Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a home in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.Hatem Khaled/Reuters
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The Israeli military took control of the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, the main corridor for humanitarian aid going into Gaza, as Israel’s invasion of Rafah, the last Gazan city beyond its control, gathered pace on Tuesday.
Tamara Alrifai, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the main United Nations aid agency operating in Gaza, told The Globe and Mail Tuesday that the Rafah crossing was closed and almost no aid was reaching the strip, where 2.3 million people were already living in dire humanitarian conditions.
Footage posted online, filmed from the perspective of someone aboard an Israeli tank, showed the armoured vehicle arriving at the border crossing in the south of the strip after driving over a red “I love Gaza” sign as gunfire rattled nearby. Two Israeli soldiers then lowered the Palestinian flags that had flown over the facility and raised blue-and-white Star of David flags in their place.
The aid cutoff comes days after World Food Programme director Cindy McCain said that the northern Gaza Strip was experiencing a “full-blown famine,” which she said was spreading to the south of the densely populated coastal enclave. On Tuesday, the WFP said it had enough food in its stocks to supply the centre and south of Gaza to cover needs for between one and four days if border crossings were not reopened.
LEBANON
100 km
SYRIA
Mediterranean Sea
WEST
BANK
Detail
JORDAN
ISRAEL
EGYPT
4 km
Deir el-Balah
Al Rasheed
Road
Mediterranean Sea
Mawasi
safe zone
Expanded
humanitarian zone
1
Khan
Younis
Salah
al-Din
Road
GAZA STRIP
Rafah
EGYPT
Evacuation
zone
ISRAEL
Rafah
crossing
2
Kerem
Shalom
crossing
1
May 6: Israel Defence Forces tell 100,000 civilians in eastern Rafah to evacuate to Mawasi safe zone.
UN says around 450,000 displaced Palestinians are sheltering in Mawasi, in squalid conditions with few sanitation facilities.
2
May 7: Israeli tanks close Rafah crossing, vital aid route into Gaza Strip.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: GRAPHIC NEWS
LEBANON
100 km
SYRIA
Mediterranean Sea
WEST
BANK
Detail
JORDAN
ISRAEL
EGYPT
4 km
Deir el-Balah
Al Rasheed
Road
Mediterranean Sea
Mawasi
safe zone
Expanded
humanitarian zone
1
Khan
Younis
Salah
al-Din
Road
GAZA STRIP
Rafah
EGYPT
Evacuation
zone
ISRAEL
Rafah
crossing
2
Kerem
Shalom
crossing
1
May 6: Israel Defence Forces tell 100,000 civilians in eastern Rafah to evacuate to Mawasi safe zone.
UN says around 450,000 displaced Palestinians are sheltering in Mawasi, in squalid conditions with few sanitation facilities.
2
May 7: Israeli tanks close Rafah crossing, vital aid route into Gaza Strip.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: GRAPHIC NEWS
4 km
Deir el-Balah
Al Rasheed
Road
Mediterranean Sea
Mawasi
safe zone
ISRAEL
Expanded
humanitarian
zone
1
LEBANON
Khan
Younis
50 km
Salah
al-Din
Road
GAZA STRIP
WEST
BANK
Rafah
Detail
EGYPT
Evacuation
zone
ISRAEL
Rafah crossing
2
EGYPT
JORDAN
Kerem Shalom crossing
1
May 6: Israel Defence Forces tell 100,000 civilians in eastern Rafah to evacuate to Mawasi safe zone.
UN says around 450,000 displaced Palestinians are sheltering in Mawasi, in squalid conditions with few sanitation facilities.
2
May 7: Israeli tanks close Rafah crossing, vital aid route into Gaza Strip.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: GRAPHIC NEWS
The Rafah crossing has been the main entry point for humanitarian aid since early in the conflict. The Kerem Shalom crossing to southern Israel has been closed since Sunday, when Hamas rockets hit a nearby Israeli military staging ground, killing four soldiers. On Tuesday, only the Erez crossing, at the north of the strip, was open, though only a trickle of aid has entered from there so far.
“Erez will simply not be enough,” said James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund. “If Rafah gate closes for an extended period, it’s hard to see how famine in Gaza can be averted.”
Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly also warned against the humanitarian consequences of military action in Rafah.
“An invasion of Rafah, which would endanger the lives of women and children and innocent civilians, is completely unacceptable,” she told reporters in Ottawa. “We need a ceasefire now. We need to make sure that hostages be released. We need to make sure humanitarian aid goes into Gaza. The violence must stop. Hamas must lay down its weapons.”
The Israeli military's seizure of the Rafah border crossing in the Gaza Strip comes as Israeli authorities said it was moving forward with an offensive in the southern city even as cease-fire negotiations with Hamas remain on a knife’s edge. The move comes after hours of whiplash in the Israel-Hamas war, with the militant group on Monday saying it accepted an Egyptian-Qatari mediated cease-fire proposal.
The Associated Press
More than a million people have gathered in and around Rafah – which had a prewar population of about 200,000 people – after Israel declared it a safe zone earlier in the war. Many of those displaced people had been living in tents for months, with limited access to food, medication and sanitation.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health says more than 34,000 people have been killed in seven months of fighting in Gaza.
Israel says entering Gaza and defeating the four battalions of Hamas fighters it says are based there is essential to its twin war aims of destroying the Islamist militia and rescuing the hostages Hamas been holding since its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. A battalion is usually comprised of about 1,000 fighters, and Hamas has vowed to combat the Israeli push into Rafah.
The Oct. 7 assault saw Hamas kill more than 1,100 Israelis and foreigners, and take more than 200 others back to Gaza as prisoners. Israel believes that many of the more than 100 hostages Hamas is still holding have since died in captivity.
The invasion of Rafah came despite Hamas’s acceptance on Monday of a Qatari- and Egyptian-brokered ceasefire deal that reportedly would see the group release 33 of its hostages in the first stage of a three-phase truce. The proposal would have eventually seen all the hostages released in exchange for an end to the war and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
On Tuesday, families of some of the hostages took part in a protest outside Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv, calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to accept the ceasefire offer. “What separates us and our loved ones was and remains a commitment to end the war. We say to Netanyahu and the government – end the war, bring them back and save lives!” the protesters said in a statement.
UN says ‘full-blown famine’ is in northern Gaza. What does that mean?
Many Israelis and Palestinians believe that Mr. Netanyahu is against a ceasefire for political reasons, since it would likely lead to the collapse of his coalition government, which includes cabinet members from the country’s far right.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office has dismissed the terms Hamas agreed to as “a proposal” that was far from meeting Israel’s demands. Israel nonetheless sent a team to Cairo on Tuesday to continue negotiations, and delegates from Qatar and Hamas were also in the city, as was the United States’ CIA director, William Burns.
An Israeli government official told foreign journalists that Israel wasn’t interested in a deal that left Hamas intact as a military force.
“We’re always open to a diplomatic resolution to try and get our people out of the hands of Hamas. But I must tell you that this operation in Rafah is designed to destroy the last four battalions of Hamas,” said Avi Hyman, a spokesperson of Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, referring to the Rafah incursion. “This deadly terrorist organization must be defeated, this country will be protected and Hamas will be completely annihilated.”
The Israeli army on May 6 ordered tens of thousands of people in the southern Gaza city of Rafah to begin evacuating, signaling that a long-promised ground invasion could be imminent. The announcement complicated last-ditch efforts by international mediators, including the director of the CIA, to broker a cease-fire.
The Associated Press
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, however, seemed to indicate that the Rafah operation could be halted if Hamas began releasing hostages. “The operation in Rafah will not stop until Hamas is eliminated, or until the first hostage returns to Israel,” he told troops during a visit to a staging ground near Gaza.
Israel’s decision to go ahead with the assault despite Hamas’s acceptance of ceasefire terms was condemned by neighbouring Jordan, which has had a peace treaty and close security co-operation with Israel since 1994.
“Instead of giving negotiations on hostage release and ceasefire a chance, Israeli government occupied Rafah crossing and closed it to humanitarian aid to starved Gazans,” Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi wrote Tuesday on social media. He called on the United Nations Security Council to act. “Netanyahu must face real consequence.”
Resident Amer al-Joub said panic had fallen over Rafah since Monday, when Israel dropped leaflets warning people to leave the eastern part of the city. The spread of fear accelerated on Tuesday, he said, after the closing of the crossing to Egypt.
“Closing the crossing and not allowing aid to enter will have disastrous results for Palestinian society,” said Mr. al-Joub, a 58-year-old employee of the Palestinian Authority who has been out of his job since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. “People are trying to survive and escape from the death. They leave everything and run away.”
Mark MacKinnon