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Sex, flies and videotape on Sinai smuggling routes
By Dan Williams
August 30, 2004
Mount Harif Border Outpost - At a signal from their guide, the women halt,
hunched uncertainly in the dark no-man's-land.
He lays down towels in a row. The human caravan proceeds, treading gingerly to
prevent telltale tracks.
Were it not for the infra-red cameras of a roving Israeli police helicopter,
they might have made it from the Sinai desert to Tel Aviv, whose streets are
seen by thousands of foreign workers as a promised land of quick cash and no
questions asked.
Keen to curb the trafficking of sex workers and drugs and wary of infiltrations
by Palestinian gunmen fighting a nearly four-year-old revolt, Israel is
cracking down on Bedouin Arab smugglers who ply its sprawling frontier with
Egypt.
"It's a bit of a competition," said Capt. Amichai Cohen of the Israeli border
police outpost at Mount Harif. "They do what they can to get through, and we do
our best to keep up."
Fences of razor wire, watch towers, and minefields separate Israel from its
other neighbors Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
But most of the 200-mile border with Egypt is literally just a line in the
sand.
The border police compensate with around-the-clock aerial surveillance and a
network of informers among local crime rings.
Tipped off about an impending infiltration, commandos - some of them riding
camels - set up ambushes on the fly-blown smuggling routes from Sinai into
Israel's southern Negev desert.
Price of Peace
Israeli officials are reluctant to complain about the frontier, seeing it as
the price of peace with Egypt, which in 1979 became the first Arab state to
recognize Israel.
While Egyptian border personnel may at times turn a blind eye to smugglers,
they say, the government in Cairo cooperates completely with its own swoops on
Sinai narcotics plantations. "We have worked on this (smuggling) and have
stopped a lot of things," said an Egyptian official who asked not to be named.
At Har Harif, Cohen and his comrades keep a video library of successful
"busts."
The women seized in no-man's-land, believed to be Asian prostitutes, were
deported. There is also footage aplenty of U.S.-supplied police vehicles
tearing across vast desert vistas after smugglers in pick-up trucks.
A kilo (2.2 pounds of hashish commands 10,000 shekels ($2,200) in Israel,
tempting poor Sinai Bedouin to pack the wild-grown resin on the back of trucks
or camels and head for the border, risking a 4.5-year prison term if caught.
Barely Half Get Caught
Israel puts the interception rate at only 54 percent -- a nuisance for vice
squads, but a big concern for security forces fighting a Palestinian uprising
since September 2000.
At least seven militants from the Gaza Strip have slipped into Israel by way of
Sinai.
Three gunmen, and an Israeli army patrolman, were killed in ensuing clashes --
prompting Israel to set up an airborne special forces unit that is always on
standby. The other militants were arrested.
Security still falls far short of the measures Israel takes on the border
between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, though.
Clashes there between Israelis and militants smuggling weapons through tunnels
have made it one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the conflict.
Cohen said some smugglers tried to bring guns through Sinai for Palestinian
militants in the West Bank. Israeli criminals were also among their customers.
A team of Eastern European men in Israeli custody are suspected of being
members of a hit squad who were brought in from Egypt to put a bloody end to a
local gangland feud. Another surprise was the arrival from Sinai this summer of
eight Sudanese who claimed to be fleeing the fighting in Darfur.
Israeli authorities said the Interior Ministry was examining their case.
"It may look quiet here, but we keep busy," Cohen said.
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