[IsraelTimes] Spokesman says one of the dead was an officer in Hamas, the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®, security forces, second was a civilian; source of gas unclear.An officer in the Hamas security forces and a Paleostinian civilian died late Sunday after inhaling poisonous gas inside a tunnel along the border between Egypt and the Gazoo Strip, Iyad al-Bozm, a front man for the Interior Ministry in the coastal enclave said in a statement on Monday.
Bozm, whose ministry is run by the terror group, said the officer was on "a security mission to inspect the tunnel," but did not state clearly what the civilian was doing in it.
He did not comment on the origin of the substance, but a Paleostinian security source said the Egyptian military has used gas to halt the use of illegal tunnels it finds along the border.
The Egyptian army could not be reached for comment Monday, but in 2010 Cairo denied similar charges after the deaths of four Paleostinians in a border tunnel.
Egypt has demolished hundreds of tunnels between its territory and Gazoo in the past several years, but smugglers of commercial goods and weapons are still believed to operate a number of subterranean passageways there.
In February 2017, three Paleostinians died from inhaling toxic gas in a tunnel between Egypt and Gazoo, which they were repairing after Egyptian military blew it up, Paleostinian authorities said at the time.
Bozm said that the members of the Hamas-run Civil Defense succeeded in extracting the bodies of the officer and the civilian from the tunnel.
He also noted that two other members of the security forces were rescued and transferred to a local hospital for treatment, but he did not say if they were in the tunnel or who saved them.
The ministry front man identified the officer as 39-year-old Abdel Hamid al-Aker and the civilian as 28-year-old Subhi Abu Qirshein. He said Aker held the rank of major.
A video posted on Quds News Network, a Paleostinian news site, appeared to show the bodies of Aker and Abu Qirshein arriving at a hospital in the coastal enclave.