BICOM

Egypt’s police force closed the Rafah border crossing with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip following the kidnapping of seven Egyptian policemen and soldiers by Islamist gunmen towards the end of last week.

The gunmen seized the security personnel in the northern Sinai Peninsula on a road between the towns of el-Arish and Rafah. They then demanded the release of several fellow Islamist extremists currently imprisoned by Egyptian authorities. In response, Egyptian policemen arranged barbed wire across the country’s Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip on Friday. The crossing remains closed, stranding hundreds of Palestinian families with no end to the stand-off in sight. According to Reuters, the protesting policemen announced “We will not open the crossing until the kidnapped soldiers are freed and the interior minister arrives to listen to our demands so that these attacks on us are not repeated.”

The northern section of the Sinai Peninsula has become increasingly lawless since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and since then it has been used as a staging ground for three deadly terror attacks on neighbouring Israel. In March, Egyptian officials said that they apprehended twenty five suspected terrorists in the Sinai region and seized a number of weapons.

Addressing the current border crisis, Egypt’s President Muhammed Morsi yesterday pledged “We will not succumb to any blackmail,” commenting that “all options are open.” A video of the seven kidnapped policemen and soldiers, all blindfolded, was released by their captors. Meanwhile, Egyptian policemen extended their closure of the country’s border, blocking the Nitzana commercial crossing with Israel, twenty five miles south of Rafah, which is responsible predominantly for transporting goods to the Gaza Strip. Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri told Al Jazeera that the Egyptian closure was “unjustified and incomprehensible.”