Egyptian army destroys six cross-border Gaza tunnels

By Mohamed Mahmoud

CAIRO (AA) - The Egyptian army has destroyed six cross-border tunnels linking Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula to the blockaded Gaza Strip, the army said in a Wednesday statement.

"The tunnels were destroyed in the period from Feb. 21 to March 13,” Egyptian army spokesman Tamer al-Rifai was quoted as saying in the statement.

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

Following a 2013 military coup against Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president and a Muslim Brotherhood leader, the Egyptian authorities have cracked down hard on the Sinai-Gaza tunnel network.

In 2014, Egypt began building a "buffer zone" along its border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip following a spate of militant attacks on Egyptian security forces deployed in Sinai.

One year later, the Egyptian army began flooding the tunnel network with seawater in a bid to eradicate all cross-border traffic.