Israel’s military campaign against Hamas after the militant group’s offensive on October 7 has been making its way towards the south of the Gaza Strip and after four months it is already at the gates of Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that his forces will assault the city, where 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are crowded, because members of the organization responsible for the attacks that left 1,200 Israelis dead and more than 240 kidnapped are also sheltered there.
“It is impossible to achieve the war goal of eliminating Hamas leaving four of its battalions in Rafah“, declared the president on Friday.
But organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, as well as governments traditionally allied with Israel, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, have warned Netanyahu that the humanitarian cost of an offensive would be very high.
Palestinians in Rafah, most displaced from other Gazan cities already under Israeli control, have said they have nowhere to go in the event of a massive military incursion, because the border with Egypt is closed.
In this Arab country there is another Rafah. Both cities were once one, but centuries of invasions and wars ended with a city divided in two, crossed by one of the most conflictive borders in recent decades.
Since the time of the pharaohs
Rafah’s origins date back 3,000 years, says the Jewish Virtual Library.
The first mention of this town appears in an inscription made in the year 1303 BC, during the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I, father of the famous Ramses II, who ordered the construction of some of the magnificent temples and monuments that today attract millions of tourists annually. to Egypt.
Seti I launched several military campaigns in the area and in Syria, says Israeli columnist Michael Freund, in his article “Rafah: A turbulent history”, in which he cites the studies of the late Israeli historian and geographer Zeev Vilnai.
Throughout history the town has been known by different names.: Robihwa by the Egyptians, Rafihu by the Assyrians, Raphia by the Greeks and Romans and, finally, Rafah by the Arabs.
And although the place name Rafah does not appear expressly in the Torah (the Hebrew Bible), experts consider that the term “Hatzerim”, with which a town is named in the book of Deuteronomy, refers to her.
Due to its location south of the Gaza Strip, at the entrance to the Sinai Desert (Egypt) and facing the waters of the Mediterranean, the town became not only an important center for navigation and regional trade, but also an scene of numerous conflicts.
One of the most famous battles that took place at Rafah occurred around 217 BC, when the Egyptian king Ptolemy IV defeated the Syrian emperor Antiochus III.
“It is considered one of the largest battles of the classical era with a total of 120,000 to 150,000 soldiers and about 175 elephants ready on the battlefield,” summarized the Israeli-Canadian writer, Brandon Marlon, in his article “Rafah: A Brief History,” published in the newspaper “The Times of Israel.” ”.
To seal peace, the defeated man married his daughter Cleopatra Sira to the son of his enemy and the wedding was celebrated in Rafah.
From splendor to oblivion
Over the centuries, the city became the seat of an important Jewish community, as described by the 1st century AD historian Flavius Josephus in his book “The Wars of the Jews.” A situation that remained unchanged, despite the arrival of the Greeks, Romans and later the Muslims.
However, all this would change with the crusades. In the 12th century the city was razed and the inhabitants who were not killed were forced to move to other locations.
During the Middle Ages, when the Ottoman Empire took control of the region, the town ended up becoming a simple postal station at the gates of the desert.
Despite its loss of relevance, Rafah continued to be the scene of bloody battles that reduced it to rubble on several occasions. Thus, for example, at the end of the 19th century the French forces of General Napoleon Bonaparte destroyed it as part of their campaign to conquer Egypt and Syria, recalls Brandon.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Zionist organizations tried to acquire land in the area to repopulate it with Jews fleeing persecution in Europe. Nevertheless, the plan was rejected by the Ottoman authorities.
The initiative was attempted again once the territory came under British control, after World War I (1914-1919) and the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire, but it was also unsuccessful.
From military base to refugee camp
During World War II Rafah served as a base of operations for the British army and attracted Muslim migrants from other parts of Palestine looking for work.
At the dawn of the partition of the territory to create what is now Israel and a Palestinian Arab state that did not prosper, British forces used the town as a jail to arrest Hagana and Irgun leadersJewish organizations considered terrorists.
However, after the founding of the State of Israel, the city began to acquire its current profile as a large refugee camp.
Some 41,000 Muslim Palestinians who, until then, lived in areas now awarded to the nascent Israel – such as Beersheba and the Negev Desert – ended up moving to the small town.
In 1949 the Rafah refugee camp was opened, which at the time “it was the largest and most numerous (…) in the Gaza Strip”according to the website of the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
Since the outbreak of the current conflict, which has left more than 28,000 dead, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, Rafah’s population has multiplied five-fold, from 280,000 to nearly 1.5 million, according to the UN agency.
Humanitarian organizations have assured that the vast majority of these refugees live in deplorable conditions, with almost no access to food, drinking water and medicines.
The Berlin of the Middle East
Since 1948, the year of the founding of the State of Israel, the town, like the rest of the Strip, was under the control of Egyptian forces. But that changed in June 1967, when after the Six-Day War, Israeli forces occupied all of Gaza and the neighboring Sinai Peninsula.
In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Egypt failed in its attempt to recover lost territory by force, but almost a decade later it achieved at the negotiating table what it could not achieve on the battlefield: the return of Sinai, which materialized in 1982.
However, the 1977 Camp David peace accords affected Rafah, because the border line between Israel and Egypt was drawn over it. A situation that turned the Palestinian city into a kind of Berlin after the Second World War, because a fence was built that crossed houses, backyards and streets and divided it in two.
“The inhabitants of the houses divided in half will have to decide under which jurisdiction they want to live (whether the Israeli or the Egyptian) and open a door on the chosen side,” reported journalist Janet Hawley, in an article published in 1982 in the Australian newspaper “The Sydney Morning Herald,” in which she reported on the partition.
This new division broke up hundreds of families, whose members were separated by a fence that, with the passage of time, has been reinforced and around it a “no man’s land” called the Philadelphi corridor has widened.
The Philadelphi Corridor is a demilitarized zone created in order to “contain terrorism, weapons smuggling from Egypt to Gaza and the infiltration of criminal activities,” says an agreement between the Israeli and Egyptian governments.
For decades there have been two Rafahs, one in occupied Gaza and the other in Egypt, but that began to change in 2013. That year the government in Cairo demolished houses, businesses and other structures located in the vicinity of the border fence with the Strip. . The reason? Widen the corridor and create a “buffer zone” with the Palestinian territory of 79 square kilometers from the dividing line.
The demolitions accelerated after the Sinai-based armed group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Supporters of Jerusalem) carried out an attack on an Egyptian army checkpoint on October 24, 2014. It claimed the lives of 33 soldiers.
Between July 2013 and July 2020 Egyptian military demolished 12,350 structures near borderleaving more than 12,300 families homeless, denounced the Human Rights Watch organization in a report published in 2021 and titled “Egypt: Mass demolitions in the Sinai as probable war crimes.”
In the report, the group also stated that the soldiers destroyed more than 6,000 hectares of crops.
“In 2014, Egypt began another campaign to demolish homes and buildings along its border to expand the Philadeplhi corridor,” Lorenzo Navone, a researcher at the University of Strasbourg and the Institut Convergences Migrations of France, explained to BBC Mundo.
“So today the area of land that included the corridor has almost doubled with the objective of being able to control the border and be able to keep the Palestinians in Gaza. What was once a ‘no man’s land’ on the Gaza side of the border now it also extends to the side of the Egyptian border”, he concluded.
With Israeli troops approaching Rafah, the city is today writing another chapter in its turbulent and bloody history.
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