But for most Arabs and Palestinians, the Egyptian wall is no different from Israel's ill-reputed separation fence in the West Bank. Some Hamas leaders have even gone as far as condemning the Egyptian initiative as a 'declaration of war' on the Palestinians.

'This wall is aimed at destroying the Gaza Strip,' said Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum. 'The wall is being built to aggravate the suffering of the Palestinians with the hope that they would revolt against the democratically-elected government of Hamas.'

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said that the barrier was 'more dangerous than the Bar-Lev Line,' which was built by Israel along the eastern coast of the Suez Canal after it captured Sinai from Egypt in the 1967 war.

In the past few days Hamas has organised demonstrations near the border with Egypt in protest against the new wall. Thousands of Hamas supporters, chanting anti-Egyptian slogans, have participated in the protests.

Hamas officials believe that the wall is intended to punish the Islamic movement because of its refusal to sign an Egyptian-brokered reconciliation accord with the rival Fatah faction headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The agreement was supposed to be signed in Cairo last October, but was called off at the last minute after Hamas announced that it was planning to boycott the ceremony.

The Hamas stance is believed to have deeply upset Mubarak who, according to reports in the Egyptian media, threatened to retaliate against the movement.

The Egyptians are also said to be furious with Hamas because the movement has preferred German mediation in secret talks to reach a prisoner exchange agreement with Israel. For the past three years, it was the Egyptian authorities who played the role of mediator between Israel and Hamas, which is holding an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captive in the Gaza Strip.

But Hamas has since abandoned their Egyptian mentors in favour of German mediators. Some Hamas spokesmen claimed that the Egyptians were 'not honest brokers' because they appeared to be biased in favour of Israel. In other words, what Hamas is saying is that it trusts the Germans more than the Egyptians — a fact that has left the Mubarak regime completely stunned and humiliated.

Tensions between Hamas and Egypt climaxed two years ago when tens of thousands of Palestinians knocked down large parts of the border fence and streamed into Egypt. The mass breach of the border was also viewed as a severe degradation of the Egyptian regime's standing and prestige.

The Egyptians, political and security analysts in the Middle East say, are worried that Hamas will co-operate with fundamentalist organisations like Muslim Brotherhood in undermining Mubarak's pro-Western, secular regime. Some Egyptians see the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as a direct and strategic threat to their national security.

Other analysts see the new wall as the result of intense American pressure exerted on the Egyptians to stop smuggling operations along the border with the Gaza Strip. The U.S. has in the past threatened to suspend $200 million in military aid to Egypt under the pretext that Egyptian authorities were not doing enough to stop the smuggling of weapons through underground tunnels into the Gaza Strip.

Whatever the reasons behind the new wall, what is evident is that the Egyptians have succeeded in drawing fierce criticism and denunciations from many Arabs and Muslims.

'Egypt is walking a tightrope between its commitments to Arabs and Palestinians and at the same time its commitment to protecting its security interests,' said Jamal Soltan, a political analyst with the Ahram Centre, a government-funded think-tank in Cairo.

Some Arabs complain that the construction of the steel wall, which they refer to as the 'wall of shame,' will affect the strength of their argument against the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank.

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