Gaza Agreement
Border crossing Rafah open: patients leave gaza stripes
Updated on 01.02.2025 – 2:28 p.m.Reading time: 3 min.
In the course of the ceasefire in Gaza, some sick and injured the area. This gives hope for a small number of a total of thousands of Palestinians who urgently need help.
For the first time in almost nine months, Rafah’s border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip has been reopened. Several patients were brought from Gaza via Rafah for medical treatment to Egypt, such as security circles and the Egyptian red crescent. The state-related TV broadcaster Al-Kahira News showed pictures of the exhausting patients. First of all, around 50 of them should leave Gaza.
The only border crossing that does not lead over Israeli territory was closed after Israel’s army took control there last May on the Palestinian side.
According to Al-Kahira News, a boy with an immune disease accompanied by his mother and a girl to whom a leg was to be amputated were brought to Egypt. They drove into ambulances on the Palestinian side into the transit area of the transition, where Egyptian ambulances were waiting for them. With such transfers, sick people and injured the area before Rafah’s closure left.
The border crossing is just as important for treatment in Egypt and other countries for the departure of injured and sick people as for the import of relief goods to Gaza. According to UN, around two million people suffer from hunger.
At first there was no evidence that the aid deliveries to Gaza would also start again via Rafah. For months they have only come to Gaza from Israel.
The images published by Hamas in Gaza in Gaza how a group of sick and injured are driven to Rafah. According to the TV broadcaster Al Jazeera, around 50 patients with cancer and heart disease should be able to leave. This number also confirmed the World Health Organization WHO, which supported the exit with a team on site. Al-Kahira News reported that around 100 people would leave, including the sick, injuries and their accompanying persons.
According to the WHOs, a total of 12,000 to 14,000 people urgently need medical help, which cannot be provided in the Gaza Strip. Among them are at least 2,500 children. It’s about people with life -threatening illnesses or war injuries.
The reopening of the border crossing Rafah is part of a three-phase agreement between Hamas and Israel to terminate the Gaza War. According to the Egyptian Red Cross, 3,000 trucks with humanitarian aid goods in Sinai were also prepared for entry to Gaza through the Rafah crossing.
So far, Rafah’s trucks have been driving to the transition Kerem Schalom, which leads over Israeli territory. There they are examined and the goods are released for the distribution in Gaza.
A spokesman for the U.S. State Department had said that Washington hopes for the import of more than 500 trucks to Gaza every day. However, this will not happen “overnight”. The deliveries would be difficult due to the security situation in the coastal area. The distribution previously failed due to a lack of trucks and drivers, and looting also occurred in Gaza.
The United Nations and Aid Organizations have been pushing for Rafah’s reopening for months in order to better provide hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza in a humanitarian manner. Due to the closure of the transition, relief supplies such as food, water and medicinal products have only come in recent months through Israel controlled transitions such as Kerem Schalom, Erez and Kissufim.
The World Food Program (WFP) announced that it could provide food rations for more than a million people in Gaza and support the economy and local food production.