To Live and Die in the Notorious Gazan City of Rafah

Rafah, in southern Gaza, is an otherwise inconspicuous city that has been featured in headline news for months now. Here is why it is so critical to Israel, Hamas, Egypt, and Western countries.

An IDF tank operates in the Gaza Strip. (photo: Israel Defense Forces/X)

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There is New York City, London, Paris, Beijing, Sydney, Jerusalem, Rio de Janeiro — and Rafah, a Gazan city that has been in the news as much as any other during the last six months, against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war.

Rafah is the southernmost major city in the Gaza Strip. In 2017, it had a population of 171,889 — but nowadays it is believed that there are some 1.4 million Gazans living there, most of whom were evacuated to the area from other parts of the Strip that were designated as combat zones.

Israeli officials claim that 250,000 of these Gazans who found refuge in Rafah have already left the city during the last two weeks since the IDF left the Khan Yunis area.¹

When Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1982, Rafah was split into a Gazan part and an Egyptian part, separated by barbed-wire barriers. The core of the city was destroyed by Israel and Egypt in order to create a large buffer zone. In a 2007 agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Rafah crossing was put under Egyptian control.

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Israel has said that there are as many as six Hamas battalions (or about 25 percent of the terror group’s militants) stationed in Rafah, both above and below ground, and it believes that many of the remaining hostages are being kept there as well.

According to a Ynet report today, the Israeli government will decide within the next 72 hours whether to launch a military operation to eliminate Hamas’ terror battalions in Rafah.

While not discussing specific battle plans, the Israeli military has increasingly signaled readiness to move on Rafah, after pushing off the offensive for more than a month to allow for truce talks aimed at freeing the 133 hostages that are believed to still be held in the Strip, as well as to hear out U.S.-led concerns about its plans for fighting in the city.

“Hamas was hit hard in the northern sector. It was also hit hard in the center of the Strip. And soon it will be hit hard in Rafah, too,” said Brigadier General Itzik Cohen, commander of the 162nd Division operating in Gaza, in an interview with Israel’s Kan public broadcaster which aired last week. “Hamas should know that when the IDF goes into Rafah, it would do best to raise its hands in surrender. Rafah will not be the Rafah of today… There won’t be munitions there. And there won’t be hostages there.”

But many world leaders are throwing a temper tantrum about a major Israeli ground operation in Rafah.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that it would be “completely unacceptable” for Israel to attack in Rafah, adding that the Commission would “sit down with our member states and act on that” if Israel invaded Rafah.

Thomas Friedman, an overly glorified mouthpiece for U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, wrote in The New York Times this past weekend: “U.S. diplomacy to end the Gaza war and forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia has been converging in recent weeks into a single giant choice for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: What do you want more — Rafah or Riyadh?”

It is as if Friedman is more interested in manipulating quasi-clever literary devices (i.e. alliteration) than he is in seriously presenting The New York Times’ audience with realistic, pragmatic commentary about an overwhelmingly convoluted region that most people (Friedman included) know two sh*ts about.

As one social media user commentated on Friedman’s piece: “Israel has a choice to make: Accept Tom Friedman’s false binaries, or reject them.”²

My interpretation is similar: The Saudis need Israel (and have been working with the Israelis covertly for years), and whatever happens (or does not happen) in Rafah will not tremendously change this reality.

If anything, Friedman’s calculus — which is nothing more than an extension of the thinking that drives the Biden administration — only uncovers more gross incompetence in truly understanding the geopolitics of the Middle East, as well as conventional Arab and Muslim wisdom (which in many ways is diametrically opposed to Western conventional wisdom).

The concerns about Rafah (and the Palestinians in general) for Biden’s Democrats and other Western countries are not really about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Middle Eastern geopolitics. They are concerns precipitated by the reality that these governments have lost control over parts of their own populations and, thus, are selfishly desperate for this war to end for domestic convenience made worse by their gross incompetence.

More specifically, it is possible that a major Israeli ground operation in Rafah will result in growing Palestinian casualty numbers — creating even more (unsubstantiated) unrest in Western cities — but not because Israel will kill them. Instead, there are at least three reasons why Palestinian casualty numbers could spike:

1. One issue could be that, according to the United Nations, it is impossible to evacuate civilians from Rafah because the rest of Gaza is “littered with unexploded ordinance.” In other words, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad booby-trapped tons of roads with explosives ahead of the IDF’s advance — a strategy to pressure the West by putting Israel in impossible predicaments and weaponizing Palestinian civilians’ suffering.

2. Gazans in Rafah could try to illegally cross over into Egypt and effectively get themselves killed.

3. Hamas has probably told all parties, in more or less words, that it will kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Gazans who try to leave Rafah — and create propaganda to blame it on Israel, the United States, and the other parties, like it has been doing since “day one” of this war.

Netanyahu knows all of this and is likely using it for much-needed Israeli leverage, especially after a new Harvard CAPS Harris poll (whose results were released yesterday) showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans (72 percent) believe Israel should go ahead with an offensive in Rafah in order to end the war against Hamas.³

(For what it’s worth, my feeling is that AIPAC funded this poll, at least in part, but that does not delegitimize its results.)

graphic: India Today

The Egyptians are also going bonkers about the prospect of a major Israeli ground operation in Rafah, since Egypt sits on the other side of the Rafah border. At least one reason is obvious: Egypt has been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood for years, Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore Egypt does not want Hamas types illegally crossing over into Egypt if Israel cannot effectively evacuate the Gazans in Rafah to other parts of the Strip.

Hence, Egypt is determined to keep the Palestinians in Gaza and has instructed its military to reinforce the border with armored vehicles and more than three dozen tanks, according to Egyptian media. But a report in February from U.K.-based Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, which has a monitoring team in northern Sinai, suggested that Egyptian authorities were also creating an area to house Palestinian refugees who crossed the border.

There are also dozens of underground tunnels that connect Gaza and Egypt, and word has it that they are a big smuggling business for both Egyptian and Gazan officials (you know, Hamas).

I would also suspect that Hamas, a genocidal terror group which cares about nobody but themselves, is threatening the Egyptians in order to compel Egypt to prevent Israel from conducting a major ground operation in Rafah. Some of these threats could include things like: “We will bring terror to Egypt” and “We will publicize dirty secrets that we know about Egyptian government officials, which will bring you down.”

As such, senior Egyptian officials have said in public and in closed talks with Israel that such a scenario would lead to a “rupture” in relations with Israel and could even “jeopardize” the 40-year peace accord between the countries.

Israeli officials have countered these empty words by saying that intimate, detailed military and diplomatic coordination with Egypt is one of the basic conditions for Israel’s pending military action in Rafah, especially in light of Israel’s intention to take control of the Philadelphi corridor, a no man’s land about 15 kilometers (nine miles) long and several hundred yards wide that stretches from the southernmost tip of Gaza to the Mediterranean Sea.

By controlling all of Gaza’s border crossings, Israel would then be in a position to call the shots in the Strip, something that likely worries the United Nations and other “humanitarian” organizations which have been operating in Gaza for years, since they are all likely in cahoots with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This could ultimately tarnish the reputations and careers of hundreds of “high-profile” corrupted people, so you can imagine there is also tremendous “diplomatic” pressure being leveraged against the Americans, Egyptians, and Europeans to prevent a major Israeli ground operation in Gaza, such that Israel will not take control of the Philadelphi corridor.

Rafah thus enjoys particular importance for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and their “friends.” While Gaza City and Khan Yunis were also important — as was control over the various camps in Gaza, such as Shati, Jabalya, Nuseirat, and Shejaia — “Rafah is the lifeline,” according to Middle East security analyst Seth Frantzman.⁴

“The control is so important,” he added, “that Hamas has been redirecting the attention of international organizations and media to the city so Hamas could use it as a human shield. There are at least four terrorist battalions in Rafah — that’s thousands of men. Yet much of the coverage of Rafah — like of Gaza in general — doesn’t pay enough attention to the armed Hamas men who control the city, overshadowed by the human tragedy and destruction.”

Former Israeli intelligence official Avi Melamed put it another way, saying:

“Hamas projects and views itself as a regional player” and it “needs to shrink into proportions where it will not be able to continue to play this role. And the way to do that actually requires two major elements: One is to significantly crush the Hamas military spine, which is exactly what Israel has been doing. And the other thing is [to reduce] its role in Gaza, which is actually the final phase.”⁵

On March 20th, Netanyahu told Biden that it is “impossible to complete the victory [against Hamas] without the Israel Defense Forces entering Rafah.” A month earlier, Netanyahu asserted that “whoever wants to prevent us from operating in Rafah is telling us, in effect, to lose the war. I will not allow this. The diplomatic campaign that I am leading, along with my colleagues, has allowed us unprecedented freedom of military action for five months, which has not happened in Israel’s wars.”

More recently, a senior Israeli official said that “everyone is waiting for Netanyahu’s directive to start evacuating the civilian population from Rafah. It’s parked at his desk. He needs to resolve the matter with both the Americans and the Egyptians.”

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1. “Top Israeli and Egyptian officials secretly meet to discuss possible Rafah invasion.” Axios.

2. Kamel Amin Thaabet on X

3. “Field Dates: April 24 -25, 2024.” Harvard CAPS Harris.

4. “‘The month of Rafah’: Will Israel's talk lead to defeating Hamas in Gaza? - analysis.” The Jerusalem Post.

5. “Why Rafah is a key flashpoint in the Gaza war.” The Hill.