Before the Gaza genocide Rafah was a densely populated city of 250,000 on Gaza’s southernmost border with Egypt. Its people were known for being particularly gracious and welcoming, which helped when their city became Gaza’s last refuge before Israel invaded it in May. Amid the smell of freshly caught fish, you could walk through Rafah’s crowded outdoor markets and hear the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer five times a day. Winding streets led to beaches where people would find relief from daily oppression.

A commercial hub since antiquity, Rafah was Gaza’s only portal to the outside world since Israel imposed a suffocating blockade in 2007. The Rafah crossing allowed “Palestinians to maintain vital connections with the outside world and access essential resources. Its operation [played] a pivotal role in easing the hardships faced by Gazans,” wrote Lorenzo Navone, a sociologist at University of Strasbourg who has researched the crossing for a decade.

Although they had to pay hefty sums to do so, people could traverse the Rafah border crossing to get to Egypt. Convoys of 18-wheelers would bring aid through the formal border crossing while smugglers would move contraband — and other inaccessible things such as fast-food carry out — through a web of underground tunnels.

Now, Rafah is destroyed along with the rest of the Gaza Strip and faces an uncertain future as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatens to keep its border occupied indefinitely.

At the end of last year, the world got to know Rafah as Gaza’s southern city when its population exploded to over 1.5 million. The Palestinians of Gaza fled there because it was marked a safe zone by Israel — which was torrentially bombing northern Gaza. Its streets were packed with makeshift shelters, its homes full of strangers.

“Our building was completely full of people. We let families that had fled south stay with us,” journalist Samia Alatrash, who is from Rafah, told The Indypendent. “We didn’t expect they were actually going to invade Rafah.”

As Netanyahu began threatening to storm Rafah, Biden declared that invading the city of refuge was a “red line” that should not be crossed. Israel did so anyway, destroying much of the city’s buildings and infrastructure with no consequences from the United States. By early July, Rafah’s population had plummeted to 50,000 as Palestinians fled to new “safe zones” designated by Israel.

Israel & The Philadelphi Accord

The 2005 Philadelphi Accord, an addendum to the Camp David Peace treaty, which normalized relations between Egypt and Israel in 1979, required Israeli settlements and troops to withdraw from Gaza (they’d been there since 1967), and it designated the ­Philadelphi corridor — a strip of land around 14 kilometers long and 100 meters wide that includes the Rafah crossing — as a demilitarized zone running from the Mediterranean to the Kerem Shalom crossing that links Gaza to southern Israel. When Israeli troops departed, it became the responsibility of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (until Hamas took over Gaza in 2007) to oversee the corridor. Netanyahu now insists on keeping his military on the border, a breach of the 2005 accord. 

“Netanyahu is claiming that they have to maintain a presence there and they have to control it to prevent weapons smuggling. But it appears he’s using it as a way to scuttle a ceasefire deal because it’s not acceptable to the parties involved like Hamas and Egypt,” says Sharif Abdel Kouddous, a journalist with Democracy Now! and Mada Masr. “He’s insisting on that presence which would be the reoccupation of Gaza… There’s already some reporting that they’re paving new road on that 14-km stretch of land and that they are building watchtowers.”

From November until May 6, when Israel invaded Rafah, some people were able to pay to escape Gaza through the Rafah crossing. Since then, everyone has been effectively trapped inside Gaza — except a very few who have acute medical needs and some health professionals — because the Israeli military occupies Rafah and the corridor. 

“No one is going to walk through there,” says Kouddous. “There’s people who paid and haven’t left. There’s people who have the money and haven’t paid. The situation has stopped. I don’t know people who are going through.” 

The movement of goods has also been thwarted. The Rafah crossing was the safest and most well-structured route for food and water delivery to Gaza before May; now aid trucks are hardly getting in from Egypt because there is no way for their goods to be picked up and brought to an area where people can reach them. Israel has refused to allow fuel to enter Gaza since the start of the war; therefore, the price of fuel is so high that it’s very difficult for groups in Gaza to hire drivers and trucks to pick up aid from the crossing. 

Divided by Colonialism

Rafah wasn’t always a border city. It was divided for the first time in its 3,000-year history in 1906 when the Ottomans, pushed to do so by the British, drew a border through the Sinai Peninsula that cut through the city. The line was not precisely drawn until 1967, when Israel occupied Sinai after the Six Day War. When Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1982 as a part of a peace agreement with Egypt, Rafah was divided between the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and Egypt. 

“We could never have imagined that an Egyptian officer would stand alongside an Israeli officer in Rafah to draw borders,” a 60-year old teacher from Gaza’s Rafah told Middle East Eye about the 1982 border construction. “Everyone was angry. We weren’t even consulted about the division or asked for our opinion.” 

Families had to quickly choose which side to settle on. Most didn’t want to live under Israeli occupation, but some stayed on the Gaza side because they had agricultural land or their workplace there. Within a year, locals began building tunnels, sometimes beginning in a Gazan home and ending in a relative’s home or farmland in Egypt. The tunnels were first built to reconnect families, and they later became a popular way to export goods from Egypt to Palestine or to smuggle weapons and other contraband. 

After a military coup brought him to power in 2013, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi began flooding the tunnels, citing weapons smuggling and Islamist insurgencies in Sinai. But some tunnels still remain or were built anew. 

Rafah Crossing 

In 2013 “coordinators” began offering their services to Palestinians seeking to enter Egypt via Rafah. For a fee, they would bribe Egyptian officials to place Palestinian travelers onto approved lists for entry from Gaza. Over time, competing coordination services drove prices down from $1,500-$2,000 per traveler to as low as $350 before October 7. 

The beginning of the current war sent coordination prices soaring, with reports of Palestinians paying up to $11,000 per adult to escape Gaza. Some paid thousands of dollars but were never placed on the outbound list. 

By mid-January, Hala, a company owned by Ibrahim al-Argany, an Egyptian businessman with close ties to his country’s military, had monopolized the coordination industry. The standard rate was now $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child for people with Palestinian passports. The application process required having a relative wait in a very long line outside Hala’s office on the outskirts of Cairo to pay the money in crisp dollar bills. Then, Hala gave the desired names to Egypt’s General Intelligence Service, which passed the names on to Israeli security for final approval. If the operation ran smoothly, the person’s name would be on the exit list within a few days.

Hala’s rates are out of reach for most Palestinians in Gaza, where the price of everything has skyrocketed (Alatrash says the price for a kilogram of fresh food — peppers or chicken, for example — is around $100). While wealthier families liquidated their belongings to raise the money to leave the Strip, others started GoFundMe campaigns. Some saw success, raising as much as $100,000 to pay for a whole extended family to get out, while other families drew little support. The GoFundMe pages that succeeded were usually in English, leaving the least privileged Palestinians the least likely to get out. 

•   •   •

Those of us who have older relatives from Egypt grew up hearing stories about taking trips to Gaza to shop at British stores, to visit its beautiful white sand beaches and to see family. After Israel seized the Gaza Strip in 1967, Egyptians didn’t feel comfortable traveling there casually. Nonetheless,  during the Israeli occupation of Gaza, which officially lasted until 2005, Rafah was technically an open border. 

When Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the ­Palestinian ­Authority and Fatah in 2007, Egypt closed its side of the border until early 2008. Hamas then used a bulldozer to breach the border, “allowing hundreds of thousands of people to cross,” according to Mada Masr, an independent Egyptian online newspaper. “Hamas declared at the time, ‘We will not accept a return to the siege cage or the agreement signed in 2005. We want a free Egyptian-Palestinian crossing.’” An agreement was reached between the two parties; the border would be open for crossing for a few days at a time and then closed for long periods. 

After the Egyptian Revolution of January 2011, the crossing was declared “permanently open,” but it started to be closed for extended periods again in 2013 after Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was ousted by the military coup that brought in Sisi. This is also when the coordination business was born.

“Although the Rafah crossing is the only way out of the Gaza Strip,” wrote Lorenzo Navone, “it has been closed more often than it’s been open for almost 20 years. Bear in mind that a border crossing should work 24/7.”

Egypt’s Complicity

While Egyptian complicity with Israel began when relations were normalized under the 1979 peace treaty, things got worse once Sisi took power. By 2015, Egypt had not only flooded the tunnels connecting Egypt and Gaza, it had also razed Egyptian Rafah to the ground, leaving residents homeless. And before the Rafah crossing closed five months ago, an Egyptian-state-linked company was making up to $2 million per day from its “coordination” business during the genocide. 

A 37-year-old Palestinian in Gaza told Middle East Eye in August, “What Israel is doing is what it has been doing for a long time. But what Sisi is doing is unprecedented amongst previous Egyptian presidents.” 

Before October, Egypt and other powerful Middle Eastern countries were more closely aligned with Israel than ever before. They had “abandoned Palestine,” says Sharif Abdel Kouddous. “But that doesn’t align with the popular sentiment, so they have to pay lip service to Palestine because they’re afraid of their populations.”

Amba Forest is an Egyptian-American journalist based in New York City and Cairo. 

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