By Jihad Abaza
CAIRO, Feb. 11 (Aswat Masriya) - Egyptian military forces destroyed another tunnel connecting northern Sinai and the Gaza Strip, a military spokesman said on Thursday, after an Israeli minister said Egyptian-Israeli security coordination is "better than ever."
The military spokesman, Mohamed Samir, said in a statement that the tunnel was in the Dahliya area of Rafah, and that it was 35 meters long and 120 cm wide. He claimed the tunnel was used to smuggle weapons into the strip.
Earlier, on Tuesday, the al-Qassam brigades said in an official statement that Marwan Marouf, from the Khan Younis area of the southern Gaza strip, was killed in a deadly tunnel collapse. The statement did not specify the reasons for the collapse.
This is not the first time Palestinians were killed inside the tunnels. In January, seven men were killed after a tunnel in eastern Gaza collapsed.
Israel's energy minister Yuval Steinitz said at an event in Beersheba that the Egyptian military flooded tunnels in the southern Gaza strip "to a certain extent at our request," the Jerusalem Post repoted on Saturday.
The Israeli official also said that security coordination between Israel and Egypt was “better than ever."
But Steinitz later retracted his statements, saying they caused an "unintended impression," the Jerusalem Post reported in a separate story published later on Saturday.
The statements caused controversy in international media and were reported to have "embarrassed Egypt," and to have broken the "unwritten" rule that Israeli officials not disclose their close relationships to Arab leaders.
“He said something that shouldn’t be said in so many words,” Eli Shaked, Israel’s former ambassador to Egypt, told The Daily Telegraph.
The Egyptian military said in a statement in June 2015 that it destroyed a total of 1,429 border tunnels connecting Egypt to the Gaza Strip in early 2015 and late 2014.
According to the Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, Rafah was closed for a total of 306 days throughout the course of 2015. The only other way outside of Gaza is through the Erez crossing, which is controlled by Israel.
When the Rafah border was open more regularly, before 2013, monthly averages of 40,816 crossings were recorded.
The Rafah crossing has been closed-off since Oct. 24, 2014, after a military attack in Northern Sinai killed over 30 military conscripts. Before this incident, the crossing was also primarily closed, and opened on rare occasions for pilgrims, students, and other exceptional medical cases.
In September, the UN predicted that the besieged Strip, which has survived three Israeli bombardments over the past five years, is likely to become “uninhabitable” for residents within five more years. In the same month, Egyptian military forces began flooding tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.
The tunnels are often the only source from which Gaza residents can receive essential goods, as both the Egyptian and Israeli controlled crossings are closed.
Egyptian authorities claim that the tunnels are a pathway for arms and criminals, and are a national threat to Egypt.
Gaza is home to 1.8 million Palestinians, one of the highest population densities in the world, and is widely called the “world’s largest open air prison” due to a decade of Israeli blockade, backed by Egypt.
