Reportage
At the Rafah crossing, a barricade dividing life and death
Here, everything is available, and yet nothing is. The crossing is a non-place, surreal, the boundary between life and death and the vivid image of genocide: a captive, starving and bombed population, separated from life-saving aid.
From 50 kilometers away, the sound of explosions arrives as a muffled roar. Along the coast of Al-Arish, Sinai, the echo covers up the crashing of the waves on the shoreline for a few seconds, like fireworks in the distance. Egyptians who live here say they started to hear the bombs falling on Gaza a year ago, when the ground operation on Rafah started.
That was May 6, 2024, and since that day Israeli tanks have occupied the Palestinian side of the crossing leading into Egypt, after destroying it and rendering it unusable. It was Gaza’s only gate to the outside world, its passage outward, the idea of potential freedom, like the sea itself.
Today the Rafah crossing is an empty shell, a doorway to what should be and is not. On the Egyptian side are paramedics and Egyptian Red Crescent workers, ambulances on standby, two 50,000 sqm warehouses so full of humanitarian aid that new facilities are being built to house it. A reception, storage and distribution system for aid from all over the world has reached levels of organization that did not exist a year ago, all to speed up delivery and lessen the risk that the products going into Gaza will arrive damaged.
Here, everything is available, and yet nothing is. The crossing is a non-place, surreal, the boundary between life and death and the vivid image of genocide: a captive, starving and bombed population, separated from life-saving aid, and, as is now clear, in the crosshairs of a plan to begin an inexorable process of expulsion. One cannot live in an unlivable place.
The Italian solidarity caravan “Gaza beyond the border” arrives at a crossing that has been transformed. A new stretch of concrete wall looks like the first sign of a closure that may become permanent. A dirt road leads north toward the Karem Abu Salem crossing, but no truck has been driving on it since March 2. Gone are the huddles of agents from the Egyptian company Hala, which for 18 months managed Palestinians’ exit from the Strip, charging families up to $5,000 per person to escape the bombs.
By half past 9 a.m., Israel had already killed more than 100 Palestinians in a few hours. The bombs have been falling and keep falling everywhere, incessant: in Rafah one hears one every few minutes, with a muffled roar and the awareness that each explosion means death.
Yousef Hamdouna is from Gaza. He left a few weeks before October 7, 2023 and has not been able to return. He works for the Italian NGO Educaid. Standing in front of the crossing, he does what he did a year ago, with the first caravan: he calls his sister Manal on the other side of the wall. “She told me they have run out of food, they have run out of water. Last night they were bombed devastatingly. She doesn’t know where to flee, no one knows. In the background I could hear the bombs around her, and she could hear the bombs near me.”
With a piece of white chalk, Yousef traces the outline of small children’s T-shirts. The caravan, organised by AOI, ARCI and Assopace Palestina together with the Parliamentary Intergroup for Peace between Palestine and Israel, consisting of more than 60 people, including deputies from AVS, M5S and PD, aid workers and journalists, has laid soft toys, playthings, baby clothes and photos of some of the children killed in Gaza by Israeli raids on the ground in front of the crossing gate, symbolizing the 18,000 minors slain in this offensive, and also the tens of thousands wounded and orphaned and the hundreds of thousands deprived of food, health care and schooling.
They unfurl a banner reading “Stop complicity” and raise signs: “Stop genocide now”, “No impunity for international crimes”, “End illegal occupation”, “Stop arming Israel” – the messages they want to send to the world from Rafah. They also hold up the faces of European leaders Meloni, Macron, von der Leyen and Kallas.
“Out here is everything that cannot get into Palestine, including international law,” jurist Alessandra Annoni of the University of Ferrara tells us. “The list of violations committed on a daily basis is extensive: the four Geneva conventions, rules of humanitarian and common law, treaties Israel agreed to respect and conventions it ratified, international human rights norms violated throughout the occupied territory, three precautionary orders by the International Court of Justice and two Security Council resolutions requiring Israel to let aid into the Strip unimpeded and on a large scale. All these violations form part of Israel’s strategy to genocide the Palestinian population. The latest act of this strategy is the deportation being prepared under Operation Gideon’s Chariots.”
This operation has now begun with the declared aim of driving the population south, squeezed into an extremely confined space. Its extent became clear on Sunday: 125 Palestinians killed from dawn to early afternoon, 36 of them in the tent city of al-Mawasi in the south, while the Indonesian Hospital in the north was totally besieged and shelled and is now no longer operational. Muhammad Zaqout, director-general of Gaza’s hospitals, denounced Israeli troops opening fire on doctors and patients at the Indonesian Hospital and snipers shooting at anything that moved, including in intensive-care wards.
“We are here to bear witness to reality, to the apocalypse,” says Walter Massa, president of ARCI. “We came up with the caravan to bring different forces together; we can’t do it alone. I think we have partly succeeded, yet it is still far too little and we have lost too much time. Italy is one of the few countries that has not managed to stage a national demonstration. This is a political operation: we now have to take a step forward and make an effort to coordinate our communication so that clear and strong messages get out.”
“We want to denounce the complicity of European leaders, because no one is acting to stop this extermination,” adds PD deputy Laura Boldrini. “Sanctions are needed, the shipment of weapons must be suspended – without them this massacre could not continue – and the EU-Israel cooperation agreement must be suspended, because Article 2 is founded on respect for human rights. We are asking the Italian government to do everything it has failed to do so far: put pressure on its ally Netanyahu to stop. I would like to see them take a clear stand and vote for our motion in the Chamber on Wednesday.”
Among those with the caravan in Rafah, we find above all those who have worked in Palestine for decades and who now, under Israel’s new regulations, risk never being able to return: Italian NGOs. “As civil-society organizations, we are used to working with victims of conflicts, but in Gaza the situation has become so serious that even NGOs like ours are powerless,” explains Giulia Torrini of Un Ponte Per. “Given the genocidal intent, this is such an injustice that we cannot avoid acting on the political level. Being part of the caravan means joining this battle, which is a political one. The parties present have promised to stand with us from now on, in the protests and initiatives we are organizing.”
The caravan sets off again towards the warehouses where aid has been waiting for two and a half months – one of the most brutal aspects of the Israeli occupation. “Last year, Palestinian journalists, activists and aid workers asked us first of all to push for a ceasefire,” says Valentina Venditti, Middle East and North Africa coordinator for the NGO Ciss. “A year later, they are asking us to intensify our actions, to be more forceful. The priority is to stop the genocide and the military occupation that is causing it. We must act for Palestine, but also for ourselves, because we are looking at a mass grave, not only of Palestinians but of international law and of our own values. On their part, as Raji Sourani told us, they will never give up. He spoke of strategic optimism: he is certain that we will succeed.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/al-valico-di-rafah-il-confine-vuoto-tra-la-vita-e-la-morte on 2025-05-18