The situation was summed up starkly by the director general of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, 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.
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.
While a number of medical evacuations have been permitted by Israel since May, including 55 patients in December, 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 are in need of immediate evacuation.
On Saturday television cameras on the Egyptian side caught the moment 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.
But after 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.
