The Egyptian government confirmed this Thursday that the Rafah border crossing, which connects the Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula and the only one not controlled by Israel, is “open to traffic and has not been closed at any time since the beginning of the conflict” last Saturday.
In a statement, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that although it is open to traffic — although it did not mention whether it is open to people — vital facilities at the crossing on the Palestinian side were “destroyed by repeated Israeli bombings, which prevents its normal functioning.”
For this reason, he called on Israel to “avoid attacking the Palestinian side of the crossing so that restoration and reparation efforts are successful and it functions once again as a crossing of support for Palestinian brothers in the Strip.”
In recent days, the Palestinian side of the crossing has suffered up to three Israeli bombings as part of a campaign against the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the surprise attack that the terrorist group Hamas carried out last Saturday and which killed at least 1,300 people in Israel.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 1,354 died in Israeli retaliatory bombings of the Strip.
Amid this chaos, Egypt is trying to prevent a possible “mass exodus” of Palestinians to Sinai, Egyptian security sources said.
However, Egypt is also in talks with the United States, an ally of Israel, about the possibility of opening a safe corridor to Gaza from Sinai for the delivery of humanitarian aid, given that the Palestinian enclave has no electricity and few basic needs items due to the Israeli blockade.
The number of displaced people in the Gaza Strip exceeded 338 thousand, thus increasing the number of civilians who fled their homes in the Palestinian territory in one day by 75 thousand people, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported today ( THE TEA).
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