Egypt's Gaza gateway: crossroad of frustration
The border crossing is one of five ways in and out of Gaza. But it has been open just 64 days in the past nine months.
from the May 2, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Patience does not pay
An elderly, squat woman with thick round glasses, Ms. Roozah can't carry her bags through the gate. She scraped together $35 for a wheeled cart to transport them. As she speaks, two men get into a fistfight behind her over one of the carts, shouting and leaping over piles of bags to wrest the cart from the other.
Abu Khalid, meanwhile, waits in the middle of the scrum near the gate. Not the type to shove his way to the front, he is still waiting outside the gates when late afternoon arrives and the border closes. He doesn't make it across until the next day. He misses the celebration of his brother's marriage, and two of his bags are swallowed up in the chaos of the border.
Why the Rafah crossing is hard to police
Opening the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza is a central issue in new talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Israel doesn't have soldiers at the crossing, but it watches the border with dozens of closed-circuit cameras. European Union
and Palestinian security forces are on the Gaza side, Egyptian police on their side. And, under the 2005 withdrawal agreement,
Israel decides – for security reasons – when the border is to be open or closed.
The Rafah crossing was open regularly shortly after Israeli forces handed over control of Gaza to Palestinians in 2005. But
since fighting broke out between Israeli forces and Palestinians in Gaza in June 2006, the border has opened just 64 days,
according to an April fact sheet from the European Union Border Assistance Mission in Rafah. Some 400,000 people have crossed
there since November 2005. When it was fully open, an average of 1,300 people a day transited the border.
The Rafah crossing is one of the few gateways Gazans have to conduct trade and reach the outside world. But smuggling through
underground tunnels by mafialike families in Gaza has existed for years despite the efforts of various security forces at
the border.
To show the international community it is taking steps to stop the trafficking, Egypt has made hay recently of the discovery
of some smuggling tunnels and the capture of one smuggler.
"From the Egyptian point of view, they are doing the Israelis a service. They are helping [Palestinians] exit Gaza," says
Walid Kazziha, chair of the political science department at the American University in Cairo.
Egyptian officials argue the Camp David accords that produced a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel don't allow Egypt to
put enough soldiers and equipment on the border with Gaza to effectively police it. "Whenever the Egyptians are accused [of
lax policing], they get quite edgy about it," Mr. Kazziha says, because they are being asked to do a job without enough resources
to do it.
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