Word: egypts
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...Bets are on Gaza to explode first. Although Hamas claimed that Monday's suicide bomber in Dimona, the first in a year, came from the West Bank, the Israelis still are investigating whether he got into the country from Gaza via Egypt while the border fence at Rafah was breached. It's certainly possible. An estimated 750,000 Palestinians, half of Gaza's population, crossed into Egypt and back, primarily to shop for basic goods unavailable at home...
...Israel knows too that Hamas would like to drag Egypt into it. And, who knows, it might work. At some level someone in Egypt is complicit in smuggling weapons into Gaza. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition party, still looks at Hamas as its Palestinian branch. Iran and Hizballah have been soliciting Egypt's cooperation in more help for Gaza. Will Egyptian President Mubarak be able to hold the line, keep a lid on Gaza, when Israel itself...
...celebrating this blow against Israel, but realists among the Palestinians know that this first suicide bombing after a year's hiatus will make it more difficult to argue the case with the Egyptians of keeping the Rafah border open - the only entry and exit point into Gaza. Egypt says it is prepared to keep the fence open - but only if Hamas and Fatah share responsibility for it. After the breakdown of three-way talks in Cairo last week, that seems unlikely. Hamas has agreed to help Egypt reseal most of the border fence, but even that agreement seemed in disarray...
...policeman's quick reactions no doubt saved lives in Israel's first suicide attack in over a year. But the bombing seemed to confirm fears by Israeli security chiefs that terrorists had joined thousands of Palestinians who streamed through the breach made last week in the security fence between Egypt and Gaza. The bombers' route probably took them into the Sinai, where Egypt's long and sporadically unpatrolled desert border is riddled with smugglers' trails used by Bedouin. For the right amount of money, these tribesmen are willing to bring anything into Israel - drugs, weapons, Russian prostitutes, even terrorists...
Free for now, that is. Gaza militants did breach the wall?and Lubbad met up with his fiancé, who returned with him to Gaza. But Egypt has begun repairing the holes in the wall, and the wild exodus from Gaza, which included more than one-fifth of the territory's 1.5 million people, was just a brief respite from the reality of life under Israel's blockade, which had been tightened on Jan. 17 in response to rocket attacks from Gaza soil...