No Cries of Apartheid as Egypt Builds Wall at Gaza Border

They're not stupid and certainly don't want a repeat of the breach fiasco from last month.

Egypt is building a stone and cement wall on its sensitive frontier with the Gaza Strip to block Palestinians from again breaching the border to circumvent an Israeli-led blockade, security sources said on Thursday.

Egyptian workers were removing a barbed wire barrier and replacing it with a 3 metre high wall along the frontier with Hamas-run Gaza, Egyptian witnesses in the border town of Rafah said. Three kilometres of the new wall was already complete.

"The new wall will help Egypt better secure its border with Gaza," an Egyptian security source told Reuters, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.

"The wall that the Palestinians destroyed during the breaching of the Egyptian border was of a low height and easy to breach." The source would not say if the new wall would be built over the entire length of the 14 km Egypt-Gaza border, or only in specific places.

Of course when the Israelis do it, the terror sympathizers call it apartheid.

It will be curious to see what the lunatics have to say about Egypt's actions.

Odds are there will be silence.

Meanwhile, Israel is urged to open border crossings.

Double standard, anyone?

In other news out of Gaza, Mike at the Monkey Tennis Centre notes a horrifying development that no doubt has St. Pancake spinning in her grave. Although the question remains whether you can spin if you've been flattened.

For the past few years Palestinian sympathisers and Israel haters have been waging a campaign against US construction equipment maker Caterpillar, on the grounds that it builds the D9 earthmovers used by the Israeli Defence Forces.

Campaigners say the IDF uses the bulldozers to illegally demolish Palestinian homes. The IDF says it uses them to demolish buildings used by terrorists as firing positions, and to dismantle booby-traps and fill in weapons-smuggling tunnels.

A D9 famously ran over and killed the flag-burning US activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003, spawning an entire canon of sub-standard poetry and drama. The pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement claimed she was 'murdered' while trying to protect Palestinian homes, producing a series of contradictory and apparently faked photos to support their claims. (HT for that last link Israel Matzav.)

The UN, naturally, is being urged to condemn Israel.

Hey, we're dealing with the UN. I don't think they need any cajoling.

Finally, we've reach a grim milestone.