Why is Rafah, the only border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, so important?

Rafah is a Palestinian town located at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, on the border with Egypt. Thousand-year-old remains of his name have been found in Aramaic sources. In 2021, around 185,000 people lived there, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics. A rapidly growing population.

But it is best known for its status as a border post: it is one of the three main points – among a dozen checkpoints controlled around the enclave – for entering and leaving the Gaza Strip, with the point neighboring control of Kerem. Salem, in Arabic), and that of Erez, in the far north of Gaza.

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This 360 km² strip is an ultra-armored enclave, at least until the Hamas attacks of October 7. The 2.4 million inhabitants of Gaza have been administered by the radical Islamic movement since June 2007 and live under Israeli blockade, “completely besieged” since the outbreak of the conflict in October, according to the Israeli government. The water supply, cut off for a week in violation of international law, was restored on Sunday October 15.

On the Palestinian side, Rafah is also home to one of the Gaza Strip’s refugee camps, existing since 1949, a year after the first Israeli-Palestinian war. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) registered 133,000 people there in 2023 (by October 7).

There is only one road to get there, along the northern coast of Sinai, via El-Arish, the regional capital, about fifty kilometers west of Rafah.

It is controlled by Egypt outside Gaza and by Palestinian customs officials, responsible for Hamas, inside. The other two checkpoints, Erez and Kerem Shalom, are controlled by Israel.

Rafah is a sort of thermometer of the movement of regional tectonic plates. Since 2007, the door has opened sporadically. It was only between 2011 and 2013 that there was an interlude, when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Gaza and Cairo, following the Tahrir revolution: Rafah was definitively opened and Gaza was able to breathe again. Then, with the fall of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, the Palestinian territory was padlocked again. Between 2013 and May 2018, the terminal only opened for three weeks.

The stability of relations between Egypt and Israel, at peace since 1979 and the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty, remains the best guarantee of the blockade of Gaza. The treaty divided Sinai into four zones. Zone C, which includes the Rafah Pass, extends from El-Arish to Ras Mohammad, a nature reserve located at the southern tip of Sinai. Tens of thousands of police officers patrol this vast desert, populated by jihadist cells.

Above all, it is people who are going through this bottleneck: Palestinians in need of medical care, students, businessmen, faithful going to the pilgrimage to Mecca, but also Westerners, humanitarians or journalists.

“There are no very precise rules for leaving Gaza, you have to be able to justify it with a document,” explains Alexandre Buccianti, RFI correspondent in Cairo. This is quite similar to the way visas are issued to enter the Schengen zone. That is to say, drop by drop. According to the UN, some 19,600 people were allowed to leave Gaza in August 2023, the highest since July 2012. And 314 were refused entry.

The transport of goods, meanwhile, mainly passes through the nearby Israeli-administered Kerem Shalom checkpoint. Some 12,000 trucks entered Gaza in August, carrying construction materials (42%), food (22%) and humanitarian aid (3%).

Finally, traffic between Gaza and Egypt also takes place underground, with different degrees of density depending on the geopolitical situation. Between 2007 and 2011, according to UNRWA, nearly 1,500 tunnels were actively used by Palestinians to circumvent the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. “Not for weapons, but for gas, gasoline, water… Weapons do not go through Egypt, they go through the sea. The coast of Gaza is an important fishing area. But the Israel’s underdeveloped navy is unable to control all the small boats and rubber dinghies that circulate there. After returning to power, the Egyptian army devoted itself to flooding the underground tunnels. “For the last three years, due to the rapprochement between Cairo and Hamas, the remaining tunnels have not been very active,” explains our correspondent in Cairo.

If his name continues to make headlines, it is also because the post has recently been the target of numerous Israeli attacks. The last three took place on October 9 and 10 then October 16. “The objective is to hinder the passage of humanitarian goods,” explains the French journalist. In 2015, Amnesty International accused Israel of committing “war crimes” by killing “at least 135 civilians” in Rafah in retaliation for the capture of one of its soldiers during the summer 2014 war in the Gaza strip.

Thousands of Palestinians are currently concentrated on this southern border awaiting an opening. “We have been sleeping at the border for eight days, without any help,” Osama Abu Samhadana, an Egyptian trying to return home to his family, told AFP. With more than a million Gazans fleeing to the south of the Gaza Strip, the pressure at the Rafah gates is high. “During the 2008 war, tens of thousands of Palestinians climbed the fence and crossed the barbed wire,” recalls Alexandre Buccianti, who was there at the time.

The question of Egypt welcoming displaced people was then raised, but Cairo categorically rejected the prospect of Palestinian camps on its soil, only accepting humanitarian convoys in the other direction. “A border that is too open would be synonymous with a new Nakba”, that is to say the “Great Catastrophe” of May 1948, when 700,000 Palestinians, expelled from the territories they occupied, went into exile in the countries of the region.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi strongly opposes this and assured this Tuesday, October 18 that “the idea of ​​forcing Gazans to move to Egypt would lead to a displacement similar to that of Palestinians in the West Bank”, occupied territory. . by Israel. “And this will make the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank impossible,” he added. »

Today, according to the UN, Gaza is on the verge of a new “humanitarian catastrophe”.

Editor’s note: At the end of this article, Israel announced this Wednesday, October 18, that it would authorize the sending of “food, water and medicine” from Egypt to the Gaza Strip, which the Jewish state has blocked in response to the deadly attack. launched on October 7 from the Palestinian enclave by the Islamist movement Hamas.

“At the request of President (Joe) Biden, Israel will not prevent the sending of humanitarian aid via Egypt,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said, adding that the authorization will be valid “to the extent where supplies do not reach Hamas. , which governs Gaza.