Israel thwarts security equipment smuggling attempt to Gaza

Israel said Wednesday it has captured a "large-scale" amount of goods that Palestinians attempted to smuggle into the besieged Gaza Strip.

Defense Ministry spokesman Arielle Heffez said that security equipments were found and seized at the Erez Crossing, a crossing for transporting goods to the Gaza Strip.

"The discovery was unusual, even to those familiar with the most creative smuggling attempts and methodologies," Heffez said in a statement.

Over the past few weeks, officials with the Defense Ministry's crossing authority and Israel's Shin Bet security service have uncovered "hundreds of smuggling attempts" at the postal service into Gaza through the Erez Crossing.

Heffez said that the confiscated items included security and surveillance cameras, unmanned aerial vehicles, model airplanes, binoculars, laser pointers for weapons, electronic boards, tasers, weapons components, packages of motion sensors, and routers.

The Defense Ministry said that an investigation was launched, adding that the confiscation was a "demonstration of the heavy pressure being put on smugglers and terrorist operatives."

Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast War.

Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since 2007, when the Islamist organization Hamas took control over the Strip, and embargoes were imposed on the area.

Israel had conducted several rounds of fighting with Hamas in the past decade. The latest round of fighting took place in the summer of 2014 for two months, claiming the lives of more than 2,200 Palestinians and over 70 Israelis and wreaking havoc on the enclave.

The war ended with a fragile ceasefire, mediated by Egypt, in August 2014. Endit