GAZA CITY, Palestine

The bodies of three Palestinians were retrieved from an underground tunnel near Gaza’s border with Egypt, a security spokesman said.

"Rescue teams recovered the bodies of three citizens from a tunnel in the border area south of Rafah city after they went missing on Thursday evening,” Iyad Al-Bazm, a spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said in a statement.

Al-Bazm said the corpses were transferred to the hospital for postmortem examination.

The cause of the death of the three men was not immediately clear and both authorities in Gaza and Egypt are yet to issue a comment on the incident.

Israel has imposed a land and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip following Hamas’ victory in legislative elections in 2006.

Many in Gaza have resorted to a sophisticated network of cross-border tunnels connecting Gaza and Egypt to smuggle in basic commodities, including food, fuel, and medicine in an attempt to circumvent the blockade.

However, since 2013 the Egyptian authorities have cracked down hard on the cross-border tunnel network.

*Writing by Ibrahim Mukhtar in Ankara