Egyptian welcome mat yanked
Posted: Monday, January 28, 2008 4:59 PM
Filed Under:
Cairo, Egypt
By Charlene Gubash, NBC News Producer
RAFAH, Egypt – I will never look at bread the same way again. When we were driving through the
Egyptian border town of Rafah on Sunday, the pouring rain had turned the street into muddy, water-filled ruts.
A bent old man in a thin white gown and a ragged jacket slogged with difficulty through the cold rain, along the line of idling cars in his overlarge plastic sandals. He stopped at our window and asked for bread. One of the people in our group hastily prepared a bag of sandwich makings and bread and handed it to him. The old man turned red-rimmed eyes on us, and asked, "How much does it cost?"
He was not alone. The sidewalks were filled with Palestinian boys and men huddled under metal awnings. They had crossed the broken border between Gaza and Egypt looking for whatever they could buy due to the almost complete absence of the most basic goods in their own cities. But these stragglers, driven to Egypt by sheer need, were greeted by rain and shuttered shops.
Egyptian police, worried about the security threat posed by thousands of unmonitored visitors, have tightened the cordon around Rafah. One shopkeeper explained that Egyptian security officers ordered them to close their shops to discourage Palestinians from crossing the border. Shipments of Egyptian goods to the border town have been stopped. The attendant at a gas station packed with dozens of Palestinian trucks and cars complained that authorities had turned off the electricity so they couldn't pump gas.
No room at the inn
On Saturday, hotels were ordered to turn away Palestinian guests. Our Palestinian colleague was forced to spend a cold night in the car because the hotel refused to accept him. "I am Palestinian. I am used to it," he said wryly. And policemen now chase after Palestinian boys who had managed to circumvent checkpoints on foot, rounding them up and sending them in metal-sided police trucks back to Gaza.
Although the border is still officially open, the welcome mat has been yanked away. But even with no apparent reason to come, they still come, victims of a cynical political power struggle in Gaza, and no longer welcome in Egypt after a chaotic five-day shopping spree that saw people buying everything from Sinai-bred camels to Chinese-made motorcycles. Now only a relative handful of stragglers are left, braving the cold and looking to buy something as simple as a few loaves of bread.
