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The Rafah Border Crossing (Arabic: تقاطع حدود رفح, Hebrew: מעבר רפיח) is an international border crossing between Egyptian and Palestinian-controlled Rafah. It was built by the Israeli and Egyptian governments after the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty and 1982 Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, and was managed by the Israel Airports Authority until it was evacuated on 11 September 2005 as part of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan. It has since become the mission of the European Union Border Assistance Mission Rafah (EUBAM) to monitor the crossing.
The Rafah crossing was opened on 25 November 2005 and operated nearly daily until 25 June 2006.[1] Since that time it has been closed by Egypt on 86% of days due to security reasons.[1] It was not opened for the export of goods.[1] In June 2007, the crossing was closed entirely after the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip.
The EU Ambassador to Israel said that EUBAM monitors could not return to man the crossing because the legal basis for EUBAM - the November 2005 agreement on movement and access - specified that the terminal was to be manned by the Fatah-aligned Force 17, who were no longer there.[2]
On January 23, 2008, masked gunmen demolished the wall, that Hamas-linked militants had apparently weakened in 2007,[3] dividing the Egyptian and Palestinian portions of Rafah,[citation needed] and several thousand Gazans entered Egypt, most of them to purchase food and supplies.[3]
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Rafah, Egypt
Rafah, Gaza Strip
European Union (observer)
Israel (observer)
