Since the beginning of the year, my phone has been a window through which I watch the Rafah crossing from my bedroom in Paris three thousand kilometers away. Every piece of news about it awakes something in me that neither the cold of this city nor the long distance can quiet. After nine months in France I still find myself stuck between two worlds: free, expansive Paris and confined, fettered Gaza, ruled by a metal gate that opens and closes at the order of the occupation alone. On either side of this gate are stories that the world doesn’t know, but we Gazans do, because the stories are in our bodies and our names.

The Rafah crossing was closed in May 2024. In the first seven months of the genocide it had been the only way out of the Strip. Thousands of Gazans had left through the city’s gates, most for medical treatment or family reunification, some by paying steep fees to brokers with connections on the other side. They relocated, melted into their new cities, and set about building lives that would help them carry on. The sick and injured arrived at hospitals for treatment. But all of that was halfhearted.

The heart’s other half was turned toward Gaza. Whenever news broke that the crossing would open for a limited time, it reminded Gazans everywhere of their ties to their country and set a storm of questions rattling in their minds.

At the start of February those questions mingled with anger. After announcing that the Rafah crossing would reopen on February 2 the Israeli media published a photo, credited to the branch of the occupation army that controls the exit point, showing a claustrophobic passageway surrounded by barbed wire and surveillance cameras, iron gates at either end. This, then, was to be the crossing through which Gazans would enter and exit—even more prisonlike than it had been. They could show up at the crossing only once the authorities approved their names, and only in special vehicles. They all knew what this was: another method of humiliation. They knew that the occupation, after destroying more than half of Gaza, was rearranging and chipping away at what remained, holding their minds to the grindstone of fear and dread.

Now the stone is only turning faster. At the end of last month the gates of Rafah shut again. Only on Thursday did the crossing reopen, with the same inhumane restrictions. Late into the night Gazans waited for their returning loved ones to cross into the Strip and for their departing relatives to arrive at hospitals in Egypt. No one knows when it might close next.

How did our crossing—the gate we hoped might one day widen into a portal to the world—get so cramped and narrow?

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The occupation has restricted operations at the crossing ever since its inauguration in 1982, when Israel withdrew from Sinai and a border fence split the city of Rafah into Egyptian and Gazan sides. From then on it has been the only passage available to Gazans traveling by land to Egypt. For decades Israel used a variety of reasons to justify opening and closing it; some days it stayed open no more than six hours.

Then, in 2007, restrictions were tightened on the entire Strip. In the north Gaza City huddled in on itself as the Erez crossing—the gateway to the Occupied Palestinian Territories—was shut. In the south Israel and Egypt closed the Rafah crossing. No passenger traffic was allowed in or out; the occupation let in only enough foodstuffs and fuel to keep Gazans barely alive. They suffered catastrophically: some lost their homes to fire after using candles instead of electricity; others had to go without medical treatment because medication was held or confiscated at the border and hospitals lacked supplies.

In the years that followed, Egypt’s political upheavals affected the crossing’s fortunes: it opened to Gazans after the revolution of 2011, closed briefly after the coup that overthrew President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, then reopened with tighter conditions. Between 2011 and 2023 the lives of any Gazans planning to travel abroad revolved around registering, waiting, and observing its movements. Some months traffic would only be permitted for a total of three days; people slept in the checkpoints and waiting rooms. The journey could begin only when the travelers gathered at last on the concourse, passing through the Palestinian hall to the Egyptian one. The return trip could take days; again Gazans might have to sleep at checkpoints whenever the working day ended. But people put up with it, not even realizing how hard it was, since there was no choice, no alternative with which to compare it.

Now that the genocide has stolen so many Gazans’ lives, they have to make up for their losses—the loss of homes, jobs, memories, family members, limbs. Some families are looking for ways to go abroad because the occupation has denied them food or clean water, destroyed their city’s infrastructure, deprived them of an education or a way to make a living. They know that life without their country will be colorless and meaningless, but they need something to compensate them for the time they lost running from the occupation’s fires and struggling over bare necessities each morning instead of waking up for school or work.

The sick and injured, too, need to go abroad. Today more than 18,000 people in Gaza require urgent medical evacuation for treatment that the Strip’s burned, emptied hospitals can no longer offer. Hundreds of them spent last year waiting to see their names on the list for the Karam Abu Salem crossing, the temporary route I took to leave Gaza last April.

Now they wait for Rafah. For four weeks luck simply landed on certain travelers and their companions. After clustering in the yard of a hospital in the Strip and waiting long hours for the all-clear to make their way toward the crossing, they would take special buses via special routes through the devastated city to the metal gate that led them to the Egyptian arrivals hall. Not everyone made it through: by mid-February the Israeli authorities had prevented twenty-six people from entering Egypt. I imagine the pain of a sick or injured Gazan waiting outside the hospital, their hope of getting the treatment they need abroad and returning in full health, their fear of the order that would close the crossing or block their passage.

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You walk the streets of your new city, memorizing them and perhaps memorizing their histories and the faces, names, and stories of the families who live there, their work schedules and break times; you try to make another country feel like it’s yours, but you know you have failed the moment Gaza appears before you unbidden—a Gaza you know has lost all its landmarks but which sneaks into your memory complete and thriving all the same. This is the little battle of nostalgia that Gazans have to fight once they go abroad.

But larger battles invade their days. Many of their host countries have stopped short of giving them residency; testimonies circulate about some of the new authorities preventing patients and their companions from leaving their accommodations except for group trips. They can’t get a job, and if they do the salary will barely be worthwhile. Families have scattered across different countries; every patient or companion who goes abroad leaves loved ones behind.

Many people left without any sense of how long the genocide would last. “A couple of months and the war will be over,” a friend, who went abroad in Ramadan 2024, remembered saying. “Then we’ll come back.” She still hasn’t returned to reunite with her husband in Gaza. On some days, when the crossing was open, a bride and groom would meet at the border; on others a father or mother would come back to a shattered family, their spouse having been killed in their absence. Gazans have thousands of amputated stories.

For many the destroyed city is their best choice. At least it is a city whose pain they know, a city that knows them. In October 2025, when the Palestinian embassy in Egypt announced that it would start registering Gazans who wanted to return to the Strip, tens of thousands signed up. The occupation forces set a quota of just fifty returnees a day; in the first week of the crossing’s return to operations in February only ninety-eight travelers entered. The list of prohibited and restricted items stretched on: no electronic devices other than a single phone; no children’s toys and games; only small doses of medication; a single piece of luggage per person. (How many times have Gazans had to compress their lives into one suitcase while, in another world, travelers carry whatever they wish?) In online testimonies returnees describe passing through an unfamiliar route where unknown people would interrogate them for as many as three hours, asking about family members, pressing them about their reasons for returning, in some cases warning them that the war could resume. Some describe being beaten, shackled, blindfolded. The same Gazans who once waited months to leave the Strip now long to go back, fully aware of the state of the country they are returning to. And the army that blocks patients from leaving Gaza is the same one that continues to prevent them, when they do leave, from coming home.