The fate of Rafah hangs by the thread of the proposed agreement put forward by Israel which Hamas is studying and to which, it has announced, it will respond. But if there is no agreement for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, the army will enter the southernmost city of the Strip. A race against time and on a razor’s edge, given that the IDF’s ground operation seems upon us, despite the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians crammed into Rafah.
But the operation in the city on the border with Egypt and the raging battle that will follow could also have a cost for the approximately 130 hostages still in Hamas hands. Just today, the Islamic faction released a new video with two of them – Keith Siegal and Omri Miran – asking Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for an immediate agreement for their release. The desperate appeal has reinvigorated the protests against the Netanyahu executive, with the Forum of the families of the kidnapped asking the government to make a choice: «Rafah or the hostages. Choose the latter.” «We have received – said Khalil al-Hayya, deputy head of the political arm of Hamas in Gaza – the official response to the ceasefire proposal, delivered to Egyptian and Qatari mediators on 13 April. The movement – he added – will study it and, subsequently, give an answer.” A time that Hamas needs to also deal with the other Palestinian factions in Gaza, the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, also involved in the October 7 attack.
Israel is waiting but it is clear that it considers the counter-proposal “the last chance” before entering Rafah and perhaps also the ‘Philadelphia Corridor’, the narrow buffer zone that runs along the border between Gaza and Egypt and which the Cairo considers it untouchable. But the operation in Rafah also risks creating consequences for Israel’s already tense relations with the US administration.
Biden, according to what Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, could also consider cutting the recently decided sale of some weapons to the Jewish state. There are many reasons: not only that the operation in Rafah could ruin the possibility of an agreement. But also «the formation of an Arab peacekeeping force that could replace the Israeli army in Gaza, in a diplomatic agreement on security between Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the Palestinians and, finally, the union of moderate Arab states and allies Europeans in a coalition against Iran’s missile threats.”
The topic of Rafah and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza will also be on the table in a meeting in Riyadh, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF), between Palestinian President Abu Mazen, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the main international officials. “In Riyadh we have the key players and we hope – said the president of the WEF, Borge Brende – that the discussions can lead to a process towards reconciliation and peace”. The military action in Rafah is also a source of rift within the Israeli Security Cabinet. With tension growing hour by hour as demonstrated by the latest episode relating to the announcement by the head of the IDF Herzi Halevi of the surrender of “hundreds of terrorists in Gaza”. “Couldn’t we have killed some of them?” thundered the minister of national security and right-wing hawk, Itamar Ben Gvir. An exit harshly attacked by Halevi himself and other government officials.
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