Above the crowd of thousands floated a red mattress, still wrapped in plastic. Underneath, holding aloft their new purchase, Kayad Shalafa and his brother Said were returning through the sand dunes of northern Egypt.
They walked back over the trampled barbed wire, past the placid Egyptian soldiers and on to the blackened hole in the concrete border wall they had walked through that morning from Gaza. "I'm getting married in a month," said Shalafa (30), a civil servant from Gaza city. "There's a siege in Gaza, an occupation. Even mattresses are expensive there. What else can I do?"
In one of the more extraordinary scenes of life in Gaza yesterday, tens of thousands of Palestinians poured across the border into Egypt in an excited and desperate rush to buy food, fuel, blankets, goats, cigarettes, fertiliser, bags of cement, Chinese-built motorbikes and anything else they could find. Overnight a series of carefully placed explosions, almost certainly orchestrated by the Hamas movement, blasted holes in the wall, in some areas bringing huge sections to the ground. Yesterday morning the crowds did the rest, marching through the sand and clambering into Egypt.
It was not the first time the wall had been breached, but never before had so many flooded into Egypt. They left the Gaza Strip, a small stretch of land that has slumped ever deeper into a humanitarian crisis since Israel closed its crossings. Abdullah Aked walked back from Egypt carrying a box of cooking pots, a comparative bargain at €8 - about a quarter of what they would have cost him in Gaza. "We feel a little more free today. It's a good thing for the Gazans to be able to breathe," said Aked (36). "I know there is going to be more trouble ahead but in the end we need a political solution. Not a solution for just one or two days."
No Israeli forces are deployed along Gaza's southern border with Egypt, and Egyptian authorities decided not to resist the wave of people flooding into their country. However, some with luggage and plans to fly abroad from Cairo airport said they were eventually turned back by Egyptian soldiers for entering without visas.
Israel said yesterday it was up to Egypt to deal with the situation. "It is their responsibility to ensure that the border operates properly, in accordance with the signed agreements. Israel expects the Egyptians to solve the problem," said Arye Mekel, spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry. Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader in exile in Damascus, said his movement would work with Egypt and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the rival Fatah movement, to establish a new border arrangement. - ( Guardian service)