Israel and Hamas at war | Crowds at the Rafah terminal for new evacuations

(Rafah) Hundreds of people, holders of foreign passports, waited Tuesday at the Rafah crossing, in the Gaza Strip, to be evacuated to Egypt from the Palestinian territory relentlessly bombarded by the Israeli army, noted a AFP journalist.

“The Rafah border crossing opened this morning and arrangements are being made for departures,” Wael Abou Omer, a spokesperson for the administration of the Palestinian part of the terminal, confirmed to AFP.

While the crossings were due to begin in the early afternoon, the first arrivals on the Egyptian side were observed by AFP, including an injured Palestinian woman transferred on a stretcher to an Egyptian ambulance.

The terminal’s spokesperson mentioned a list of 500 people authorized to enter Egypt on Tuesday.

In front of the terminal, Farid Nawasra, a Gazan father with a Russian passport, says he has been waiting for days to be included on this list.

“My children saw horrible things, we suffered a lot […] and we hope today that they will allow us to pass,” he told AFP.

For Myrian Abu Chaaban, holder of a Romanian passport, having reached the terminal is a relief: “I am happy that we managed to reach the border, because it was such a bumpy road to get there.”

Three days of evacuations have already taken place between last Wednesday and Friday, releasing dozens of wounded Palestinians and hundreds of foreign passport holders.

After a two-day closure, departures to Rafah resumed on Monday.

“Yesterday Monday, 96 trucks of humanitarian aid arrived” while “19 injured and one sick, and around 200 people of foreign nationality also left,” the spokesperson for the crossing point told AFP.

The Gaza Strip has been pounded by Israeli airstrikes since October 7, when Hamas carried out an attack on an unprecedented scale in Israel, killing 1,400 people, the vast majority civilians, according to the authorities.

After a month of war between Israel and the Islamist movement in power in Gaza, more than 10,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the Palestinian territory, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.