Rafah border crossing closes on Gaza’s wounded again as shelling, ground operations continue to tear through strip

The Rafah border crossing has been closed since Saturday, cutting off the sole route to potentially life-saving treatment for the very few of the Gaza Strip’s tens of thousands of wounded who were permitted to enter Egypt.

Foreign passport holders with permission to leave are also stranded inside Gaza once again, after the crossing opened for only a brief few days last week.

Meanwhile, heavy shelling continued to pound Gaza and its residents into Sunday night, with a blackout on telecommunications networks limiting further updates on the impact of the bombing.

Maghazi refugee camp in Central Gaza was subject to heavy airstrikes in the late hours of Saturday night, killing at least 47 and injuring tens of civilians. The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said that many more are thought to be trapped underneath the rubble left by the explosion. Pictures from the aftermath of the impact showed bulldozers sorting through the remains of 20 buildings that once stood in a square in Maghazi, now obliterated by the bombing.

“Children were killed in the impact of the blast, and others were killed due to internal bleeding without being injured. Many suffered from huge burns,” the general director of the nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza told the press on Sunday.

On Saturday morning, Israel also bombarded a United Nations for Relief and Works Agency school in the Jabalia refugee camp, the third major attack to impact the camp in northern Gaza so far.

Palestinian witnesses told Reuters on Saturday morning that Israel struck the Fakhoura school where thousands of evacuees were living, with people in the area describing at least three separate impacts in quick succession. At least 15 people were reported killed, while a further 70 were injured.

An initial massacre took place in Jabalia on Tuesday, when Israeli airstrikes destroyed an entire residential block of 20 buildings with six bombs, according to Gaza’s Interior Ministry. “The primary death count reached 130, with hundreds under the rubble,” director of al-Awda Hospital Doctor Ahmed Mahanna told Mada Masr the evening after the strikes. Gaza’s health ministry said that the number of people killed and injured in Tuesday’s initial bombings in Jabalia amounted to a total of 400.

Less than 24 hours after the first, a second blast ripped through Jabalia’s Falouja neighborhood, killing tens of civilians in the camp on Wednesday, according to the Palestinian News and Information Agency (WAFA).

But over the course of the consecutive attacks targeting Jabalia last week and wreaking irreparable damage on the camp — Gaza’s largest and once home to over 100,000 people —  a total of 1,000 were killed, wounded, or missing, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said later.

Health officials responding to the bombing campaigns are increasingly expressing incapacity to the situation in the strip, where at least 9,770 have been killed and over 24,808 wounded since October 7, according to the ministry’s Sunday statement. “Saving the wounded is becoming impossible,” said the general director of hospitals in Gaza, Mohamed Zaqout, following the bombing at Maghazi.

Sixteen hospitals are completely out of service, the ministry said, both a result of the airstrikes, and due to fuel stocks dwindling as a result of Israel's total ban on any fuel entering the strip at all.

While Gaza’s health system buckles under the sustained pressure of responding to continuous bombing, the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt closed Saturday and remained closed on Sunday to passengers exiting the Gaza Strip, cutting off the very few injured Palestinians who have been granted permission to seek medical treatment in Egypt.

Foreign passport holders who were stranded in the strip when shelling began in October are also cut off from their sole route out of Gaza due to the closure of the Rafah crossing.

The closures come after a number of ambulance convoys transporting the wounded in Gaza were targeted in Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire over the weekend.

During the brief window that Rafah was opened, only 49 injured Palestinians made it into Egypt for treatment at some of North Sinai’s hospitals. Over 100 foreign passport holders had health checks at the border, Egypt’s Health Ministry said, out of a total of around 500 foreign passport holders who were listed as due to leave the strip.

The Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza was closed during the first days of Israel’s retaliatory onslaught following Hamas’s October 7 operation. Israel bombed the crossing facilities four times within the initial week of the war, and it took three weeks of fraught negotiations before Israel allowed a slow trickle of humanitarian aid convoys to cross into Gaza from Egypt, followed by allowing some people out of the strip on November 1.

Alongside the massive air campaigns tearing through the strip, leaving huge civilian casualties in their wake, the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, continued to battle ground incursions by troops from the Israeli Defense Forces, who began operations inside Gaza on October 27 and have been closing in on Gaza City in the north.

Clashes are ongoing between the Qassam Brigades to the north west of Gaza City, to its south, and in Beit Hanoun, in the north eastern part of the strip, said Abu Obeida, the Qassam Brigades spokesperson, in a broadcast published by various media outlets on Saturday.

“We destroyed 24 military vehicles, including tanks, tankers, anti-armor bulldozers, using Yassin 105 missiles and guerrilla action canisters in the last 48 hours,” Abu Obeida continued.

The IDF, meanwhile, announced on Saturday that another four of its soldiers had been killed, increasing the number of casualties it has suffered as a result of the ground invasions to a total of 28, according to Israeli news outlets.

Around 60 of the prisoners Hamas took in during its October 7 operation against Israel are now missing due to Israel’s airstrikes, said Abu Obeida, adding that 23 of those people are trapped under the rubble. Israeli authorities say that Hamas took over 200 prisoners in total, including 10 United States citizens.

The US has sent drones into Gaza to look for prisoners being held by Hamas, said a New York Times investigation on Thursday.

Video footage of prisoners being held in Gaza was also released by the Qassam Brigades on October 30, showing the prisoners criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for bombing and killing them and demanding — as Hamas has done — that he release Palestinian detainees in Israel in exchange for Hamas facilitating their release from the Gaza Strip.

“You are killing us, release the Palestinian detainees,” said one of the Israeli detainees in the footage.

With some of the prisoners’ families placing pressure on Netanyahu domestically to stop the indiscriminate bombing campaigns and make concessions to Hamas to secure the prisoners’ releases, the tactic of carpet bombing also gained attention in the global press.

When an ABC reporter asked IDF spokesperson Lieutenant Jonathan Conricus why Israel had attacked the Jabalia camp, Conricus claimed that it is a “Hamas tunnel complex,” and that the IDF was able to kill “a very senior and important Hamas commander,” alongside a “a significant number of Hamas operatives [who] were with him.” Hamas has denied that a Hamas leader was present at Jabalia.

But in an investigation published Friday, the New York Times noted that regardless of its aim, the size of the airstrikes that destroyed an entire residential block of 20 buildings in Jabalia — using at least two 2,000-pound bombs in a neighborhood around 40 feet wide — raises serious questions about the proportionality of Israel’s attacks.

Israel has also faced questioning about the scale of the munitions it is using from US officials, according to Politico, which cited US and Israeli officials speaking to the outlet on condition of anonymity.

US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken also said on Friday, during a visit to Israel, that he spoke to Netanyahu about “concrete steps” that the United States believes Israel could and should take to minimize civilian deaths, a message that was reiterated on Saturday in a meeting with regional leaders, including Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry in Jordan, according to the New York Times.

One of these examples include “using smaller bombs when going after Hamas leaders and infrastructure.”

During his visit to the region over the weekend, Blinken also reiterated the US’s recent change of tactic to call in favor of a humanitarian pause to allow aid to enter the Gaza Strip.

Though advocating for localized and momentary stops to fighting, the United States has vetoed ceasefire resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.

The Biden administration’s inclination toward a pause is emerging now, however, as the White House is “taking a lot of fire domestically and internationally because it is giving Israel its full backing and to allow aid trucks into Gaza,” according to the Axios news outlet, which cited a US and three Israeli officials with direct knowledge of the talks.

Netanyahu, however, has rejected any pause to fighting until Hamas releases prisoners.