, I didn’t hear any in the two hours that I was in Rafah.
Much of the bombing had happened earlier in the day.
When I got back to my hotel in El-Arish, which is half an hour or 40km away, most of the journalists talked about how intense the bombing had been.
One even showed me a video of just how close it was.
There are no hotels in Rafah, which is why most of the journalists and aid workers stay in El-Arish. They spend the whole day in Rafah and come back to El-Arish to sleep.
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp...752&sec=nation