Nadr Keshta's illicit fiancée heard of the disaster, but she could not come even just to hear his voice: her parents would have been furious if they had known of her relationship with a boy they had not approved. She would have been considered to have dishonoured the family. Juliet, who doesn't want her real name used, was despondent. She had no idea her Nadr had gone down the tunnels. "Why did he do this? I wanted him, not money!" she cried in secret. But she had to hide her distress from her family. After nine hours of solid digging, an Israeli bulldozer accidentally cut the intercom wire and there was silence on the line that connected the three cousins to the world above.
Keshta and his cousins had made the mistake of young men the world over: succumbing to the lure of the big score. But the price in Rafah's tunnels is higher than elsewhere.
However vast the sums to be made in the tunnel business, it is not easy money. Death stalks this subterranean world — the horrific slow death of suffocation below the surface. The day before I arrived in Rafah, a teenager had been electrocuted in a tunnel and his body dumped where he, but not the tunnel "eye", would be found. Families who receive the bloated bodies of their tunnel dead take a little consolation from the fact that tunnellers who die digging are considered shaheed — martyrs to the Palestinian cause — even if they mostly die in the pursuit of profit. In Rafah, the culture of the martyr is as pervasive as guns.
Yousef and Ahmed Keshta, 24 and 31, run the most popular barber's shop in Rafah, the Shaheed Salon — the Martyrs' Salon. The walls are plastered with photographs and posters of late former customers. Instead of shampoos and conditioners, the shelves of mirrored cabinets are lined with keepsakes from the dead: a string of worry beads left by Mahmoud al-Sha'ir the day before he was killed; a toy gun from their youngest customer to die in a tunnel. Their most popular hairstyles are the side-buzzed marine cut — modelled on that of the American marines seen on the news, even though most young Gazans are vaguely anti-American — and the French cut, so called because it resembles a mushroom when done properly. I asked a bearded Martyrs' Salon customer, who sat with a white bib in front of a mirror, if it was not disconcerting to be stared at from all sides by the dead. He looked at me as if I came from a different planet. "Of course not. I remember them all: most are relatives, neighbours, friends — it is my duty to remember them." There are more realistic voices, but they don't drown out the siren call of money.
Israeli tanks rolled into Rafah in May 2004 after five Israeli soldiers died when Palestinians fired an RPG at an armoured personnel carrier. IDF tanks and bulldozers destroyed another entire block of homes. Ibrahim Keshta knocked holes through his walls to get his family out. "It used to be a big neighbourhood here. Now there are only dogs," he said as he brought a tray of glasses of sweet tea and sat cross-legged on the floor of his half-ruined house to talk. "You die alone here."
Looking down through windows emptied of glass by tank shells, Ibrahim's view is of a mound of rubble — all that remains of a small tin-roofed house custom-built to hide the "eye" of the tunnel where his younger brother Mohamed died. A baby fig tree grows above the barely visible sunken path of sand that is the only trace of the destroyed tunnel beneath.
Ibrahim blames a "snakehead" for luring his brother underground. "He told my brother, 'Join my crew and you will have nice expensive guns, a nice house, you can marry,'" he says, waving his arms around with lingering outrage, shooing away his three small children, who return moments later to listen and giggle.
After hundreds of yards of digging and one day away from punching through in Egypt, on his first tunnel job, the roof collapsed above Mohamed and his boss. Both died.
In Ibrahim's neighbourhood alone, locals reckon there are about 20 tunnels in various stages of destruction or excavation. Down the street from Ibrahim's ruin is the rubble of a house destroyed because the owner had financed one of the most famous tunnels in Rafah: the one commissioned by Yasser Arafat, then president of the Palestinian Authority, to smuggle in 50 tonnes of weapons from Iran aboard the freighter Karine A, which the Israelis captured in the Red Sea. Arafat denied any connection, but the trace was clear: the PA had commissioned the $100m cargo of rockets, missiles, mortars and sniper rifles. When I went to the site of the destroyed house, a white baby donkey lay basking in the sand at the foot of all that was left: a mound of dirt and concrete slabs. After my visit, the PA found the "eye" of another tunnel dug to connect to the main one — right underneath where the baby donkey had been tethered by a rope invisible to the casual observer.
More terrifying than the spectre of sudden death is the psychological trauma of spending months underground in a space 2ft wide by 2ft 4in tall.
A 770-yard tunnel can take six months to finish. When tunnellers lowered me by rope down a shaft that began in a little girl's bedroom with posters of cuddly animals on the walls, I was gripped by panicky claustrophobia. The so-called "safe" hard-sand walls trickled away on my head as I passed into the depths; the sand crumbled each time I scrabbled for footing on the way down; the walls closed in, and the bare bulbs did little to alleviate the darkness or the fear that the whole thing might cave in on top of me at any moment.
"To do this work, you have to throw your heart away," says Ayed (not his real name), who at 28 is considered a veteran digger. So comfortable with his work has Ayed become that he sleeps in tunnels. He has a muscular, wiry body and spade-like callused fingers. He brews coffee up top, and takes a flask down with him and thinks nothing of staying underground for days. As I would learn, each tunneller has his own methods. Unlike the tunnel that I went down, where hard sand formed the walls of the shaft, Ayed's entry shaft is lined with metal plates specially welded for the job. As boss, he checks the tunnel's progress with a compass every 10-15 yards; after 20 yards he installs a bespoke engine that hauls back nine "boats" containing pails of sand. Two tunnellers work at the face, Ayed digging and the other loading the pails. Two work at the foot of the shaft unloading the buckets, then buzz when the buckets are empty, and the forward crew starts the engine to haul them back.
