Good morning. We’re gearing up to report live from the Westminster Dog Show in New York, and we hope you’ll follow along. And there’s a lot more (serious) news below. Let’s start in Gaza.
A literal lifelineThe border crossing between Gaza and Egypt opened a crack yesterday, a potential starting point in improving conditions for Palestinians in Gaza. The Times called it “a symbolic, if halting, step forward in Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas.” The crossing, in Rafah, at Gaza’s southern border, has been closed for most of the two-year war. Reopening it was a requirement of President Trump’s peace plan for the territory. Yesterday, Palestinians hoping to leave the enclave headed toward it. One of them was Mohammed Mahdi, 25. He was with his father, who was wounded in April 2024 in an Israeli airstrike. Shrapnel ripped into his face, blinding him in one eye and damaging the other. Doctors in Gaza could not do much more than stabilize him, Mahdi told The Times. “Finally, we can get advanced treatment abroad,” he said. To help us understand the significance of the reopening, I reached out to David Halbfinger, who leads the team of Times journalists who cover Israel, Gaza and the occupied West Bank. I had some questions. What’s so special about this one crossing? Gaza has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since Hamas took control of the enclave in 2007, and throughout that period Rafah was the only border crossing not controlled by Israel. That made it a metaphorical lifeline for many Palestinians — a vital connection to the rest of the world. When the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, ignited the war with Hamas, Rafah became the only potential escape route from Gaza, and tens of thousands flocked to the south in hopes of fleeing the conflict. That lifeline was severed when Israel captured the city of Rafah in May 2024 and shut down the crossing. It became impossible for most Palestinians to leave Gaza. It also stranded many Palestinians outside the territory. Some were able to seek medical treatment abroad when the crossing reopened during a short-lived cease-fire in early 2025. But United Nations officials say that around 18,500 people — 4,000 of them children — still need to leave to get treatment for war wounds or serious illnesses. For the injured, Rafah is a literal lifeline, and its reopening represents the difference between hope and despair.
What does it really mean to “open” Rafah? It’s not like the opening of a new bridge or highway. For starters, everyone crossing at Rafah is required to be on foot, and they aren’t being permitted to carry much with them other than clothes. (Food, medicine and other supplies enter Gaza at a different crossing.) The Rafah crossing is being set up with multiple layers of security. These include Egyptian and Israeli authorities, security officers from a European border-monitoring team and officers of the Palestinian Authority. With so many different entities involved, and none of them readily providing answers so far, it is difficult to get clarity on some basic questions — such as how people are cleared to make the trip, what circumstances can help people skip to the front of the line, or even how many people made it through yesterday. It appeared to take many hours for a very small number of people to cross in either direction. Why wasn’t all of that resolved during the negotiations to open the crossing? While some of it is likely a matter of working out the kinks of a complicated logistical setup, it may also be at least partly by design. Many members of Israel’s right-wing government still harbor dreams of depopulating and resettling the Gaza Strip. A few days ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Israel would limit those entering to about 50 on any given day. But, he added, Israel was “not going to prevent anyone from leaving.” There are many more questions that need to be answered. The Israeli military also announced, for example, that the only people it would allow to return to Gaza are those who left during the war. That excludes many who happened to be abroad on Oct. 7 and have been unable to return since. It’s unclear how long Israel will stick to that policy. What does this mean for Israel and Gaza? That’s also complicated. On one level, this is obviously a positive milestone. And yet, even setting aside the Israeli extremists who would prefer that Gaza be emptied out, there are plenty of Israeli Jews who don’t have much empathy for the Palestinians after Oct. 7. There’s also enormous skepticism about the Trump peace plan, which required Rafah to reopen. But Israel isn’t in a position to be dismissing the Trump administration’s wishes — certainly not when it is so dependent on the administration’s support in its dealings with Lebanon, Syria and, of course, Iran. So there seems to be a sense of resignation that Israel needs to go along with the administration’s plan, at least until it becomes clear whether Hamas will fulfill the requirements that it disarm and that Gaza be demilitarized. In that sense, opening Rafah can be seen as a step toward calling Hamas’s bluff. And for Egypt? For Egypt, reopening Rafah raises its own set of problems. Many Palestinians are already living in Egypt in a kind of limbo, and the government is about as interested in getting an influx of more Gazan refugees as Israel is interested in having Palestinian émigrés flood back into Gaza. So it will be interesting, and perhaps revealing, to watch and compare the numbers of people traveling through Rafah in each direction. Though Palestinians impatient to get on with their lives — either by leaving Gaza, or by returning home to pick up the pieces — may have some strong feelings about what promises to be quite a bottleneck there.
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