3 Palestinians killed in Gaza tunnel

By Hani al-Shaer

GAZA CITY, Palestine (AA) - Three Palestinian workers were killed inside a collapsed tunnel along border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, according to Gaza’s civil defense authority.

The three died after inhaling toxic gas inside the tunnel, the agency said in a statement on Saturday.

The bodies were recovered Saturday and sent to a hospital in the town of Rafah.

A Palestinian security source said Friday four workers had gone missing and ten others suffered suffocation after inhaling toxic gas while repairing a tunnel destroyed by the Egyptian army.

There was no comment from the Egyptian side on the claim.

Reeling from a decade-long blockade by Israel, the Gaza Strip’s roughly 2 million inhabitants have come to rely on the cross-border tunnel network for the import of badly-needed commodities, including food, fuel and medicine.

Since Egypt’s 2013 military coup against President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, the Egyptian authorities have cracked down on the network of border tunnels.

In recent months, the Egyptian army has been methodically flooding the network of cross-border tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

In 2014, Egypt began building a "buffer zone" along its border with Gaza following a spate of militant attacks on Egyptian security forces.