Published today (updated) 03/01/2010 18:39

Gaza – Ma’an –

Hamas on Sunday urged leading Islamic clerics in Egypt to reverse a recent edict supporting the construction of a metal wall cutting off smuggling tunnels under the border with the Gaza Strip.

It emerged late last week that scholars at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam's highest seat of learning, issued a fatwa in favor of the wall.

"It is one of Egypt's legitimate rights to place a barrier that prevents the harm from the tunnels under Rafah, which are used to smuggle drugs and other [contraband] that threaten Egypt's stability," the newspaper Al-Masri Al-Yom quoted the scholars as saying, according to AFP.

"Those who oppose building this wall are violating the commands of Islamic law," they added, after a meeting attended by Egypt's top cleric Sheikh Muhammad Said Tantawi, who is a government appointee.

The tunnels are used to import goods made in Gaza scarce under and Israeli-led blockade, including food items, medicine, fuel, and toys, in addition to weapons and drugs.

The leadership of the Islamist Hamas movement, which control’s Gaza’s local government, issued a statement on Sunday calling on the Al-Azhar scholars to retract the fatwa and instead declare the wall forbidden (haram).

The statement asked sarcastically, “whether the steel wall under the borders meant to protect Egypt’s national security from Zionist occupation, or it was meant to deprive the besieged Gazan children of milk and medicine?”

“We would like to remind our honorable intellectuals of Al-Azhar that Palestine is an occupied Islamic territory, and that Al-Aqsa Mosque is being Judaised and profaned,” they added.

The statement asserted that Hamas and the people of Gaza would come to Egypt’s defense just as they would defend Jerusalem, and that Egypt was still represents a “strategic dimension for Palestinian resistance.”

The fatwa in support of the wall has also sparked criticism from other clerics who say it contradicts previous edicts calling on Muslims to support Palestine.

“This barrier will besiege our brothers in Gaza and offer them no way out of the three-year old Israeli blockade,” an opposed group of scholars said in a statement, according to the pan-Arab news network Al-Arabiya.

“It will deprive them of food, medicine and fuel and will crush the resistance,” the group said of the wall.