Rafah, Egypt and Gaza
I leave Malta for Cairo with 40-year-old Sanaa and 56 boxes of donations from the Maltese, including clothes, medicines and dressings, together weighing 850 kgs. She collected them in barely two weeks.
“All the people I have come to know in 20 years have turned up at my house in those two weeks,” she says visibly satisfied, as the plane takes off.
It’s a minuscule contribution for the desperate Palestinians in Gaza, but Sanaa keeps up her optimism by repeating that every little bit of help counts.
“If everything goes well, I will return with even more supplies. I’m sure I’ll return,” she says.
Upon arriving in Cairo, the first hurdle of passing all the cargo through customs is impressively overcome, with a good word from some contacts. Friends and relatives of Sanaa wait for us at the airport with a pickup van, in which everything is loaded for the four-hour journey to Rafah.
Paying a couple of bribes along the way, the trip is still made longer by the Egyptian border police who keep us for a full 90 minutes at the Sinai border.
Even though it is part of Egypt, going inside the Sinai region is like practically crossing into another country.
At one stop, she tells them we are carrying humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, to which the police are visibly sympathetic.
At another point, the police officers’ relentless questioning on whether we intended to cross to Rafah makes it clear we are not welcome.
Indeed, contradictions among the “Palestinian brothers” here stare you in the face as, despite the official rhetoric, the borders with Gaza are tightly shut precisely when Palestinians need aid badly. And of course, none of the people of Gaza can get out.
Sanaa’s brother is one of them. He studied to become a doctor in Romania, but upon graduating went back to his country on what is clearly an honourable mission.
“He had everything in Romania,” Sanaa tells me. “He lived a good life, he could enjoy going out with his friends, he had a lovely girlfriend who loved him a lot. But after he became a doctor, he left everything behind him to return to Gaza. He could work abroad and have a great career, but he didn’t.”
That was in 2000, when the Al-Aqsa intifada started.
“For him, there was no question about returning. Now, after eight years, and particularly now in this war, everything is leaving its toll on him. He calls me by phone, desperate at what he’s seeing everyday, but also stuck in Gaza with no prospects of getting out.”
Sanaa herself recalls how when she was 16, she would go out with friends in Gaza and live a normal life. She has been living in Malta for the last 20 years.
“In the 1980s, if you wanted to impress your wife, you would take her to Gaza. Now there is only destruction.”
As we approach Rafah, we meet Mai Aref, a medical doctor working with the Palestinian Red Crescent and who has seen countless victims of this war.
“The white phosphorus is devastating, it just burns everything,” she tells me. “I’ve seen people suffering severe burns, more than 2cm deep, as they were fleeing from the bombs.
“As the war went on, people were blaming Hamas. But what is Hamas next to all these victims? It’s the Palestinian people we are talking about. And yet, for all the world, it was just a question of checking the latest number of dead people, seeing it rise from 100, to 300, 500, 1,000 … it was just a statistic.”
Despite experiencing the devastation first hand, Dr Aref was horrified to think of what was happening to her friends and family.
“One of my best friends lives in an area that was heavily bombarded. For a whole week, I was terrified of calling him as I was afraid of the bad news. He ended up calling me. He told me his father and three of his children were killed. I told him that was why I was afraid to call.”
On the other side of the fence
Just a few metres away from Gaza, we are stopped as we await a whole day for a much-needed piece of paper from the Maltese Embassy which would give us the green light to cross over to the other side of Rafah. By the end of the day, we are told the embassy is closed and we’ll have to wait another day.
Sanaa’s relatives here greet us inside their houses, while others unload the cargo into a garage, waiting to be hopefully transported to Gaza tomorrow morning.
Pieces of bombs and shrapnel have also fallen here. Nobody has died, but people were injured and had to be rushed to hospital.
Mohammed Duram, 13, shows me a piece of shrapnel he collected outside his house in Salah el-Din Road, just 300 metres away from the other side. It is heavy, around 3kg, with rough edges that would seriously injure anyone hit by it.
“They came down very fast,” he says. “It could have killed me.”
From the roof of their house, his 16-year-old cousin, Ahmed Khalid Mousa Durham, tells me they saw the fighter planes dropping their bombs and the ensuing explosions. As we speak, he shows me the shattered windowpanes of his house, wrecked by the blasts of the bombings.
On the streets, at every corner of the 15-kilometre perimeter touching with the Gaza strip, Egyptian police and soldiers are on alert as they fear that masses of Palestinians would want to escape.
Ahmed Khalid’s uncle, Jamel Durham, tells me of his frustration of not being able to cross into Rafah to help his brothers. Although he is Egyptian, he tells me half his family is on the other side.
“I want to go there, but they won’t let me in,” he says about the Egyptian border guards. “They are also our family, our brothers, but we are powerless.”
He tells me the bombs could be heard so loudly from here that he decided that his wife and three-month-old baby would stay out of Rafah, in the nearby town of El Arish, until the war was over.
“At night, it was unbearable. You can imagine how it was in Gaza.”
Held at the gates of Gaza
After around a four and a half hour wait at the Rafah Crossing, Sanaa el Nahhal was allowed into Gaza with only some of the boxes of food and medicinals yesterday evening.
Despite herself being a Palestinian, Sanaa and many other co-nationals were held for long hours, and more were refused entry, by the Egyptian border police, even though the Israeli forces have moved out of the Gaza strip.
A long queue of trucks loaded with all sorts of humanitarian aid could be seen outside the border waiting to be let inside, together with hundreds of journalists from all over the world. Even Egyptian journalists were banned from entering, prompting a brief but vociferous protest at the gates of Gaza, as some of them were physically banging on the gates in protest.
Officers said they were instructed to let in only foreign doctors, ambulances and supplies carried by the Red Crescent. They gave no reasons why journalists were not allowed, not even those in possession of the required diplomatic documents.
Elderly Palestinians eager to reunite with their family could be seen clearly disappointed and visibly tired after a whole day left to wait until late yesterday night.
“This was the last thing I was expecting,” el Nahhal said, hours before they let her cross the border. “I don’t understand this.”
The refusal to allow travellers and aid workers seems to confirm the Egyptian government’s policy of toning down the Israeli war on Gaza, but official explanations are in short supply.
An Egyptian national witnessing the ordeal said that in the last weeks, protests of solidarity with the Palestinians were repressed in Rafah and in nearby towns, while police were confiscating pieces of shrapnel from the bombs that ended up on the Egyptian side.
The rest of the cargo sent from Malta, including clothes, blankets and food, has been kept in a store in Rafah until the Egyptian authorities give their green light.
El Nahhal was still in Gaza reunited with the rest of her family until yesterday night.
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