Cars are the best thing to have as a Gazan, and smuggling them in parts is one unique way to transport them. Or maybe more car bombs?
Posted on 10/08/2009 6:46:31 AM PDT by myknowledge
A shiny green Volkswagen, standing out among the rattletraps on Gaza's dilapidated roads, is the latest hot item to come out of the besieged territory's smuggling tunnels.
Cars are brought in piece by piece from Egypt, which only opens its sole crossing point into Gaza for humanitarian purposes, because of an embargo imposed by Israel two years ago.
A handful of the hundreds of smuggling tunnels in the Rafah border area are dedicated solely to the auto operation that started a few years ago. The entrepreneurs who run them say they've managed to bring in 30 to 40 vehicles in the past few months alone.
Hamas controls at least two of the car tunnels, according to operators who spoke under pseudonyms because of the sensitive nature of their work.
(Excerpt) Read more at alarabiya.net ...
Cars are the best thing to have as a Gazan, and smuggling them in parts is one unique way to transport them. Or maybe more car bombs?
If the tunnels are this big and blatant the Israelis must be deliberately turning a blind eye to them for reasons of their own.
No, they are not a big as you think, but they have a well-laid-out tunnel network, whose entrances are well-concealed from detection by Egyptian and Israeli authorities.
With the technology available to day I just can’t believe the Israels couldn’t find and shut them down if they wanted.
I cannot imagine that the Egyptians couldn’t shut them down if they really cared. If the tunnels were used to smuggle bombs into Egypt they would have been closed down long ago.
Ground-penetrating radar is already in existence, but the Israelis lack the will to employ them unless they want to.
DManA wrote:
If the tunnels are this big and blatant the Israelis must be deliberately turning a blind eye to them for reasons of their own.
From the article:
“We receive a car in four sections plus the motor,” says Abu Bilal, a mechanic who, like others involved in the enterprise, gave an assumed name.
“We verify that everything is OK and then we begin to reassemble it right away,” he says, as his team prepares to get to work on a 2004 BMW fresh from the subterranean passages.
“We need two weeks to reassemble a car, since we have to solder the pieces and repaint the body,” Abu Bilal says. “The client chooses the color.”
They aren’t putting whole cars through the tunnels. They are cutting them into pieces small enough to fit, and then reassembling them after they get them out. And I hope “soldering” is a translation error. Even welding a car back together after cutting it into 4 pieces is going to be iffy. Of course, you can’t go too far in Gaza, and I doubt that you need to travel at speeds over 35mph (50kph). So I guess the safety issue of these chopped and reassembled cars aren’t as big a deal as they would be here in the States.
Overall, this story reminds me of an incident when I was in high school. One morning, our Principal’s VW Bug was mysteriously found in the chemistry lab on the third floor. It sat there for a several days, until there was an item during the daily announcements on the PA, “Whoever put Mr. Davis’ Volkswagen in the chemistry lab, please remove it by the end of the week and return it to the parking lot. No questions will be asked provided his car is undamaged.” Just as mysteriously, a couple of days later, we came in one morning, and the little VW was back in the parking lot. The school had no elevators, so someone or some group had to have disassembled it and carried it up (and back down) the stairs in pieces.
I also thought this bit was funny:
The Rafah municipality charges a 10,000 shekel ($ 2,500) fee to open a smuggling tunnel and while the transport ministry officially refuses to register the smuggled cars it is possible to obtain the necessary documents.
For some reason, I find that hilarious. I wonder what the punishment is for operating an unlicensed smuggling tunnel.
| From the desk of cc2k: |
Jeez, this is how my dad got my Honda 70 home from Vietnam! Apparently, there was no ban on motorcycle parts, just on motorcycles. AAFES had no problem with it.
Colonel, USAFR
Do you think the USA can find all the tunnels from Mexico? There’s a new one found every few weeks - but that staggers the actual number of them. I can honestly say I’ve heard of them in SoCal, and Arizona - but don’t remember any actual tunnels crossing into the larger border of Texas.
At 2000 mile the American Mexican border is much more difficult to keep track of. But I’m sure we could if that was the goal of the American government. It isn’t.
That’s because the Rio Grande river forms the natural boundary between Texas and Mexico.
Do you think the Rio is miles deep? It’s a tunnel - it can (and does) go under the Rio Grande. Heck, in many places you can throw a ROCK to Mexico. You’re naive if you think there aren’t any tunnels under the Grande.
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