The thousands of traders who swarm the once destitute corridor that marks Gaza’s southernmost boundary with Egypt call the area the “Rafah free zone.” They spend most of their day in hot, damp passageways a hundred feet underground, dragging rubber sleighs loaded with goods and then winching them to the surface.
Rafah long languished as a provincial backwater in the claustrophobic Gaza Strip, a clannish and rural hinterland to Gaza City’s bustling and cosmopolitan downtown. A few families controlled the limited tunnel trade that existed for decades. And even in the days when Gaza’s legal overland trade flourished, weapons and contraband were still smuggled into the Strip underground.
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