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For weeks, we wrote that a planned Israeli offensive on the Gazan city of Rafah was “looming.” Now, in the face of widespread global outrage and mounting humanitarian fears, it appears to be underway.
More than a million Palestinians have taken sanctuary in the city in the months following Oct. 7, when militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented terrorist strike on southern Israel, seizing dozens of hostages while provoking an Israeli onslaught that has leveled much of Gaza, killed more than 34,500 people, including many women and children, and left the territory in the grips of one of the most sweeping and sudden humanitarian crises of the 21st century.
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For months, Rafah was relatively safe, a hub for relief operations and an area where Palestinians fleeing other parts of Gaza could find shelter. But Israel’s war cabinet, led by embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, sees a move on the city as an essential part of dismantling Hamas’s military capacity — an imperative that overrides the stated concerns of a host of allies, including the United States, which fear the calamity for civilians that may unfold. Netanyahu pressed forward even as demonstrators in Israeli cities campaigned against his government, warning that an offensive risked the lives of hostages still in Hamas captivity.
By Tuesday, Israeli forces had seized the pivotal Rafah border crossing that links Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. Israel intensified bombardments on parts of the city, hitting houses and residential towers, and prompted more than 100,000 people into a panicked evacuation. The Rafah border crossing was closed, though Israeli authorities said another crossing at Kerem Shalom remained open to funnel critical supplies into Gaza — a claim questioned by aid groups that said the routes were not safe for the passage of humanitarian relief.
“The crossing area has ongoing military operations and is an active war zone,” Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the U.N.’s agency for Palestinians, currently in Rafah, said Wednesday. “We are hearing continued bombardments in this area throughout the day. No fuel or aid has entered into the Gaza Strip, and this is disastrous for the humanitarian response.”
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Representatives of major international organizations said the lack of access would trigger further disaster. “All the fuel that entered Gaza went through Rafah crossing,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, at a joint news briefing Wednesday of prominent humanitarian organizations. “The whole aid operation runs on fuel, so if the fuel is cut off, the humanitarian operation collapses. Water can’t be pumped. Lights cannot be kept on in hospitals. Vehicles cannot distribute aid.”
“With that crossing now being closed, our whole humanitarian operation on the ground is compromised,” Ricardo Pires, spokesman for UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, told my colleagues. “If the crossing is not urgently reopened, the entire civilian population in Rafah and in the Gaza Strip will be at greater risk of famine, disease and death.”
Famine is already believed to be prevalent in areas of Gaza’s north. Human Rights Watch said Wednesday that Israel was contravening legally binding orders from the International Court of Justice by obstructing the entry of lifesaving aid. “The court’s March order required Israel to report to the ICJ on the implementation of the court’s measures within one month,” the rights group noted. “However, as of May 2, Israeli authorities continued to obstruct basic services and entry of fuel and lifesaving aid, acts that amount to war crimes and include the use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.”
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The current Israeli push elicited an exasperated response from U.N. Secretary General António Guterres. “Haven’t civilians suffered enough death and destruction?” he said. “Make no mistake, a full-scale assault on Rafah would be a human catastrophe.”
Rafah’s exhausted residents concur. “We can’t find anywhere to go now,” Mohamed Khaled, 22, told my colleague Heba Farouk Mahfouz on Tuesday. “There is no place left. People are being scattered around, each leaving in a direction. Constant bombardment, I swear. It is not easy to leave. Transportation is extremely expensive for us. I pray tomorrow I could find a place to go to.”
In 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from inside Gaza, it ceded control of the Rafah crossing to Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in 2007 prompted Egypt to shutter the crossing, though it would periodically allow openings. A sprawling network of smuggling tunnels into the territory emerged, which have now become notorious as key conduits for Hamas’s activities. Egypt ultimately cracked down on the smugglers, and Hamas’s illicit fortunes took a dip in the past decade.
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During the second intifada, Israeli forces razed hundreds of homes in the city in their campaigns against Palestinian militants. In 2003, U.S. activist Rachel Corrie was killed in Rafah, crushed to death by an Israeli armored bulldozer as she tried to thwart the destruction of a house.
Rafah has a far deeper history, tracing back to antiquity and pharaonic times. Into the 20th century, it stood at the border between Ottoman Palestine and British-controlled Egypt. Israel captured Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula after the 1967 war, but it eventually withdrew from Sinai in 1982 after clinching a peace agreement with Egypt.
As a consequence, Rafah was split down the middle between Egyptian and Palestinian sides. “A separation barrier was built, splitting families (and sometimes houses!) and the center of the town was destroyed to make way for a buffer zone between the two sides,” explained my colleague Erin Cunningham, who has reported from Gaza in the past, in an email message. “This is when the first smuggling tunnels started to pop up — initially to reunite families but also, of course, to bring in contraband.”
“The great irony is that Rafah was united by war and now will be divided by peace,” a Western newspaper noted at the time. More than four decades later, the current war offers the battered city little hope of either peace or unity.
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