Plan to let Canadians and other foreign nationals leave Gaza at Rafah crossing cancelled
Canadians and other foreign nationals were unable to leave Gaza via the Egyptian border crossing at Rafah on Saturday, leaving those civilians still waiting for a way out of the emergent war zone as the day came to a close.
CBC News viewed a message that Israeli officials sent to several Western embassies indicating that a potential Saturday afternoon window for crossing the border into Egypt was cancelled.
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told reporters that Saturday’s planned Rafah crossings had to be halted due to unspecified “violence.” She said she was seeking more information on the circumstances.
Joly said some 40 families with Canadian ties had been “seeking to secure safe passage” using the Rafah crossing.
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The minister said Israel had given assurances that Canadians would be able to leave Gaza. It was not immediately clear when that might occur.
These Canadians are among the estimated 1,500 people in Gaza who hold Western passports, according to The Associated Press.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forced from their homes in Gaza in the wake of an intensive and days-long Israeli bombardment on targets in the territory, following a devastating surprise cross-border attack by Hamas militants a week ago.
The number of displaced persons is growing, as some 1.1 million people in Gaza were told Friday to move south — with the same warnings repeated Saturday — ahead of an expected Israeli ground offensive. Those who have been displaced can move, but they can’t actually leave the territory because they can’t cross at Rafah, and Israel is not allowing any alternative paths out.
“Nobody can leave Gaza — nobody,” Bushra Khalidi, a policy lead with Oxfam, told CBC News Network on Thursday.
That leaves the stranded civilians trying to find a safe place inside Gaza, which is home to 2.3 million people and bordered by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.
The surprise attack Hamas launched on Oct. 7 saw more than 1,300 Israeli civilians and soldiers killed, and 150 people taken hostage. Within Gaza, as of Saturday, more than 2,200 people have died amid the ensuing Israeli response, according to the Health Ministry — and that doesn’t include the 1,500 Hamas fighters that Israel says were killed.
Gaza has further been sealed off from food, fuel and other supplies, as Israel seeks to compel Hamas to return its hostages — though Basem Naim, a former Hamas government minister, said that wouldn’t happen while Israel’s operation continued in Gaza.
No exit at Rafah
The crossing at the town of Rafah is the only one between Egypt and Gaza.
Earlier this week, Egypt’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said airstrikes had prevented it from operating, leaving trucks of aid stopped on the Egyptian side.
Featured VideoFears of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza are growing as the United Nations says 340,000 people have been displaced by Israeli airstrikes and supplies, including food, clean water and medical supplies, are being cut off by an Israeli blockade.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for access through Rafah in a speech on Thursday. He also pushed back against letting in large numbers of Palestinians.
“The threat there is significant because it means the liquidation of this [Palestinian] cause,” el-Sisi said. “It’s important for its people to stay steadfast and exist on its land.”
He also pointed out that Egypt already hosts some nine million refugees. That population swelled this year as 300,000 Sudanese fled their country’s war into Egypt, which was already facing an economic crisis.
On Saturday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said Palestinians will not leave Gaza or the West Bank to migrate to Egypt.
“Our decision is to remain in our land,” he said in a televised speech, while addressing Egypt in that part of his address.
Khaled Gendy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said Egypt’s primary concern is that hundreds of thousands of refugees will become a permanent reality.
“What sort of guarantees are there going to be for their return?” he said.
Meanwhile, the Israel-controlled pedestrian crossing into Gaza at Erez has been closed until further notice, as has the commercial crossing at Kerem Shalom.
Under all of these constraints, civilians are simply trying to stay out of harm’s way.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Oxfam’s Khalidi said, adding that schools are serving as makeshift shelters, despite not being suitable for that purpose.
Sean Carroll, president and CEO of aid group Anera, said Thursday there’s no telling how long people will be living like this, and they’re going to need to be supplied with food, water and medicine.
More broadly, without food coming into Gaza, there are fears a disastrous shortage is imminent.
Nowhere to go
Israeli airstrikes have levelled residential buildings and neighbourhoods in Gaza. The Israeli military has indicated it is using intelligence to target locations being used by Hamas and says that civilians were warned.
Mkhaimer Abusada fled his apartment in Gaza City days ago after a bombardment “very much erased” a nearby neighbourhood.
He rejected calls for Palestinians to leave areas being targeted in Gaza — as there is nowhere they can go.
“Two million people are trapped,” he told CBC News on Tuesday.
Gideon Levy, a columnist with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, penned a recent column saying his country must come to a reckoning with Hamas alone — and not the population of Gaza as a whole.
He told CBC News Network on Thursday that, in his view, “there must be some limits” — militarily and otherwise — on how Israel responds to what Hamas did.
Many civilians will expectedly be among the victims as Israel further responds, Levy said. “We have to raise our voice to stop at a certain stage, because otherwise it will be really a bloodbath in Gaza.”
