Nadr Keshta was 18 and his attractive young neighbour had caught his eye. He started hanging about on street corners, trying to catch sight of her as she walked home from school in her blue-and-grey uniform. For weeks she ignored him. When she finally waved back to his wink, it was her signal that she returned his interest. Without ever exchanging a word, they considered themselves "engaged". That was where their story, as told by his younger brother Mohamed, led into the subterranean world of the "tunnel people" of Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip. He needed money now, to build a house for his bride and, truth be told, to show off a bit — buying a new gun was first on his list. For young men in Rafah, a gun is street cred; it's cool, like having the latest pair of trainers.
Nadr was earning a pittance on his father's farm. Gaza has been locked down by the Israeli army since the armed Palestinian intifada began in September 2000. There are no jobs for young men, because Gaza can no longer export the fruit and vegetables that were the staples of its economy — tomatoes that used to sell for $20 a crate are down to $3 in the local market. Only a few men have permission to enter Israel for work.
Nadr turned to the only paying job in Rafah: digging tunnels under the Israeli-Egyptian border. I had heard rumours of tunnels for years, but never really believed them, because there is nothing but white sand that runs through your fingers. How could you have a tunnel network in this flimsy sand? My scepticism was buttressed by knowledge of Israel's defences: the army has erected an 8ft wall that plunges invisibly many more feet underground along the Rafah side of the Philadelphi road — a dirt stretch patrolled by armoured Israeli Jeeps that parallels the Egyptian border — to stop tunnellers. Then there are explosions every night in Rafah, set off arbitrarily by Israeli engineers in the hope that they might collapse an undiscovered tunnel.
But a chance conversation resulted in my living in Rafah for a week with the "tunnel people". It was like discovering a lost tribe in a city I had been visiting for 15 years. I found an extraordinary, secret tunnel culture known only to a few Palestinians. The tunnel people told me they originally smuggled in contraband drugs, women, cigarettes (5 shekels in Egypt, 12 shekels in Gaza), and even the python that still slithers around in the Rafah zoo, and the ostrich that escaped during the May 2004 Israeli incursion, to the great glee of Rafah kids, who rode bareback on the big bird until the zookeepers recaptured him. Since the second intifada began five years ago, however, the tunnellers have mostly smuggled weapons.
The profits are huge. A Kalashnikov sells for $200 on the Egyptian side, but fetches $2,000 on the Gaza black market. A good night's delivery is 1,200 Kalashnikovs — a profit of more than $2m. Bullets — 50 cents in Egypt, $8 wholesale in Gaza — are even more profitable. A standard one-night delivery returns a profit of $750,000. The tunnels are financed by wealthy families — locals call them the "snakeheads" — who run the tunnels as businesses. They rent the passage to anyone who pays $10,000 for one night's use — a gun dealer, Hamas or Islamic Jihad, the militant Islamic fundamentalist groups, or a man who can't get his wife legally into Gaza. Cash is the currency, not politics, patriotism or sentimentality.
They rent, build or buy a house, even an entire farm, just to disguise a tunnel's "eye", as they call the entrance. The gun dealers are their biggest clients. "We call them blood dealers," said Abu Sibah, 36, the bearded head of a rogue Palestinian militia in Al-Bureij refugee camp north of Rafah, outside a car mechanics' shop where he had stored his latest shipment of Kalashnikovs and a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). "But there is nothing to do about them. We depend on the tunnels for guns." He was particularly proud of the shiny black Belgian revolver in his belt — at $3,000, a special order. It was to this world that Nadr Keshta turned for the money to marry.
His relatives were in the tunnel business and he heard a "big project" was about to start. He signed on with a group of eight young men, all relatives. In the tunnels there is a hierarchy: those not related to the patron work for $100 a day as diggers, while those who are relatives get a share of the profit in return for their labour, a much better deal. When the tunnel is finished they are entitled to a percentage on every load that passes through it.
Israel has made endless efforts to stop the tunnellers; apart from explosives, bulldozers have chopped away at Rafah's unlovely blocks of concrete houses that used to sprawl right up to the border fence. But all that has done is make the digging longer and more arduous. Tunnels now have to extend about 880 yards to span the bulldozed divide. Keshta expected to make $20,000 as his share of the tunnel's first load, and then a continuing profit as long as it remained undiscovered. In Gaza, that was enough to build a house and have some left over for his new gun and a wedding reception. But disaster struck.
At the start, the new project ran smoothly following well-rehearsed procedures. Keshta and his fellow diggers began excavating a shaft from a back bedroom of a three-storey house. The tunnel was financed by Hisham al-Sha'ir — the al-Sha'irs are known as Gaza's premier tunnelling family. An al-Sha'ir grandmother had died there and the house was empty. The tunnel "eye" was concealed by four marble floor tiles. They dug a narrow shaft, barely wider than their bodies, 40ft down through "hard sand" — red sand that is impacted and solid — until they reached a layer of soft sand. The tunnellers of Gaza are self-taught geologists; their grandfathers discovered that a "hard sand" stratum runs under Rafah to varying depths. They dig through it until they hit the soft sand below — the layer of hard sand becomes their ceiling. They are hunted by both the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Keshta and the other young diggers lived day and night in the house, so that their comings and goings would not arouse suspicion. They hid the telltale sand in other rooms. But unbeknown to them, the explosives that the Israelis periodically set off had weakened the hard-sand ceiling. Three days of unexpected rain weakened it further, and the tunnel collapsed on Keshta and his two cousins, Nidal al-Sha'ir and Sufiyan al-Sha'ir.
The three were trapped. Other diggers heard Nadr yelling over the intercom that goes through every tunnel: "Help us, help us, help us to live." The three entombed teenagers began chanting "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet," the phrase that Muslims intone in times of crisis.
The tunnel financier raced to the scene and began digging with a bulldozer along the tunnel's path, but nobody knew the boys' location. Friends and relatives gathered at the intercom in the back bedroom.
"There is no air, it is too dark, we are feeling like we are in a grave," Nadr's brother, Mohamed, heard him shout. "I was sure then that they would die," Mohamed said, remembering his sense of helplessness. For nine hours, the cousins were heard praying aloud and pleading for rescue. The Palestinians dug on their side of the Philadelphi wall and the Israelis began digging on theirs after a desperate relative broke the tunnel code of secrecy and drew the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) a map of the tunnel's path.
