The Gaza Strip is a mousetrap for its 2.2 million residents, who are eagerly awaiting an invasion by the Israeli army after incessant bombardment over the past week. Last Saturday’s attacks by the Hamas militia have unprecedented consequences for the residents of this Palestinian territory, which the Islamist group has ruled de facto since 2007.
All border crossings with Israel have been closed for seven days and supplies of electricity, gas, water, food, medicine and fuel have been interrupted. Nobody comes in and nobody leaves. The only access point to the enclave is the Rafah border crossing in the south of the strip, a small infrastructure linked to Egypt’s Sinai Desert that lacks the capacity to support a rapid evacuation of the population was bombed last week. Using influx data for this crossing, it would take 2,200 days for the entire population to leave Gaza.
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The ultimatum that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given to the over one million residents of the northern strip to evacuate the area within 24 hours – a deadline that was extended by a few more hours in the early hours of this Sunday – is therefore: a complete one Chimera. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that moving “through a densely populated war zone to a place without food, water or shelter when the entire area is under siege” is “extremely dangerous and in some cases simply impossible”.
Tension is at maximum, the 1,400 deaths that Hamas claimed have been avenged for now, as another 2,200 Gazans have been killed by Israeli bombings. The UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) warned this Sunday that their shelters are no longer safe, estimating that almost a million people have been displaced to the southern areas of the Gaza Strip, which are overcrowded due to intense Israeli bombing. The survivors have nowhere to go.
Calls from the international community and the United Nations to open humanitarian corridors to allow refugees to leave the country and bring in medical supplies, food and water have also had no effect. Egypt has insisted that its opening be approved and has designated El Arish airport, 50 kilometers from Rafah, to receive international supplies, although it still does not have the necessary security guarantees from Israel.
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Negotiations by the USA, which want to guarantee the exit of its citizens via Egypt, were also unsuccessful. However, Egyptian authorities are refusing to allow this until there is an agreement to open the crossing to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, sources at the crossing told the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights.
Gaza has been surrounded by land, sea and air since the early 1990s, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza and West Bank territories. Israel retained control of Gaza’s airspace, territorial waters and land borders, except for the southern part, which borders Egypt.
There is currently no access by plane. Back in 2001, an Israeli bombing raid destroyed Yasir Arafat International Airport, the only airport controlled by Palestine. As for the sea, the strip has just over 50 kilometers of coastline, bordered by Egypt to the south and Israel to the north, where a 400-meter-long fence juts into the sea to separate the two coasts. In addition, Gaza residents have between six and 15 nautical miles of fishing space. Access from there is prohibited.
The strip is surrounded by a seven meter high double fence known as the “Iron Wall”. It is equipped with motion sensors, remote-controlled machine guns and barbed wire and is monitored 24 hours a day by the Israeli army.
All of these restrictions have resulted in up to 60% of Palestinians in Gaza needing humanitarian assistance to survive, according to the Humanitarian Aid Coordination Office (OCHA).
Entry and exit by land were difficult until the Israeli government closed its border crossings and imposed a blockade on October 9 last year. Initially there were seven, but since Hamas came to power in 2007 and Israel imposed a strict blockade on the grounds that they wanted to prevent the import of weapons, these points were gradually closed until only two remained operational. These are those of Erez in the north and for people and those of Kerem Shalom in the south for the movement of goods. In the south there is also the Rafah Pass, which connects to Egypt.
Human border crossings: Erez and Rafah
Until the Hamas attacks, the Palestinian population had two options for leaving Gaza: to Egypt via the Rafah border crossing in the south of the territory and to Israel via the north via the Erez border crossing.
The hangar in Erez or Beit Hanoun is about 35,000 square meters and can accommodate 45,000 passengers per day. The current facilities were completed in 2007 at a cost of $60 million. It is open six days a week to authorized international citizens and Palestinians with Israeli permits, which must be obtained in advance. Some 18,000 Gazans have received permits from Israeli authorities to work outside the enclave, providing a cash injection of about $2 million a day to the territory’s impoverished economy.
There have been more entries in 2022 and 2023 than in the last 10 years, with more than 420,000 people leaving the Palestinian enclave in 2022 and 400,000 so far in 2023, the vast majority of whom were workers, followed by those in need of medical care and their companions. During the pandemic years, the number of crossings fell to 59,000 people in 2020. Even before that, the number was significantly lower, especially since the blockade in 2007. In the last six months of the year, only 11,000 people managed to leave the country. According to OCHA, the total number of Gazans who were able to leave this year in 2022 was 93% lower than the number who were able to do so in 1990.
Traffic through the Rafah border crossing, which opened in 1982, has fluctuated over the past decade depending on the political context. In 2012 and 2013, coinciding with the presidency of Mohamed Morsi of the Hamas-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood, the border crossing was open for 341 days and more than 470,000 crossings were recorded. However, between 2014 and 2017, during the first years in power of Al Sisi, a staunch opponent of the Brotherhood, Rafah was closed for an average of almost 300 days a year. This year it was open for 138 days and recorded almost 190,000 crossings.
Growing crowds in the south of the Strip are increasing pressure on this crossing, which, however, remains closed to passenger and freight traffic since Tuesday, OCHA reported, as the Palestinian side of the pass was bombed three times by Israeli aircraft. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry assured that Cairo had not ordered its closure, but acknowledged that the damage caused by the airstrikes had necessitated a halt to normal operations.
Freight crossings: Kerem Shalom and Rafah
The Kerem Shalom or Karm Abu Salem Pass in the south is managed by the Israeli Ministry of Defense and is open during the day five days a week. According to Gisha, an Israeli NGO that aims to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, it is a gigantic goods entry and exit terminal with an area the size of 60 football fields and a capacity to handle up to 1,000 trucks per day. A total of 696,494 trucks have entered the Gaza Strip since 2007, of which 88% transported commercial products – particularly building materials – and 12% transported humanitarian aid. The busiest year was 2016 with nearly 88,000 and the lowest year was 2007 when only 547 were registered.
As for Rafah, truck movement increased significantly in 2022, when about 32,000 people entered Gaza (more than double the previous year), mostly with construction materials and food, according to OCHA data. Fuel and cooking gas, on the other hand, normally enter through the Salah Ad Din Gate near the Rafah border crossing and have been operational since 2017.
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