Hamas sets up new border posts, checkpoints

Move to improve strained relations with Egypt

GAZA CITY, April 23, (AFP): As peace offerings go, prefabricated metal huts on a sand dune may seem unimpressive, but they are what the Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, has chosen.

Hamas has set up dozens of new border posts and military checkpoints along the enclave’s border with Egypt in an attempt to improve relations with Cairo after three years of acrimony.

The move will be seen as the latest attempt to improve relations with Cairo that have been strained since the overthrow of Egypt’s Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013.

Cairo regularly accuses Hamas, which is allied with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, of supporting jihadist attacks inside Egypt.

Morsi was a close Hamas ally, and the army chief who toppled him, Abdel Fattah elsisi, is now Egypt’s president.

Cairo has largely closed off the border, and Egyptian forces have also destroyed hundreds of Palestinian tunnels used to smuggle commercial goods, cash, people and, allegedly, weapons in both directions.

Now the Hamas-run National Security Force in Gaza has deployed an additional 600 soldiers along its 13-kilometre (eightmile) southern border to bolster security.

Frontier And where that frontier adjoins the border with Israel, Hamas has for the first time established three checkpoints within a few hundred metres (yards) of Israeli lookout towers.

On a tour of some of the new sites, officials cited their wish to rebuild relations with Cairo and ensure security along their border as the reasons for the developments.

“We have established 60 bases and military points along our borders with our brothers in Egypt to control the border and to ensure against any penetration,” Major General Hussein Abu Aazara told AFP during the tour.

“At the behest of our Egyptian brothers, we have increased the number of troops to 800 from about 200,” he said. He said three bases had been established close to the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel.

The Israeli army said it was “closely watching the developments in Gaza and Hamas’s recent activities, including the addition of outposts along the fence”.

Addressing hundreds of troops, Hamas official Tawfiq Abu Naim told them that Egypt’s security was Hamas’s security.

Egyptian soldiers watched from observation towers as Hamas installed the trailers on the dunes along the desert border.

Khaled Al-Batsh, a leader in the Islamic Jihad movement in the Palestinian territory, said his group was also committed to Egypt’s security.