Thee Palestinian workers were killed inside a collapsed tunnel along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, according to Gaza’s civil defense authority.
The workers died after inhaling toxic gas inside the tunnel, the agency said in a statement on Saturday.
The bodies were recovered on Saturday and were sent to a hospital in the town of Rafah.
A Palestinian security source said on Friday that four workers had gone missing and that ten others suffered after inhaling toxic gas while repairing a tunnel destroyed by the Egyptian army.
There was no comment from the Egyptian side on the claim.
Reeling from a decade-long blockade by Israel, the roughly 2 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have come to rely on the cross-border tunnel network for the import of badly-needed commodities, including food, fuel and medicine.
Since Egypt’s 2013 military coup against President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, the Egyptian authorities have cracked down on the network of border tunnels.
In recent months, the Egyptian army has been methodically flooding the network of cross-border tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
In 2014, Egypt began building a “buffer zone” along its border with Gaza following a spate of militant attacks on Egyptian security forces.
