Terrible food, sparse water, poor hygiene, and inadequate shelter.  The conditions are ripe for tragedy.  Seriously ill people face preventable deaths as, despite their desperate need of medical care, the Rafah border remains closed, preventing passage to medical facilities and to safety back home.  For Gazans, it is the equivalent of shutting down Los Angeles airports and banning all other transportation while F-16s, helicopters, and warplanes hover over the static population of the city, ensuring no one can make it back home.

For over one month, at both the Palestinian and Egyptian sides, people have been waiting at the Rafah border –without medicine, with little to no food or water, shelter-less and blistering under the searing Gazan summer sun.  All are waiting for the first of 7 consecutive gates to be opened, which will allow the stranded thousands to cross into Gaza or out to seek medical help. 

The Rafah border is strictly controlled by Israel, closely monitored by video-cameras.  Israel is not allowing the border to open, despite previous agreements to keep the crossing open for 24 hours.  Slighting that agreement, Israel hasn’t opened it lately.  So, each day ordinary citizens are paying the price, one which comes at the cost of health and life!  At least 28 have died as a result of the strict denial of passage to and from Gaza at the Rafah crossing, completely closed since June 10, where nearly 6,000 Palestinians wait without adequate food, water, or shelter in the intense sweltering heat of summer.   Even those with severe medical emergencies are being denied passage. 

Patients have the right to medicine, children to drinking water, and people to respect—at the very least respect as humans, not to mention as Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs.  Frequently I wonder, how can anyone allow human beings to suffer like this, to be kept waiting even though many are only a tantalizing half an hour away from home. Yet their proximity to home has no impact on their reality: they are stuck, trapped, in another country without the basic services of citizens.  Where is the international outrage and action?

It is impossible to fathom that ambulances should be held back with suffering people in critical need of medical care following operations in hospitals in Egypt and other Arab countries.  Additional salt in their many wounds comes with the loss of nearly 6000 people’s suitcases.

Over phone, 25 year old Mohammed Abu el Karash, with an injured backbone and who has returned from Nasser hospital in Cairo, explained how he was kept waiting inside the ambulance for 13 hours before he gave up and went back to the Cairo hospital: “I have tasted death many times.  I can’t move at all, even to go to the restroom—I’m waiting for the international community to let us back to our homes, immediately, to end our undue and extended suffering at the border,” he said.

Added to the border troubles are the deaths and injuries from repeated Israeli invasions in the last weeks.   A July 5 invasion of Al Boreij refugee camp in central Gaza left 11 dead, including 3 civilians, and over 30 injured, including many children.  In the same incursion, a clearly unarmed Palestinian cameraman was shot repeatedly in both legs, resulting in their amputation, by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) soldiers, in the latest of many attacks on journalists.

“I feel like our lives don’t matter to the European Union observers and Israel—they never care.  Aren’t we human beings like them?” he asked.