How do you -- how do you wrap your mind around
risking your life that much every day
just to put food on the table?
Dina: Oh, my God.
We are in Gaza, and basically, a few steps in front of me
is the official borderline into Egypt.
Got a lot respect for Dina Amer for, you know,
having the courage to go down in those Gaza tunnels
and giving us just a glimpse of what it must be like
to live under one of the harshest embargoes in the world.
We're 30 meters underground right now.
At any moment, this could collapse,
or even the Egyptians could bomb us.
Michael: Everybody in Gaza feels like they're denied everything --
food, basic medical supplies.
[ Shouts ]
It feels like what we would consider a prison.
Our goal is just to simply show the world a window
as to why people do the things they do
and where that desperation comes from.
It's like they say, when the system fails you...
...you create your own system.
Dina: We're in this caged corridor,
which is the official crossing into Gaza.
There's a feeling already that we're entering a place
that's clearly cut off from the rest of the world.
Tunnels provide a black market economy
and a way for people to transport goods into Gaza
because it is very difficult to get things in
through the official crossing.
[ Horn honks ]
[ Indistinct conversation ]
This is the end point of the tunnel economy.
The central market in Rafah.
And this little package of chocolates is from Turkey,
and it came from the tunnels.
Smuggled goods can be marked up as much as 500%,
so a gallon of milk that might cost the equivalent
of $4 in Egypt can go for $20 in Gaza.
Three wars in 10 years have left the economy in Gaza destroyed.
The series of conflicts began in 2006
when the militant group Hamas won an election
and took control of Gaza.
In response, Israel has tried to cut off Hamas from the world,
only allowing a limited amount of humanitarian aid in.
So Gazans began digging over 2,500 tunnels
to Israel and to Egypt
that delivered everything from water to livestock
to cigarettes to medicine.
But Hamas also uses some tunnels
to move weapons and fighters into Israel.
So Israel began a campaign to destroy them.
But another conflict here is with Egypt.
Man: Egypt stepped up its presence along the border with Gaza
after an attack killed dozens of soldiers.
Dina: When hardline general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
took power in a coup in 2012,
he ordered his men to start destroying the tunnels
he claims connect militants in Egypt's Sinai to Gaza.
The last remaining tunnels are owned by a small group of men,
some of whom are Gaza's wealthiest merchants.
We meet up with two of them
to learn what it takes to build and run a tunnel
and to see if we can get permission to film in one.
Mm-hmm?
Dina: We get permission to go down in one of their tunnels
that had been bombed but is being rebuilt.
We're driving to Rafah now,
the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza
and the ground zero of the tunnel economy.
So, we just crossed a security checkpoint.
We are in a heavily militarized area right now.
This is Rafah, the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza.
All of these mounds of sand is the remnants
of what's been dug up to create the tunnels, essentially.
So on the other side of this mound is Egypt.
Hamas soldiers stand on dirt mounds
and look out at their Egyptian counterparts
just 100 yards away.
The Egyptians are freaking out.
They've managed to see our cameras,
and they're threatening to shoot us.
He's gonna let me go up.
The Egyptian soldiers warn our team to leave the area,
or they will open fire.
Despite the threats, our contacts agree to take us
to a tunnel entrance just a couple hundred yards away
hidden under a tent.
[ Speaks Arabic ]
Going down!
[ Shouts ]
Holy shit.
[ Speaks Arabic ]
Oh, my God.
This is fucking scary.
Guys.
Are there people here?
Oh, wow, yeah.
Even though we're 30 meters underground right now,
there's electricity, there's, uh, microphones
that they have connected here so that they can communicate.
But, uh, of course at any moment, this could collapse,
or even the Egyptians could bomb us.
The tunnel will be used to smuggle goods
to the Palestinians living here under an economic blockade.
-Okay. -[ Speaking Arabic ]
Dina: I meet a 15- and 16-year-old
who have been digging tunnels for more than two years.
Mm-hmm.
Oh.
Hm, hm.
All right, here we go.
We decide to head further into the tunnel,
closer to the Egyptian border.
[ Speaking Arabic ]
Dina: Wow.
I'm in a tunnel under Gaza's border with Egypt
that will be used to smuggle contraband into Gaza.
So -- so, basically, they --
they use, uh, this machinery over here
to pull in, um, bags of sand so they can dig in deeper
and get further into Egypt.
Um, these workers don't want to have their faces revealed,
so this is -- this is really, really dangerous for them.
We should -- we -- we need to move out
because their lives are in danger basically right now
if their faces are revealed.
Okay. I think we need to --
These guys have hundreds of yards left to dig
before they can break the surface
and connect with their Egyptian partners.
Whoo!
Being down their makes you realize
just how bad things are in Gaza.
With unemployment at 45% and so few goods coming in,
you can understand why Gazans are willing to risk so much
to build these tunnels.
[ Birds chirping ]
Mohammed Omer is an author and journalist
who covers the illegal tunnel economy that keeps Gaza alive.
Here we are in Rafah.
This is your neighborhood? -Yeah.
You've been here all your life? Yes.
Rafah is just filled with buildings like these
that are just completely, like, destroyed from the war?
Well, I mean, this is one of the best buildings, if you ask me.
-Really? -[ Chuckles ]
This area used to be filled with working tunnels. Yes.
Remember that this used to be the hub of the economy
in the Gaza Strip.
The tunnels economy at least employed
30,000 to 40,000 workers.
Between the period of June 2013 until October 2013,
the Gaza de facto authorities said that they had lost
$460 million in revenues from this tunnel.
Wow. So they would tax each item coming through the tunnels.
-Yes, indeed. -Hamas would tax it, of course.
Oh, yeah, you have to get a clearance beforehand
of what's coming, and then you need to bring it.
Even if you are bringing sheeps, animals,
if you bring cows from Egypt through the tunnels,
you need to make sure that they go through the tax system,
which will provide the money and revenue
to the Palestinian de facto authorities in Gaza.
If we look from here, the Egyptian side,
it's being completely destroyed
because Egypt has started this policy of, uh,
creating a buffer zone of 500 meters.
And then they have decided to increase it into another 500.
And now it's even going beyond one kilometer of destruction
as we see.
Why do you think the Egyptians are so threatened by the tunnels?
Why do they have such an investment in destroying them?
It's actually to crash the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip
and also to -- not to create any linkage
between Hamas and the remains of the Muslim Brotherhood.
If you stay here for one more hour,
you will hear massive bombardment
throughout the night, and it stays until early morning.
Dina: These bombings have meant getting access
to an operational tunnel is proving really difficult.
Our local producer, Mohammed,
has been trying to get permission from Hamas.
[ Cellphone rings ]
Yeah.
[ Cellphone beeps ]
So, they have, like, control over all the tunnels.
They're aware of every single tunnel that's going out of Gaza. Yeah.
And no one can get access to it without their permission.
Yeah. 'Cause if they trust you, they give you everything.
But if they don't trust you, they don't give you anything.
So, we have to get them to trust us.
-Exactly. -[ Chuckles ] Okay.
Great.
We're waiting on Hamas.
Dina: I'm in Gaza,
and we're waiting on word form Hamas
to film inside one of the illegal tunnels
that bring in contraband goods.
In the meantime, I want to meet some of the families
that depend on these tunnels to survive.
So I headed to the mosque for Friday prayers.
Mm-hmm.
[ Singing in Arabic ]
After the service, I met a young woman named Ahlam.
Ahlam invited us into her home.
She lives with her parents,
who were well off before the blockade.
My mother.
Uh, my sister.
Dina: This is their Friday-night meal.
They couldn't find any meat at the market.
Her father had to spend two days of wages
to buy a few cans of chickpeas, some vegetables, and pita bread.
Even a middle-class family like Ahlam's depends on the tunnels.
As the bombings continue, security has tightened.
I linked back up with Mohammed
to see if he heard back from Hamas.
Rajab: We are heading to Rafah to see one of the few tunnels left.
We were lucky to see that and access this tunnel
because he's -- he's afraid that if someone will know about that
they're gonna destroy these tunnel later by air strike.
Dina: We have finally got permission
to film inside an operational tunnel.
[ Speaking indistinctly ]
[ Machine whirring ]
[ Motor whirring ]
It takes up to 40 minutes
for these sleds to make the mile-long journey
from deep inside Egypt to Gaza.
On this night, only a dozen shipments made it through.
One carried medicine for one of Gaza's main hospitals.
Another sled had potato chips.
This is only a fraction of the goods
that used to move through the border
when their were thousands of tunnels.
[ Motor whirring ]
[ Birds chirping ]
Omer: Poverty is increasing in Gaza.
Young people are having no jobs.
There are no chances.
They're just gonna create more hatred
by segregating and separating the Palestinians
from the rest of the world.
Dina: Since we filmed, the tunnel I went down in
was flooded by the Egyptian military.
The workers I met are safe,
but now there are only a couple of tunnels left,
further cutting off Gaza from the outside world
and making people more desperate for new tunnels to open.