BICOM

Egypt plans to open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza over the weekend. The Egyptian military government said yesterday that the Rafah border crossing would be opened permanently starting on Saturday from 9am (Israel time) to 5pm everyday except Fridays and holidays. The Egyptians will apply a protocol according to which men aged between 18-40 would have to coordinate going through the crossing, but women and children would be exempt from visas.

The opening of the crossing eases a four-year blockade and allows Palestinians to freely enter and exit Gaza for the first time since 2007, when Hamas forcefully took over control of the Strip. According to Egyptian officials, the decision was made to open the border in order to end divisions among the Palestinians and to persuade the Hamas leadership to sign the reconciliation deal with Fatah.

The opening of Rafah will allow the flow of people and goods in and out of Gaza without Israeli permission or supervision, which has not been the case up until now. Furthermore, on the Palestinian side of the border, the crossing will be operated and guarded by policemen deployed by Hamas. The deployment of Hamas police at the crossing will be a violation of an agreement reached in 2005 between the US, Israel, Egypt and the European Union, which also gave EU monitors access to the crossing. The monitors’ presence was to reassure Israel that weapons and militants wouldn’t get into Gaza after its pull out from the territory in the fall of 2005. Now with no such objective monitoring, Israel has no guarantees the crossing will not be used for terrorist related activities. However, Israel’s crossings – Karem Shalom, Sufa, Karni and Erez – in terms of goods, are of more importance. A year ago Israel significantly eased its restrictions on cargo entering Gaza, but it still severely limits entry and exit of Gazans through the crossing into Israel.