The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is working with the Egyptians to stop smuggling through tunnels spanning the Egypt-Gaza Strip border.
The United States “worked through the Army Corps of Engineers to help them identify ways that they might deal with the tunnels,” Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State, said Thursday in testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rice was asked by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) to justify continuing $1.3 billion in military assistance to Egypt considering its failure to stanch the arms flow to the Hamas terrorists who run Gaza and who have enabled rocket attacks on Israel.
“I think it’s fair to say that we’ve not been satisfied with Egypt’s effort on the tunnels, but that in fact those tunnels have been there for a long time, and it’s been hard to stop smuggling whoever was trying to deal with that,” she said. “We’re in constant – we’re in conversation with the Egyptians as well as the Israelis about how that might be done better.”
