It may have been the biggest shopping spree in history. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, running out of the bare necessities, swarmed out of Gaza into Egypt yesterday to buy everything they could lay their hands on after Hamas militants blew up a huge metal border wall.

They returned herding goats, sheep, heifers and camels, riding on donkey carts laden with sacks of cement, or festooned with cans of petrol strapped to their bodies, after militants brought Israel’s siege of the coastal territory to a halt, dismantling the 40ft-high (12m) barrier like a broken concertina.

Old women lugged heavy cans of olive oil and children stumbled under the weight of packs of powdered milk, passing even more of the besieged masses still rushing through the gaping breaches to stock up on the basics.

“This is a key victory for Hamas,” crowed Abu Ayman, a grey-bearded Gaza farmer, as he and his son wrestled two calves across the border. He had just paid $1,000 (£500) for the livestock on the Egyptian side of the border. “Before, we couldn’t even find coffins to bury our dead,” he said as people swarmed around him in both directions.

Blockade drains life from Gaza

The movement of goods into Gaza had been intermittent at best since Hamas won Palestinian elections early last year

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BACKGROUND

• Israel continues Gaza blitz as 310 dead

• Q&A: Hamas and Gaza

• 97 days and counting for BBC's man in Gaza

• Now war is with the enemy within

• The little girl trapped by a quirk of war

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The tidal wave of humanity stampeded towards the border from across the Gaza Strip, almost emptying the northern cities of taxis, as news of the breach spread by radio, television and word of mouth. The United Nations estimated that 350,000 people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, had crossed the border by mid-afternoon, with a steady tide still bustling across as night fell. They scrambled across the vast sheets of rusted, corrugated metal that had abruptly turned from imposing wall to giant bridge.

Prices of cigarettes, soap and cement, which had been spiralling out of control in Gaza during the Israeli blockade, plummeted, while on the Egyptian side of the border they rocketed as supplies ran out. By the end of the day many Palestinians were returning empty-handed after their fellow countrymen had stripped Egyptian stores of goods. Some Egyptians even hopped into Gaza to avoid their own inundated shops or to sell motorbikes – much sought after in fuel-starved Gaza.

“I need to buy bread for my children,” said Ashraf el-Sayyid, an Egyptian biking into Gaza. “The Palestinians left us with nothing. It’s true, they are dear to us, but today they were like locusts.”

As the shops in the Egyptian side of Rafah ran out of goods, Palestinians commandeered taxis to take them deeper into Sinai to shop, many clambering on to the roofs of overcrowded cabs to make the trip to al-Arish, 25 miles (40km) away. Egyptian policemen in riot helmets and batons leant on their plastic shields, allowing the endless cavalcade to pass by unmolested, and leaving the work of marshalling the vast crowds to Hamas men with guns who operated openly a few feet away.

Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, said that he had ordered his border guards to let the Palestinians cross because they were starving under the Israeli blockade, imposed as a means of pressuring Hamas into ending its daily rocket attacks on southern Israel. “I told them to let them come in and eat and buy food and then return them later as long as they were not carrying weapons,” Mr Mubarak said.

Aid organisations had reported a looming humanitarian crisis, but there had been no reports of actual starvation in Gaza.

Hamas officials denied that they had played a role in destroying the massive fence, built by Israel years ago to seal the border and used as a shield from behind which the Israeli army would launch raids into Rafah to attack militants firing on their border positions. Now lorries full of Hamas gunmen patrolled where once Israeli tanks mustered for raids into the bullet-pocked streets of Rafah, a teeming, concrete shanty city of refugees and their descendants.

Few of the Gazans staggering across the border with bags of blankets and boxes of cigarettes and sweets believed Hamas’s denial. A Palestinian security guard admitted that the Islam-ists had been cutting through the base of the metal wall with oxyacetylene torches for months, working in the daytime and behind screens to avoid attracting attention. “I’ve seen this happening over the past few months. It happened in the daytime but was covered up so that nobody would see,” said a lieutenant with the Palestinian National Security, a Hamas-run military unit liaising with Egyptian forces and based in the narrow slice of land between the toppled wall and the Egyptian frontier.

Asked whether he had reported it to the Government, he said: “It was the Government that was doing this. Who would I report it to?” Seventeen explosions between midnight and 1am had brought down the sheared-off wall. The gates had been left intact to allow the passage of vehicles full of medical supplies or Hamas gunmen. “We were told to keep away from the wall. We were ordered to stay away because they were going to break the blockade,” he said.

The collapse of the wall was a serious blow to Israel, which withdrew from its border positions when it left Gaza in 2005. It fears that militants and weapons will be able to move freely into Gaza now that its blockade is hopelessly compromised. And it has provided Hamas – hitherto isolated politically and physically – with sudden political leverage, which its leader Ismail Haniya, the sacked Prime Minister, was quick to exploit.

He called for an urgent meeting with Egypt and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which has been stonewalling him since his Islamist militiamen drove its Fatah forces out of Gaza in heavy fighting last summer.

A minister in the Ramallah Government denounced the call for talks. “Everything Haniya is saying is simply to exploit this situation to win political gains. It is a part of the problem, not the solution,” said Ashraf Ajramim.

The vast majority of Palestinians were returning after their shopping. But a few younger men were unwilling to end their short burst of freedom. “I’ve been stuck in Gaza for a year and a half, now the border is open,” said one man in his early twenties. “Now I'm getting some fresh air, I don’t want to go back to Gaza. I’m seriously thinking about staying.”

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