The tunnels overwhelmingly go to Egypt, not Israel, and the strip's entire economy for almost a decade has been built around bringing everything from iPods to entire automobiles into the strip underground, and away from prying eyes.

The Gaza economy is hugely dependent on the tunnels, and domestic investment in the production of new and better tunnels to import new and better products was materially the only growing sector in the Gaza Strip's economy, to the extent that at some points, investment bubbles were formed by the desperation to get into the tunnel digging business.