Five Palestinians found dead in Gaza-Egypt smuggling tunnel

Gaza medics say five Palestinians have been found dead in a smuggling tunnel under the border with Egypt.

Health official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain said the men suffocated in the cramped, makeshift tunnel.

Local residents say they were smuggling food into the strip, which has been under a crippling blockade since the violent Hamas movement seized control there in 2007.

Hassanain said the men died Saturday, but were only found on Sunday.

The body of one man killed in the same incident was retrieved on Saturday making a total of five.

Halting Gaza's smuggling is a key issue in negotiations for a stable truce between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers.

The tunnels are used to smuggle food and consumer products, but also to run arms.

Egypt opens Gaza border crossing to students, medical patients

Egypt on Sunday opened its Rafah border crossing with Gaza to let students, third-country residents and medical patients stranded in the territory cross the usually closed frontier.

Spokesman Adel Zourab says Egypt has agreed to allow 500 students studying abroad and 500 others with valid residency permits for Egypt or other countries to pass through the border crossing Sunday. He says 800 medical cases will be allowed to cross on Monday.

Egypt sealed the border after Islamic Hamas militants seized control of Gaza in June 2007. It has occasionally opened the passage for limited periods.

European monitors on Sunday said they are ready to resume their assignment on the Gaza-Egypt border at a moment's notice, following an involuntary 20-month break, the head of the mission said.

In the past two weeks, 20 monitors returned to the region amid reports of progress on a Palestinian power-sharing agreement and an Israel-Hamas prisoner swap - prerequisites for reopening the Gaza-Egypt border. For months, the European Union Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM) had operated with a scaled-back staff of 18.

"We are waiting for all parties to agree," mission chief Col. Alain Faugeras said in an interview Friday.

The European monitors were deployed at the Rafah passenger terminal between Gaza and Egypt as part of a 2005 agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas. The monitors were to reassure Israel that weapons and militants wouldn't get into Gaza after its pullout from the territory in the fall of 2005.

Israel has kept its crossings with Gaza closed. Rafah is Gaza's main gateway to the outside world.