Gaza residents have been telling a macabre joke in recent weeks: Once the Egyptians finish building the huge fishponds they’re planning in Rafah, tens of thousands of tunnel workers will have to take up diving.

Not long ago, Egypt announced that in an effort to stamp out the smuggling enterprise through tunnels from the Sinai Peninsula to the Gaza Strip, it was planning to set up an enormous system of fishponds 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) long. How the ponds will be built, how the large quantities of water will be transferred from el-Arish and when the work will be completed all remain a mystery at this stage. These unknowns aside, the plan’s detractors and the concerned people in Gaza say that the project — if ever implemented — would take so long to complete it would give the tens or hundreds of thousands of unemployed people enough time to find new ways to adapt to the fishponds.

Israel, too, had tried to come up with creative ideas to secure its Egypt-Gaza border, such as a deeply planted steel wall (the Philadelphi Route) or digging a sea canal on the border between the Egyptian side of Gaza and the Palestinian one to make contraband smuggling harder. The canal was never dug, and Gaza’s tunnel experts found ingenious ways to overcome the obstacles that had been set up. But this time, it seems the lights have gone out in Rafah’s tunnels.

Until Cairo waged its all-out war against the tunnels that were Gaza’s lifeline, Hamas leaders saw the Saladin Project — the name for the smuggling enterprise from Egypt — as a huge pioneering success, a symbol of the triumphant Palestinian spirit. Thanks to the tunnels, Hamas' leaders were able to hold onto the reins in Gaza despite the hardships. But those times seem to be over. Gaza is shutting down. Though the last eight years have been horrible for its residents, the future appears to be even bleaker.