U.S.A, October 30, 2009, (Pal Telegraph) -Tuesday morning at 8 o'clock is chaos at Rafah Crossing, the Egyptian-controlled entrance to the Gaza Strip. Black-clad Egyptian security forces stand by their trucks, ready if things get out of hand. Aid convoys line up in front of the main gate. Hundreds of Palestinians have already massed before the first checkpoint, yelling at border security in their effort to push through. Off to one side, a group of travelers tries to revive a sick woman who has lost consciousness. Egyptian security look on. Tempers are mounting. This is Day One of a rare three-day border opening.

"Are we animals? This is inhumane," a man yells from a bus that is packed so tightly with people that limbs, heads, and torsos are pressed against the dirty windows. "I'm a German citizen," he calls out. "I have two children with me. They are dying." To the non-Palestinians at Rafah Crossing, "Come and see how the Palestinians live" was a popular refrain through the long, hot wait. Everyone wanted his or her name and story recorded; passports and documents were thrust in the face of a foreign journalist. "Record this," people asked with desperation.

Rafah is one of only two operating entry/exit points for human traffic into Hamas-held Gaza - the other is Erez on the border with Israel. Gaza, home to an estimated 1.5 million people, has been under Israeli blockade since June, 2007, when Hamas forces routed loyalists of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel, the United States, and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization.

Every one to two months, Egypt opens up Rafah for two or three consecutive days. During that period of time, a couple of thousand people cross in and out, according to Palestinian human rights monitor Al-Mezan, compared to the tens of thousands who traversed the crossing every month when it was operating regularly. According to a March 2009 report by Gisha, an Israeli rights group that tracks border activity, the sporadic openings at Rafah meet the travel needs of only 3% of Gaza's residents.

"Israel continues to exert substantial and indirect control over the possibility of opening Rafah Crossing and uses that control to exert pressure on the residents of Gaza, as part of a policy of collective punishment," the Gisha report says. Egypt, for its part, "which has the physical capacity to open Rafah Crossing," keeps it closed as the result of outside pressure and a desire to keep Islamist Hamas isolated from Egypt's own opposition groups. Indeed, the collusion between Egypt and Israel was evident on Tuesday. Aid convoys entering through Rafah Gate are diverted to Kerem Shalom to be subject to Israeli controls. Several, along with a dozen Palestinians, were turned away.

The unlucky Palestinians were the foreign passport holders who didn't have Palestinian identification cards. All were born in Gaza, but some had been away for a decade or more. They carried Swiss, German, Spanish, and Australian passports. "No Palestinian ID card, no entry," a border guard shouted back at a Spanish-Palestinian couple who had been pulled off a bus at the checkpoint while their luggage continued on to Gaza. Last year, the couple said they had tried to enter the territory through Erez. They made it into Israel, but were denied entry to Gaza. "I don't want to move back to Gaza," says Mariam Khalil El Frani, 62, who has lived in Spain for 26 years. "But my family is there. My mother is 85 years old. I just want to see them."

Israel controls the Palestinian population registry, and according to Al-Mezan, it is nearly impossible for Palestinians like El Frani to obtain an ID card. "There is only one mechanism, which is family reunification," says Mahmoud Abu Rahma, the group's communications director. "It's very complex and it takes years of trying to obtain this ID card."

Craig and Cindy Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, were also at Rafah Crossing that day, leading a delegation of nine Americans and one Canadian into Gaza to meet with local NGOs and attend the Rachel Corrie Ramadan Football Tournament. They spent two days phoning contacts in Cairo and negotiating with border officials before they were allowed to cross.

The Corries, who had made three previous trips to Gaza, said that when they visited the Strip for the first time, following their daughter's death, Craig Corrie was shot at by Israeli forces. "So in a very personal way, we witnessed that kind of violence," says Cindy Corrie, waiting at Rafah gate. "But there's another kind that has to do with squeezing people to such an extreme degree, I think with the intent of pushing people out, or at least pushing responsibility for those people to someplace else. And I think this border reflects that."

Getting through Rafah ultimately feels like a tremendous feat. Once on the other side, the bus pulls away from the Egyptian customs terminal, past Egyptian tanks, and into no-man's land before a sign welcomes you to Palestine. As the bus moved through the checkpoint, the Palestinians who had made it in began to applaud. They cheered and thanked God; others called relatives on their mobile phones. It was an emotional moment, yet paradoxical all the same, given that many might never be able to get back out.

Richard Goldstone, author of the scathing U.N. report released this week, which accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead last winter, also had to pass through Rafah to conduct his investigation in June. Israel had refused to cooperate with the mission, denying Goldstone, a South African Jew, and his team visas to enter the Jewish state. He, of course, got back out. But for the Palestinians on the inside, escaping through Rafah requires special permission. "The Egyptians only open it for humanitarian situations - sick people, students, and residents outside with foreign passports," says Issam Younis, the director of Al-Mezan.

"I don't like the analogy of a prison," says John Ging, chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, dispelling a description that many Palestinians themselves use. There is a tendency, he says, to view prisoners as deserving of their suffering for having committed some crime. "Nothing could be further from the truth... They're like you, if one morning, you woke and someone had transported you to a prison. What do you do? How do you cope with this? You're now imprisoned, in a prison, where you shouldn't be."

*Abigail Hauslohner / Rafah
Source: time.com