Above photo: Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa packing boxes of aid for Gaza at the Egyptian Red Crescent.
Miles of semi-trailer trucks are lined up on the Egyptian side of the Rafah Crossing.
Waiting to deliver water, food, medicine and other essentials to Gaza.
Longtime peace and justice activist Sarah Flounders recently traveled to Egypt with a delegation to push for opening the Rafah Crossing to let aid into Gaza. She was joined by members of a long list of organizations including the National Lawyers Guild, Palestine Prisoner Solidarity Network, Black Alliance for Peace, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, US Peace Council, Veterans for Peace, Samidoun, Palestine Rights, Free Julian Assange Committee, Philly Palestine Coalition, and Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees. They were accompanied by representatives of media outlets including Black Agenda Report, RT, The Grayzone, Real News Network, and Brazil’s Diário do Central do Mondo. We discussed why they went and what they saw.
Ann Garrison: What’s your understanding of the situation at the Rafah Crossing?
Sara Flounders: Even in normal circumstances 500 trucks a day carry supplies into Gaza. They’ve been under US and Israeli sanctions for 16 years, ever since the 2006 election of the Hamas government, so it takes 500 trucks a day to get basic food and medicine and essential supplies into Gaza. And since the Israeli offensive began, only about 10 trucks have been getting in on some days, maybe a few more on others. In other words, a fraction, just a tiny fraction of what’s needed to take care of the essential needs of the population. Now I think we’re on day 47, so you can just do the math to picture the deprivation in Gaza.
AG: That would be a catastrophe even if Israel weren’t relentlessly bombing Gaza. Now, after so few trucks have gotten in for so long and so much damage has been done, far more than 500 trucks a day must be needed.
SF: Definitely, and the news story that is covered pretty regularly in Egypt and throughout the Arab world is that lines and lines of these trucks are awaiting passage into Rafah. Miles of trucks.
AG: I did a few calculations earlier, after reading the phrase “miles of trucks,” just to make sure it’s not an exaggeration, and the numbers confirm it. A semi-trailer truck is about 70 feet long, and there are 5280 feet in a mile. Dividing 5280 by 70 gets 75.5 trucks, and most accounts are that there are hundreds lined up, meaning, as you said, miles of trucks. It’s also being reported that the nearest warehouses, in El Arish, are full of undelivered aid.
SF: That’s what we were hoping to see for ourselves if we’d been allowed to go on from Cairo to the Rafah Crossing.
AG: Do you know how these drivers and whoever else is traveling with the convoys are coping? I know they’re not the main concern because they’re not the ones being bombed, but I’m trying to imagine what this looks like. If you’re outside Rafah Crossing waiting in semi-trailer trucks and you’re there for days, I suppose you have to camp out next to the trucks.
SF: Well, that I don’t really know, again, because we weren’t allowed to go beyond Cairo. The nearest town or city is El Arish where, as you said, aid is reportedly piling up in warehouses.
In years past El Arish was a resort town, although it’s not functioning that way now, and it’s about an hour from the Rafah Crossing. So that is a place where people have stopped, sometimes waiting for days to cross into Rafah.
AG: El Arish has a population of roughly 200,000 and seems to be the only city anywhere near that size in the Sinai, where there also seem to be very few roads. A Web search says there’s a largely nomadic bedouin population of 600,000 in the Sinai but minimal urban infrastructure outside El Arish.
SF: For a long time the Sinai has been a military zone. You can’t cross the Suez Canal without military clearance. And then I think it’s another six hours from the Suez Canal to Rafah.
AG: Could you give us sort of a travelog, so people can imagine what you went through in Egypt? You arrive in Cairo, the capital of Egypt and a city of 10 million people. Then where do you go and what do you do?
SF: Well, first of all, the members of the delegation, who had flown in from many different starting points, came together.
We then began trying to get clearance to go to Rafah and started meeting with groups in Egypt, which is very difficult because Egypt is now a military dictatorship. It’s not really legal for many groups to operate, so the conditions are difficult. The conditions are especially difficult because of the US role in Egypt and its complete collaboration with the Zionists.
We went to the Red Crescent, where Susan Abulhawa, the prominent Palestinian author, made a donation arranged through Playgrounds for Palestine.
We were busy the whole time looking for ways to connect with the groups who are able to operate in Egypt today. There are journalists and medical associations there that are completely focused on this.
AG: Did you go to the US Embassy?
SF: Yes, and we tried to deliver a letter of protest on the US role in the war and the blockade. We notified them that we were coming and asked for an appointment.
But instead of responding, the US had embassy security meet us when we arrived. First they told us to go across the street and down the street, and so on. We complied, and then found ourselves all being detained.
So this is the way that the US operates in Egypt today. Any attention to their role, which is large and intense, is met with hostility, dismissal, and even arrest.
AG: How long were you detained?
SF: For several hours.
AG: By Egyptian police?
SF: It appeared to be at the direction of US embassy staff, but we were detained by Egyptian police.
AG: Were there any other foreign delegations in Egypt at the time?
SF: No, but there was an international delegation of conscience that was arriving on the day we were leaving and their connection with the Egyptian movement was also part of this.
AG: Tell us about trying to get to Rafah.
SF: The group that was leaving for Rafa initially included us in their delegation, but then just before departure, we were told that no one with a foreign passport would be allowed to participate.
AG: It was the Egyptian delegation that met with you and said you could join them on their trip to Rafah, but then the Egyptian government said you couldn’t?
SF: That’s right.
AG: And was the Egyptian delegation traveling with trucks?
SF: Yes. They were traveling with a truck convoy, but they were in buses, not in the trucks.
AG: Had any of you made previous attempts to get into Gaza?
SF: There were people in our delegation who have been involved in “Boats to Gaza” and other earlier efforts to get supplies in.
This has been a years-long effort, ever since the US and Israeli sanctions on Gaza tightened like a noose 16 years ago.
And, of course, those who tried to get there by boat faced Israeli attacks. In 2010, Israeli forces attacked the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish humanitarian flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and killed 10 people, nine Turks and one American.
AG: I just read that the Mavi Marmara Freedom and Solidarity Association is organizing another flotilla, even though Israeli forces destroyed Gaza’s monument to the Mavi Marmara martyrs last week.
SF: Ann Wright, a former US military officer and diplomat who resigned over the Iraq War, has been very active with the past boats to Gaza and many other Palestinian rights issues, and she was denied entry to join us in Egypt.
There have been huge efforts that have involved many, many hundreds of people, 1000s of people internationally, in past efforts to break the blockade over many years. But now, of course, it’s more extreme than at any time in the past because so much of Gaza has been turned to rubble. There’ve been all the attacks on the hospitals, including Al-Shifa, the main hospital in Gaza.
And while we were there, of course, the whole time, the Egyptian press repeated endlessly, along with the US corporate press, that Al Shifa Hospital was a command center for Hamas with huge bunkers and underground command rooms and all of these wild distortions. And when they finally destroyed the hospital, they found none of that. And that’s important. It’s one more Zionist fabrication to try to justify this horrendous war on every level. And it was clear, this was a total fiction that this was the command center of Hamas.
There are no huge tunnels, no weapons, no command center.
AG: In the pictures, it looks like they may have found a dozen rifles, a few vests, and a few rounds of ammunition.
SF: Yes, and who knows where they came from.
AG: Can you talk about the specifics of the sanctions since 2007?
SF: Yes. The sanctions on Gaza are the most extreme form of US sanctions in the world. The US now imposes sanctions on 40 countries, a third of the world’s population. And in every country, they’re meant to destabilize, create shortages and hyperinflation, and directly harm civilian populations. They’re a flagrant violation of international law.
In 2006, when Hamas won an overwhelming majority in democratic elections, the Israelis and the US were so outraged that they imposed newly harsh sanctions on Gaza, in terms of supplies, trade exchanges, even Gaza’s trade in the fruit and vegetables that it produced. That’s now been the story for 16 years.
AG: The Israeli sanctions have US approval, but are there actual sanctions on Palestine listed with OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, at the Treasury Department?
SF: Yes, as a matter of fact, people have been prosecuted for doing things like gathering money for orphanages in Gaza. Consider the case of the Holy Land Five, who are serving long sentences in US prisons for gathering funds for orphanages to be administered by nonprofit organizations that were fully vetted.
So these are really the most extreme form of sanctions on an already beleaguered, surrounded people.
AG: We should probably explain sanctions, which are still abstract to a lot of people. Sanctions are the specifics of a trade embargo, the exact specifications of what’s allowed in and out of a country and what’s not.
SF: A better name for it is really economic coercive measures or better yet, economic strangulation. And as I said, it means the most basic supplies can’t be traded. Of course, we’ve seen it over many decades against Cuba, since 1962, and now in 40 countries. Sanctions are the US effort to dominate the world economically and to threaten every country that doesn’t agree with the US government. But against Palestinians, sanctions reach a whole new level.
AG: When you were in Egypt—stuck in Cairo—did you get any sense of how Israel’s war on Gaza is affecting the mood there?
SF: Support for the Palestinians there is overwhelming, as it is throughout the Arab world. And, of course, we’ve seen images of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations of literally millions of people. This is also true in every Islamic country, where support is deeply rooted over decades, over generations.
Now in Egypt, as I say, there is a military dictatorship. So I think there was one demonstration allowed early on for a very short period of time, but since then, not at all.
AG: I saw footage of that large demonstration.
SF: Yes, that was in Tahrir Square early on.
AG: We keep hearing that Israel’s goal is to force Gazans through the Rafah Crossing, ultimately into the Sinai Desert. But there’s next to no infrastructure there. Besides El Arish, this coastal town of 200,000, there barely even seem to be any roads. Two-thirds of the distance between Cairo and the Rafah Crossing is desert. So what can it possibly mean to force Gazans into the Sinai Desert where only nomadic bedouins know how to survive?
SF: The Sinai is absolute desert, barren, completely undeveloped. And so this is really Israel’s final complete expropriation of Palestinian land. And once they’re expelled, it’s clear that there’s no returning. That’s why this expulsion into the Sinai has been totally rejected by every Palestinian group and by the Egyptian government, which obviously doesn’t want more than two million Palestinians in Egypt, even if in an endless desert encampment.
Gaza itself is an extremely lush, coastal area that could well feed itself if it weren’t constantly bombed and destroyed.
The same process is going on in a different way in the West Bank, where every single Palestinian village and town is under attack. There are settler gangs that have really become like vigilante groups or lynch mobs. They go into Palestinian towns and simply grab and kidnap everyone they possibly can.
The Hamas attackers’ goal on October 7 was to take hostages and then bargain for an exchange for some of the 1000s of Palestinians that Israel has imprisoned.
AG: Sara, thank you for speaking to Black Agenda Report.
SF: Thank you.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann(at)anngarrison.com. Please help to support her work on Patreon.