In on the tide, the guns and rockets that fuel this fight

As the methods of drugs smugglers are used to bring weapons to Gaza, mystery still surrounds the 'Karin A' arms shipment

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It was the day of the black barrels. Everyone along the Gaza seashore remembers the day. Big, black-painted oil barrels drifting in on the tide just 16 months ago brought more guns into Gaza than the Palestinians have smuggled through the tunnels of Rafah. All night and all day they came in on the tide.

It was the children of Gaza who broke open the first barrel on the sand – to find it stuffed with grenades, Kalashnikov rifles and mortar shells. Where did they come from? One Palestinian official called on a drug-dealer – "an unsavoury person who didn't want to come and see me" – and gave him coffee. Thus did he learn one of Gaza's profounder mysteries. Whoever sent the guns knew how the drug-smugglers use the tides.

"This man tells me that there's a place about 25 to 30 miles from the shore, it's known as al-birkah – the pool – and the smugglers drop their packages there. The tides take them on to the shore between Erez and Rafah," he said.

"The current in the sea is like the road in the desert. People know the right time to drop stuff over the side of a ship, how long it will take to reach Gaza – less than a week. These are professionals – they know how to get the guns in."

The Israeli army is all too well aware of how well armed the Gaza Strip has become, and not just because it picked up some of the barrels.

Galil assault rifles and Israeli sniper rifles have turned up in Gaza, bought in what was Area B of the West Bank – the district jointly administered by both Israelis and Palestinians under the Oslo agreement – with the help of Israeli middlemen. These are often, so Palestinians say, newly-arrived Russian immigrants to Israel. And a lot more weapons found their way into Gaza in the years immediately before the Oslo treaty.

According to a Palestinian lawyer, a group of Israelis – possibly an undercover military squad – made an attempt in 1991 to flood the illegal market with weapons in order to provoke a battle between Palestinian Islamists and PLO groups in Gaza.

"I didn't believe there would be so many weapons around," the lawyer says. "People would come and say, 'you want 50 pieces [guns]? Then prepare your cash.' Now at this time, everyone knew that the nationalist factions – the PLO and the PFLP and others – were broke. It was Hamas which had the money. The Israelis are not stupid. They knew if they dumped guns on the market, they would go to the Islamists. There were hundreds of pieces – M-16s, Galils, pistols – and 80 per cent of them went to Hamas. The Israelis wanted an internal, domestic war. Fortunately, we avoided this and kept the guns for now. The Israelis didn't think about that. As they say here, 'the calculations of the palace are different from the calculations of the field'."

Short-range rockets and explosives have come through the tunnels beneath the frontier fence at Rafah – the border is controlled by Israeli troops and, on the other side, by the Egyptians – but Palestinians involved in the future defence of Gaza remain puzzled about the mysterious Karin A, the ship loaded with weapons that was escorted to shore by the Israeli Navy earlier this year. On the basis of the strange voyage of the Karin A, the United States blamed Iran for trying to smuggle weapons to the Palestinian Authority – and Yasser Arafat for his alleged involvement in the operation.

One man well-versed in the movement of weapons has his own theories about the Karin A. "I know the man who was behind this, a dirty guy who used to be involved in drugs, a Palestinian who also once worked for Arafat. Now here's what I am told: those guns that were 'found' on board never came from Iran. The Karin A stood offshore off Yemen for a couple of days and the guns were brought from an old PLO arms dump in Yemen.

"Do you really think it's possible to smuggle guns on a ship up the Red Sea with the Saudis watching and the US fleet in the waters there? Do you really think that ship could come up the Suez Canal without being checked out by the Egyptians? The Suez Canal is mission impossible. We're not talking about Zodiac speed-boats. This was a big ship. So it only got a few miles."

In the dirty war of arms-smuggling, this story just might be a false trail, but it certainly raises a number of intriguing questions. Not least is the claim by the same Palestinian that the very same drug dealer who allegedly arranged the voyage of the Karin A is now inside Mr Arafat's besieged headquarters in Ramallah. Whether he is there as a prisoner or as a collaborator, the Palestinian did not know.

Israel, of course, has long accused the Palestinians of contravening the terms of the Oslo agreement by acquiring more weapons than they are permitted. Technically, the Israelis are right – although the Oslo accords did not permit Israel to re-occupy West Bank cities. "Why should it be regarded as illegitimate for the Palestinians to have these weapons?" the lawyer asked. "Legitimacy is acquired by defending your people. The Israelis have tanks and F-16s which they use against us. So why can't we have guns? At the end of the day, you can't be lambs in a wood of foxes."