Alwaght- The military-backed regime in Egypt has been blamed for 'violating' international law through 'mass home demolitions and evictions' over the past two years along the country's border with the besieged Gaza Strip.
The Egyptian government has evicted 3,200 families over the past two years and razed hundreds of hectares of farmland and thousands of homes in its bid to destroy Palestinian smugglers’ tunnels connecting the besieged Gaza Strip with Egypt’s northern Sinai peninsula, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report published on Tuesday.
“Destroying homes, neighborhoods and livelihoods is a textbook example of how to lose a counterinsurgency campaign,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the organization's director in the Middle East and North Africa.
“The Egyptian authorities provided residents with little or no warning of the evictions, no temporary housing, mostly inadequate compensation for their destroyed homes – none at all for their farmland,” Human Rights Watch said.
Egypt’s official plan for the buffer zone calls for clearing about 79 square kilometers on the Gaza border, including Rafah entirely, a town of about 78,000 people
HRW also said it received video footage showing an American-made M60 tank shelling a building to demolish it. It called on the US to make sure its weapons were not being used in violation of human rights.
Last week in a move set to please the Israeli regime, the Egyptian army begun pumping water from the Mediterranean Sea into underground smuggling tunnels connecting Sinai with the besieged Gaza Strip.
Blockaded by the Israeli regime since 2007, Gaza used to receive much-needed supplies through the network of smuggling tunnels on its border with Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian security officials say the operation on Friday aimed to end smuggling into the impoverished Palestinian territory.
The World Food Program (WFP said in a report in February 2014 that the tunnels have represented “the main supply and commercial trade route for goods into Gaza” since 2007.
Dozens of people, mostly Palestinians, have lost their lives during the destruction of tunnels, which has intensified since the 2013 ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi.
Egypt's President Fattah El-Sisi headed a bloody military coup in 2013 that resulted in the ouster of the Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi.