Egyptian police and Hamas gunmen sealed off the Gaza border yesterday, almost two weeks after militants blew up a frontier wall and triggered a tidal wave of desperate Palestinians into Sinai.

After weekend talks between Egyptian authorities and senior Hamas leaders in Cairo, reports emerged that a deal had been struck to control the chaos on the frontier. Egyptian police with riot shields and helmets halted the cross-border flow through the final two open crossing points, until Hamas militants, armed with sticks and assault rifles, chased Palestinians away from the makeshift border fence that was cobbled together from razor wire, bulldozed earth and metal tank traps.

A spokesman for Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, said that Cairo would not permit a return to the chaotic scene that ensued two weeks ago when Hamas broke a crippling Israeli siege by blow-torching huge stretches of the wall and knocking it down with explosives. “Egypt absolutely will not allow a repeat of what happened because it has a border, territory and sovereignty, and it is Egypt's right and duty to preserve that,” the spokesman said.

The new fence was small enough for a person to leap across in places, and it was a pale shadow of the vast Israeli-built metal wall that lay in the mud a few yards away, decorated with a graffiti slogan that recalled Islam's imperial heyday: “From Spain to Indonesia, one nation, one people, one border.” The new barrier's unimpressive appearance underscored the implicit threat that if Hamas was not included in a deal to control the border, it could easily allow the situation to get out of hand again.

Israeli intelligence officials said that the Islamists, whose constant rocket fire into southern Israeli towns triggered the total closure of the Israel-Gaza border crossings, had already exploited the gaping breach to stock up on weaponry capable of escalating the war of attrition.

“Over the past days, massive amounts of weapons were moved into Gaza,” Yuval Diskin, head of Israel's internal security agency, briefed the Cabinet. “As far as we know, these were weapons of high quality, including long-range rockets, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other rocket-manufacturing materials that are usually much harder to bring into Gaza.”

Mr Diskin said that the opening also allowed Hamas and other militants to sneak back into Gaza after high-level military training in Iran and Syria.

The closure of the border caught many Gazans by surprise, and they waited at the fence for goods that they had bought in Egypt to be carried over by donkey-carts. “No one expected [the wall] to come down before, but now they'll definitely expect it to fall again if the siege continues. Hamas will turn a blind eye and let the people do it,” Abu Ashraf, a Gaza resident, said.

The two-week shopping frenzy that drew hundreds of thousands of Gazans across the border has taken the edge off the misery of the blockade. Vast amounts of basic goods, as well as an estimated 3,000 motorbikes, flooded into Gaza during the breach. Hamas border guards even caught a man trying to smuggle a lion cub and a monkey to sell in the crowded Palestinian territory.

Rafat Hamadona, the administrator of the main hospital in Gaza City, said that the influx of cheap motorbikes — popular among a fuel-starved population — had been as much of a curse as a blessing, with a sudden increase in road accidents taxing the overburdened health system.

Fuel supplies for the generators at his al-Shifa hospital will run out today if UN agencies cannot provide emergency reserves, he said, adding that this would lead to the deaths of 40 of his patients, including premature babies in incubators, intensive care unit cases and people on dialysis. “The situation is very bad,” he said. “I don't think it's been this bad before.”

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