Hamas leader Mahmud al-Zahar told reporters on Saturday his movement will work with Cairo to gradually seal the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.
"We will work towards controlling the border between us and Egypt... this has to be done gradually," Zahar told reporters as he crossed back into Gaza after two days of talks with officials in Cairo. He added that the border would be under control by Sunday.
"We have concluded an agreement between us and our brothers in Egypt to operate channels at the local level at the crossing and along the border and we will implement it tomorrow after we meet with the (Hamas-run) government."
Cairo has not yet commented on the talks, which followed a meeting between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose forces were violently driven from Gaza by Hamas seven months ago.
Hundreds of thousands of people have streamed across the border since January 23, when Palestinian militants destroyed large sections of the barrier wall after a near week-long Israeli lockdown of the territory.
"The opening of the border was a popular act because we could not find coffins for our martyrs, our sick were dying, and 400 people suffering from kidney failure were threatened with death," Zahar said.
"The blood and the injustice ignited the Arab position." By Friday Egypt had succeeded in halting all but pedestrian traffic, but Hamas militants later dragged away metal barricades to allow a column of massive transport trucks to push into the centre of Egyptian Rafah.
"We gave our side of the story to the Egyptians about what happened on the border because there was some behaviour that was unacceptable," Zahar said, without offering specifics.
"There will not be any armed Palestinians on the border," he said. Zahar said humanitarian aid will continue to flow through the crossing-the only gateway to Gaza that is not under Israeli control.
"Egypt has confirmed that it will work to provide the Palestinian people with everything it needs... the trucks that carry food and medicine will be processed on the Egyptian side in a suitable way," Zahar said.
Hamas has demanded that the Rafah crossing be operated through a strictly Palestinian-Egyptian agreement to replace a 2005 arrangement that included European Union observers and Israeli electronic surveillance. Abbas has said his government should operate the crossings and has refused all contact with Hamas unless it returns Gaza to his control.
On Saturday Zahar said his delegation and the Egyptians had "overcome many obstacles and agreed on ways of solving the problems with the crossing in the way we have demanded. "There will be discussions among international bodies to solve these problems in a way to normalise the border in the way we have demanded and not according to the whims of the Israelis," he added.
Militants blasted and bulldozed several gaps in the border fence less than a week after Israel completely sealed the territory off from the outside world after a spike in Israeli-Palestinian violence.
The border has evolved into a landscape of chaos and commerce in recent days, with thousands of people streaming across in both directions with crates of goods, livestock, and plastic jugs of diesel fuel.
In the days following the January 23 breakout Egyptian forces closed in on the border region, preventing Palestinians from travelling further inland to Cairo and sealing all but two of the breaches in the barrier fence.
But no effort has yet been made to halt pedestrian traffic, and neither Egyptian nor Palestinian security forces have been inspecting goods on their way into or out of Gaza. Israel has been on heightened alert amid fears that militants will cross into the Sinai, and has warned its citizens to avoid the area around the border, including nearby Egyptian beach resorts.
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