Commerce
An average-sized tunnel costs $90,000 to construct and run; some investors in the tunnels have been defrauded. According to one report, the cost of smuggling a person from Egypt into the Gaza strip is $1,000. A Kalashnikov rifle in the Gaza Strip can cost up to $1,000 compared with 2,000 Egyptian pounds ($320) across the border. A single cartridge used to cost $3 in Gaza compared with $0.08 in Egypt, but since the Hamas coup, and the subsequent capture of the Fatah weapons' storage, the prices have dropped.
The tunnels are used to import a wide range of goods, including the horses that race at the Faisal Equestrian Club. The tunnels were also used to smuggle in construction materials for the Gaza Mall and the Crazy Water Park.
Read more about this topic: Gaza Strip Smuggling Tunnels
Famous quotes containing the word commerce:
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.”
—Anita Brookner (b. 1938)