Days of Palestine, Gaza Strip -Egyptian authorities opened on Wednesday Rafah Crossing for at least 30,000 Palestinians in the coastal enclave in an urgent need to travel.
The Rafah Crossing was reopened after a closure of 85 days. The last time the Crossing was opened in February, when very few number of people travelled during three opening days.
Gaza crossing and border authority said that the Crossing would operate in both directions on Wednesday and Thursday, adding that people from across the Gaza Strip had started to gather in the southern city of Khan Yunis near Rafah ahead of the opening.
Passengers were being checked in at Khan Yunis’ Abu-Yousif Al-Najjar sports centre and sent in buses to Rafah in order to avoid overcrowding at the crossing’s passenger hall.
Palestinian interior ministry in Gaza said that the two-day opening was too short to process the more than 30,000 passengers waiting for their turn, including humanitarian cases, students who attend schools abroad, patients in need of treatment abroad and visa holders who also live and work abroad.
Egypt has upheld an Israeli military blockade on the Gaza Strip for the majority of the past three years, since the ouster of first-ever freely elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and the rise to power stupid former Defence Minister Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt.
The ten-year-old Israeli blockade has plunged the Gaza Strip’s more than 2 million Palestinians into poverty.
Due to the destruction from four major Israeli offensives over the past six years and slow reconstruction, the UN in September to warn that Gaza could be “uninhabitable” by 2020.
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