Crossing into Egypt for supplies

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By Paul Martin BBC News, Gaza

Tens of thousands of Gazans have crossed into Egypt for supplies

Since the Egypt-Gaza border was breached more than a week ago, Palestinians have been crossing into Egypt looking for items they cannot find in Gaza.

After getting back from his shopping expedition to Egypt, Tareq Tabaza, a 25-year-old Palestinian, is unloading 10 bags of cement onto the roadside.

Many passing Palestinians offer to buy them.

"Oh no, they're not for sale," says Tareq, who's an off-duty Hamas policeman.

He explains that he needs all the cement to finish off his new kitchen, vital, he says, so that he can attract a wife.

"She must be religious, educated and beautiful," he tells me, "and I expect my mother will bring me a bride soon, God willing."

There is another major item of equipment that he and many others like him feel they need to buy before they can marry: a large mattress for the matrimonial double bed.

Also in search of this key item is an amiable and burly 27-year-old Gazan teacher called Ismail Rabah.

We meet up just after he has walked through a hole in the half-destroyed border fence and into lemon-tree groves inside Egypt.

Now I've been out of the Gaza Strip for the first time in my life, I have a taste for freedom and travel Ismail Rabah

As he sucks a lemon, offered free as a farm boy's welcome gift, Ismail explains the predicament. He is a newly-wed with a nice kitchen but a lousy mattress.

The factory in Gaza that makes mattresses has run out of metal springs and other raw materials, after the Israeli blockade, leaving many potential couples in a state of limbo.

I decide to tag along with him on his quest.

As Ismail trudges through the Egyptian-held part of the border town of Rafah, he ignores plenty of other much sought after commodities like cement, goats, sheep, cows and shining, new, Chinese-made motor-cycles.

But he cannot find even one mattress for sale. Ismail assumes his fellow Gazan newly-weds or would-be-weds have beaten him to it.

Impromptu sight-seeing

So he pays two young Bedouins to drive him to the markets on the Sinai Peninsula's Mediterranean coast.

Yamit was once the biggest Jewish town on the Sinai Peninsula

On the way, the impromptu taxi driver insists on showing his Gazan passenger and me the remains of what was once a large farming settlement called Yamit.

When Israel controlled this part of the Sinai desert, its settlers had successfully grown vegetables in the sandy but fertile soil here.

When Israeli troops came to evict the Jewish farmers from their homes - after the historic Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 - they were pelted with tomatoes.

They still grow tomatoes here but today they are for Egyptian consumption.

In 1979, I was in the Sinai - sent there from Cairo by the BBC - as Israel made its historic withdrawal from the main town on the Sinai's west coast, the palm-fringed El Arish.

So, as our car gets near that same town, I cannot resist telling Ismail some of the story.

'Thank God for peace'

On the day the Israelis were due to pull out of El Arish, a lone French tourist and I had crossed into what was at that moment no-man's land, the first two people ever to make the once impossible journey by land from Egypt to Israel since that state was founded in 1948.

There had been a small tent halfway across. I had peered inside and there were two soldiers - one Egyptian, one Israeli.

"If he'd walked in here a few weeks ago," said the Egyptian soldier, "I'd have blown his head off."

The two soldiers had sipped some sweet tea and, almost in unison, said: "Thank God for peace."

Now, nearly three decades later, there is indeed peace - or at least an absence of war - between these two countries.

But the conflict over land between Israel and the Palestinians is still nowhere near being solved.

And Egypt is not exactly loved by Palestinians either, especially after decades of visa and movement restrictions that make them feel far worse treated than any other of Egypt's Arab brothers.

Ismail is far from impressed with some aspects of Egyptian hospitality: traders have pushed up their prices for the throng of Gazans, and the shwarma sandwich he has bought is, he says, "disgusting".

Gaza is much more technologically advanced too, he opines. And the much-needed Egyptian petrol is of inferior quality.

'Taste for freedom'

But, what of Ismail's main quest?

It's been great today but who knows about tomorrow? Ismail Rabah

In El Arish, finally he finds the right shop and there a smiling bearded salesman offers him cold water from a large, red cylinder and displays a lovely blue mattress for a double bed.

Out comes the tape measure. There is a sad look on Ismail's face.

"I don't want a coffin," he says. "If I roll over on this thing I'll fall out of bed. It's too narrow for our bed-stand," he concludes.

In fact, Ismail never finds the right mattress.

So he returns forlornly to the hole in the border fence, carrying just a large red box of crisps and a crate of Coca Cola. Scarce in Gaza, and some consolation for his wife, he says.

But all the same, he has gained more than just material things.

"Now I've been out of the Gaza Strip for the first time in my life, I have a taste for freedom and travel," he remarks.

"It's been great today," he adds. "But who knows about tomorrow?"

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 2 February, 2008 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a> for World Service transmission times.