Here's what we know about the Rafah border crossing
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have descended on the south of the Gaza Strip as a potential Israeli ground operation looms.
The crossing is currently shut, with aid unable to get into Gaza. The United States has been pressuring Egypt to establish a humanitarian corridor for civilians in Gaza, as well as for foreigners. Egypt has said it won't allow refugees to flood its territory and has instead insisted that Israel allow it to deliver aid to Gazans.
Gaza has changed hands several times over the past 70 years. It fell under Egyptian control in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and was captured by Israel in the 1967 war, after which Israel began settling Jews there and significantly curtailed the movement of its Palestinian residents. In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from the territory, and two years later the strip was seized by Hamas.
That has left the Rafah crossing with Egypt as the territory's only entry point to the outside world. Israel then opened the Rafah crossing, which it controlled until it withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Between then and Hamas' takeover of Gaza in 2007, the crossing was controlled by the European Union, which worked closely with Egyptian officials.Following Hamas' takeover, Egypt and Israel significantly tightened restrictions on the movement of goods and people in and out of the territory.
On the day of departure, a bus would take travelers from the Palestinian side of the border to the Egyptian one, where they would wait hours for Egyptian authorities to receive and process visa applications. Many travelers are turned away there, Shawa said, adding that Palestinians are regularly mistreated there.Egypt, which already hosts millions of migrants, is uneasy about the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees crossing into its territory.
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