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The Rafah Crossing: Who Controls It, Who Can Cross, and Why It Matters

For most of the world, a border crossing is an inconvenience — queues, passport stamps, a wait before moving on. For Palestinians in Gaza, the Rafah crossing has been something else entirely: the one door between two million people and the outside world that was never controlled by Israel directly, yet whose every movement Israel could shape regardless. Understanding who opens that door, who closes it, and what it has cost ordinary Palestinians to stand on the wrong side of it is inseparable from understanding the siege of Gaza itself.

The Geography of a Single Exit

Gaza’s perimeter is tightly bounded. To the north and east, Israel controls three crossing points — Erez for people, Kerem Shalom and others for goods — all of which Israel can shut unilaterally and has, repeatedly, as collective-punishment measures. To the west is the Mediterranean, monitored by the Israeli navy under a naval blockade that has since 2007 restricted fishing zones and interdicted vessels. That leaves the south: an 8-kilometer border with Egypt, at the end of which sits the Rafah terminal.

Rafah is therefore not merely convenient — it is structurally irreplaceable. When it closes, Gaza seals. When it opens partially, the triage of who gets out begins: the critically ill, the foreign passport holders, the students with overseas scholarships, the people who have been waiting months or years on lists that move at the discretion of governments they cannot vote for and cannot appeal to.

The Architecture of Control: The 2005 Agreement and What Followed

After Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the European Union deployed a monitoring mission — EU BAM Rafah — to observe operations at the crossing under the terms of the Agreement on Movement and Access signed in November 2005. Under that agreement, the crossing was to be operated by the Palestinian Authority, observed by the EU, and coordinated with Israel, which retained a remote-monitoring and veto role over passenger lists through a back-channel mechanism. In practice, Israel could flag individuals for denial without passengers ever facing an Israeli official.

When Hamas took administrative control of Gaza in June 2007 following the Fatah-Hamas split, Israel declared Gaza a “hostile territory” and Egypt — under then-President Hosni Mubarak and a close security relationship with both Israel and the United States — moved to tighten Rafah dramatically. EU BAM Rafah suspended its active monitoring role that same year, citing lack of access, and has remained effectively dormant since. The crossing’s operation then became a bilateral matter between Egypt and the Hamas-run Gaza administration, with Israel’s influence exerted through continuous diplomatic and intelligence pressure on Cairo.

The result, documented exhaustively by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt), was a crossing open intermittently at best. Between 2013 and 2018, following the Egyptian military’s removal of President Mohamed Morsi — whose government had maintained a relatively more open posture toward Gaza — Rafah was closed for stretches totalling hundreds of days per year. OCHA recorded that in 2015 the crossing was open for fewer than 30 days in total.

Who Actually Gets to Cross

Even on days the crossing technically operates, movement is far from free. Palestinian movement through Rafah has required, at various points: coordination with Egyptian intelligence, appearance on pre-approved lists compiled with Palestinian Authority input, and in some periods explicit Hamas approval. The layering of authorities means that a patient with a cancer referral to a Cairo hospital, a student holding a scholarship to a European university, or a Gaza resident with foreign residency rights can face months of bureaucratic paralysis with no single authority accountable for the delay.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have documented the medical dimension repeatedly. WHO’s monthly health access reports track patients referred for treatment outside Gaza who are unable to exit — a category that, before October 2023, regularly numbered in the thousands awaiting movement in any given month. The denial or delay of medical permits has been directly linked to patient deaths, a finding also detailed by Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human rights organization.

For students, the Gaza-based rights organization Gisha — Legal Center for Freedom of Movement (which monitors all Gaza crossings) has published repeated case documentation of scholarship holders who watched academic years expire while waiting. The human cost is not abstract: it is measurable in deferred degrees, forfeited scholarships, and life trajectories rerouted by bureaucratic closure.

May 2024: Israeli Forces Seize the Palestinian Side

The situation at Rafah reached a new threshold on 7 May 2024, when Israeli military forces moved into Rafah city as part of a ground offensive in the southern Gaza Strip and seized operational control of the Palestinian side of the crossing terminal. Israel announced it had taken the crossing as part of military operations targeting what it described as Hamas infrastructure in the area.

The crossing closed immediately and completely. Egypt, which had publicly warned against an Israeli offensive in Rafah — including in statements from President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — suspended coordination and kept its side of the terminal shuttered in response. The closure came as an estimated one million or more displaced Palestinians had been sheltering in Rafah, having fled fighting further north following Israeli evacuation orders. OCHA reported that the closure halted the entry of humanitarian aid through the only southern land route, compounding supply shortfalls already described by UN agencies as catastrophic.

As of mid-2024, the crossing remained closed to both civilian movement and commercial goods, with intermittent, limited humanitarian convoys negotiated on a case-by-case basis under heavy international pressure. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its provisional measures order of May 2024 in the case brought by South Africa under the Genocide Convention, ordered Israel to keep the Rafah crossing open for unimpeded humanitarian supplies — an order whose implementation remained disputed and incomplete.

Why the Crossing Is a Political Instrument

The history of Rafah makes clear that the crossing has never been purely humanitarian infrastructure. It has functioned as a lever — one that Israel, Egypt, and internal Palestinian politics have each pulled at different moments to exert pressure, signal alignment, or impose costs on a civilian population that has had no meaningful recourse.

Scholars including Tareq Baconi, in his 2018 study Hamas Contained, and Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, situate the siege architecture — of which Rafah is a central component — within a longer strategy of constraining Palestinian political agency through control of movement and economic life. The crossing is, in that framing, not an exception to normal border management: it is the most visible expression of what a blockade does to a population over time.

For the patients on waiting lists, for the students watching scholarships expire, for the families separated across the Egyptian border, the politics are lived rather than theorized. The door exists. Whether it opens is rarely their decision.

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