Palestinian smugglers are using a network of tunnels dug under the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt to bring a new flavor to the Israel-blockaded enclave: fried chicken from U.S. fast-food chain KFC.

Since Israel tightened a blockade on the coastal territory six years ago, Palestinians have used the tunnels to smuggle everything from fuel to livestock - and even cars - from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.

Now, a Gaza-based delivery service company known as Yamama, or pigeon, has taken to delivering Kentucky Fried Chicken all over the Gaza Strip.

Yamama’s motorcycle couriers ride to the Egyptian border, pick up the chicken from one of the tunnels, and deliver it to customers.

The meals are made at KFC stores in various cities throughout the Sinai Peninsula, because there are no KFC restaurants in Gaza. A KFC restaurant opened last year in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Israel tightened a blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after the militant group Hamas seized control of the territory from secular Fatah rivals, who govern the West Bank.

“Anyone who wants to eat real Kentucky Fried Chicken can call our office in Gaza, give his name and his telephone number and say exactly how many meals he wants,” said Ibrahim, a Yamama motorbike rider.

Yamama’s owners said the new business began by accident when the company’s motorbike riders offered to order KFC meals.

“It usually takes three hours for the meal to be brought from Egypt to Gaza and less than an hour to bring it from the tunnel and give it to the customer,” Ibrahim said.

The company has a website (http://www.ymama.ps) featuring pictures of Egyptian fast food. It also has a page on Facebook, where customers can place orders for KFC deliveries the next day.

But the lengthy delivery time, sometimes prolonged by Hamas inspections or holdups on the Egyptian side, takes its toll.

“It is really very delicious although it is not very hot,” said Eyad, a 21-year-old Gaza student.

Haaretz

A Health Ministry inspector poured bleach over pots full of food in a Sudanese restaurant in Tel Aviv Sunday night.

The inspector, from the ministry’s district office for Tel Aviv, was participating in a raid by police and municipal inspectors on illegal businesses owned by African migrants. Altogether, the raid shut down 10 businesses in the city’s Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood, confiscating their equipment and welding the doors shut. The equipment was then loaded onto vans by other African migrants who had been hired as contract workers.

Many diners saw the inspector pouring bleach on the food, and one, asylum-seeker Aladin Abaker from Sudan’s Darfur region, posted photos of the incident on his Facebook page. He also described his feelings of humiliation.

“Everyone − except the destroyers − was in tears from the humiliation,” he wrote. “The waitress told us, ‘I’ve seen very harsh things in my life, like torture in Sinai, but this humiliated me more than what happened to me in Sinai.”

Abaker accused the inspector of “insensitivity to people and their culture, which sees food as a sacred thing that must be respected,” and said the raid was aimed at “embittering our lives so we’ll return to Africa ‘voluntarily.’”

Altogether, he said, more than 200 kilograms of meat, chicken and fish and over 500 prepared meals were destroyed.

The inspectors said they didn’t know where the meat came from and therefore feared for the diners’ health, Abaker wrote. “We told them: But this is the only place we’ve eaten all our meals for four years now, and none of us ever had stomach problems. Even whites eat here.”

The Health Ministry responded that inspectors had discovered “deplorable sanitary conditions, food stored under unsuitable conditions and temperatures, and food from unknown sources. In order to preserve the public’s health and that of the diners themselves, it was decided to destroy the food immediately. As part of the process of destroying the food, chemicals suitable to this purpose are used. It should be noted that this was a routine process of food destruction that is no different from other destructions of food/meat.”

Tel Aviv’s deputy city manager, Ruby Zelof, said the raids were carried out “to eradicate the undesirable phenomenon of businesses operating illegally, with sanitation and safety problems and illegal connections to electricity and water, and sales of alcoholic beverages without permits.”

Haaretz | Photo credit: Aladin Abaker

Israel is deporting Africans and also planning to put tens of thousands into detention camps.

Knesset Member Miri Regev — a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party — called the refugees “a cancer in our body” and Danny Danon — also a Likud Knesset Member — wrote on his Facebook page referring to the Africans as “infiltrators”. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said the African asylum seekers threaten “the Zionist dream,” adding, “Jobs will root them here.”

See also:

• Why is the birth rate in Israel’s Ethiopian community declining? Ethiopian women who immigrated to Israel were coaxed into agreeing to injections of long-acting birth control drugs, or told they would not be allowed into the country
• Israeli woman has her photo taken with Africans, titles the Facebook album: “Late night tour of the Tel Aviv Safari”, captions the photo: “There are no signs forbidding taking pictures with the animals. There were no signs that forbid feeding, but we passed on that.”

Follow @iyad_elbaghdadi / #ArabTyrantManual

Related:

• Sami Kishawi: “Genuinely disgusted by pro-Assad thugs who say they also support Palestine against Israel’s oppression. Don’t need your backward support.”
• Airstrike carried out by Bashar al-Assad’s forces on a mosque in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria [extremely graphic]
• [Extremely graphic] Videos and photos from #MassaceofBaniyas, in which Assad’s forces executed at least 62 Muslims, 14 of whom were children; Victims were stabbed and shot, women found mutilated, toddlers covered in burns
• Assad’s soldiers force Muslim man to prostrate to poster of him and call their leader his G-d

Olga Khazan | The Atlantic

Israel mounted two air raids on Syrian military facilities near Damascus this weekend, striking what was believed to be a store of Fatah-110 missiles that were destined for transfer to the Lebanon-based Islamist militant group Hezbollah, an ally of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and an arch-nemesis of Israel.

But the strikes weren’t intended to weaken Assad — or even the Syrian opposition, for that matter. Instead, Israel seems singularly focused on preventing Hezbollah from getting stronger as a side effect of the Syrian civil war.

Israel so far hasn’t taken a position in the Syrian conflict, largely because it’s not especially rooting for either side to win. The Jewish state has had a tense but relatively peaceable relationship with the Assad regime for decades, and it fears what might happen if Syria’s rebels — some of whom, unlike Assad, are hardcore Islamists — boot out their ruler and take charge.

In fact, Israel so desperately wants to avoid taking sides in the Syrian conflagration that it didn’t even formally take responsibility for this weekend’s strikes — an attempt to allow Assad to “save face,” Reuters reported. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to China on a scheduled trip Sunday, as if to show Assad and the world that everything was business as usual.

Despite this seemingly meek approach, though, Israel has done whatever it can throughout the war to prevent the arming of Hezbollah without provoking Assad. Military analysts told Reuters that the Fateh-110 missiles Israel destroyed this weekend could have put Tel Aviv within range of Hezbollah gunners. (Hezbollah may be stockpiling weapons, some think, in case Assad falls and their own clout is weakened as a result.)

This weekend was the second time Israel has struck weapons in Syria this year. The first was in January, when Israeli warplanes hit a convoy carrying anti-aircraft weaponry just outside Damascus.

At the time, Israeli officials said that if the country gets any inkling that Syria is losing control of its weapons or transferring them to Hezbollah, it will attempt to “hit the stockpiles.” “Everything will have ramifications,” Avi Dichter, the minister for the home front, told Israel Radio in January. “The stockpiles are not always in places where operative thinking is possible. It could be that hitting the stockpiles will also mean hitting people.”

Then, lest anyone get the wrong idea, he hastily added that “Israel has no intention of hitting residents of Syria.”

This weekend’s air strikes show that while President Obama’s so-called “red line” for Syria is the use of chemical weapons, Israel’s is weapons for Hezbollah — and Israel isn’t budging.

“The Israelis are saying, ‘O.K., whichever way the civil war is going, we are going to keep our red lines, which are different from Obama’s,’” Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the New York Times.

So far, there’s no sign of retaliation from Syria. A Syrian government spokesman responded to Israel’s attacks by accusing them of backing the so-called “terrorists” fighting Assad and said it “opens the door wide to all possibilities.” Israel deployed two of its Iron Dome missile interceptors along the Syrian border as a precaution, but most analysts say Israel is too powerful a force for Assad to take on at this point.

Meanwhile, Israeli officials went out of their way to demur:

“There are no winds of war,” Yair Golan, the general commanding Israeli forces on the Syrian and Lebanese fronts, told reporters on Monday. And later, in a vigorous wave of an olive branch, denied that the strikes would escalate tensions between Syria and Israel.

“Do you see tension? There is no tension. Do I look tense to you?”

See also:

• Immediate Responses to Israel’s Attack
  
• Erdogan: Israeli air raids opportunity for Assad to cover up massacre in Baniyas which took place over the weekend
  
• [Extremely graphic] Videos and photos from #MassaceofBaniyas, in which Assad’s forces executed at least 62 Muslims, 14 of whom were children; Victims were stabbed and shot, women found mutilated, toddlers covered in burns