Rafah crossing reopening cannot be underestimated – it hints at success for Gaza ceasefire | Israel-Gaza war

The Rafah terminal that marks the crossing between southern Gaza and Egypt straddles a complicated border. On the Egyptian side, a double arch marks the entry to the terminal buildings themselves, and beyond, Gaza.

Television cameras on the Egyptian side caught the moment on Saturday that the crossing, which has been closed since May, was reopened for medical evacuations showing one young girl, whose foot had been amputated, being loaded into an Egyptian ambulance.

What cannot be underestimated is that any reopening of Rafah, even partial, is a moment of considerable significance.

Amid the long years of Israeli blockade that followed Hamas’s takeover of the coastal strip in 2007, Rafah – the only crossing out of Gaza that does not border Israel – has been seen as a safety valve as a potential access to the outside world.

If it was never really available to many, at least the possibility existed.

For a period earlier in the war, Rafah was the exit point for Palestinians with dual passports, employed by foreign organisations, or with the financial wherewithal and connections to pay to be put on an Egyptian list to leave.

But since Israeli forces launched an offensive in and around the southern city of Rafah in May last year, the border has been closed even for the most urgent medical evacuation cases, with Egypt closing its side in protest.

The director general of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, summed up the situation starkly last month: “Only 5,383 patients have been evacuated [from Gaza] with support from WHO since October 2023, of which only 436 since the Rafah crossing was closed.

“Over 12,000 people still need medical evacuation. At this rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients, including thousands of children. In the meantime, their conditions get worse and some die.”

Israel has permitted a number of medical evacuations since May, including 55 patients in December, but it has been a drop in the ocean, an assessment underlined by the comments of the UN secretary general, António Guterres, last week that 2,500 children were in need of immediate evacuation.

If opening the crossing to 50 children and their families is a first step as an agreed part of the Gaza ceasefire deal that envisages further regular evacuations, it has another significance too.

While Israeli society has celebrated the release of hostages, ordinary Palestinians in Gaza in the past week have also begun to see benefits to the ceasefire deal beyond the cessation of fighting and killing.

Large numbers of residents from the north of the strip have been permitted to return home to the devastated area having been forcibly displaced by Israel. As well as the opening of Rafah, the first Palestinian detainees arrested in Gaza and held in Israel, numbering 111, were released home on Saturday.

Then there is the opening of Rafah itself, facilitated by an arrangement in which the deployment of EU monitors at the crossing to supervise officials from Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, have been tasked with processing those leaving Gaza.

All of which suggests that – just maybe – there may be a hint of a potential dynamic for success emerging in the fragile and complex three-phase deal, which to many seemed set up for inevitable failure and a return to Israel’s offensive.

After today the next significant milestone will be marked by the planned beginning of negotiations for phase two of the deal next week, amid evidence that the Trump administration in Washington, despite a highly erratic and contradictory grasp of its Middle East policy, is still insisting that both sides cleave to the agreement and see it through.

What is clear today is that another important staging post in the deal has been passed, as well as the first small measure of relief for sick and wounded Palestinians.