Real Lives
Israel keeps Rafah's residents out of their own city
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Ten months after the ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, the people of Rafah have not gone home. The city sits inside the area Israeli forces hold behind the so-called yellow line, and there is no published account of a single family that has moved back into it.
"Every day they advance more. We settle, they advance again," a displaced Palestinian woman, Bushra Al-Suwaisi, told a camera crew in footage broadcast by Democracy Now on 30 July, describing a line that has crossed her family's shelter three times.
The line keeps moving.
Residents of Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, Gaza City's Zeitoun, Tuffah and Shejaia neighbourhoods and northern Rafah told Reuters in late July that Israeli forces had pushed the yellow concrete markers deeper into the Strip over the previous ten days, forcing another round of displacement; at least seven people interviewed said warnings came by text message or from loudspeakers mounted on drones.
The Israeli military told Reuters its forces are deployed in Gaza to protect Israel from attack, and that the line was being marked clearly on the ground to reduce the risk of contact between troops and civilians.
Democracy Now put the area under Israeli control at an estimated 64 per cent of Gaza, and reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to extend it to 70 per cent.
The Christian Science Monitor reported in February that the line bars tens of thousands of people from their homes in Rafah and eastern Khan Younis in the south, and in eastern Gaza City, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun in the north, with residents saying the blocks were being shifted steadily west and south.
Gisha, the Israeli access-rights group, says the route's exact boundaries are not clear to residents, while any approach — even unknowing — is an immediate danger to life.
A mother of five from Shujaiya, Heba Abu Ajwa, told the Monitor that nothing in her life had changed since the peace plan was announced, and that her eldest son turned back when drones opened fire as he neared their neighbourhood.
In October, a man in his forties, Hani Abu Omar, told the Palestinian outlet Arab48 that young men of his family risked the crossing to look, and came back to tell him his house was destroyed. "Throughout my life, I worked and earned my living," he said.
The only returns to Rafah that the record documents are returns through it, not to it.
OCHA reported in February that the Rafah crossing opened for limited movement of people for the first time in nearly 11 months, and that UN teams in Gaza had received 223 Palestinian returnees, taken to a reception area at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis staffed with protection officers, psychologists and medical teams.
OCHA also recorded reports of ill-treatment of returnees in transit.
Israeli authorities, according to the same OCHA update, permit returns from Egypt only for people who left Gaza during the war, in coordination with Egypt and after Israeli security clearance. Al Mezan Center for Human Rights said on 4 February that all movement runs through pre-approved lists and what it called a militarised screening corridor.
By 6 March, OCHA reported the crossing shut again, with medical evacuations and the return of residents from abroad suspended.
Water in Rafah governorate is a pipe held together by improvisation.
OCHA reported in February that the UAE drinking-water pipeline from Egypt had been damaged in the overland stretch running through Rafah, that temporary repairs used the last two available pipe clamps, and that two further leaks were sealed with plywood and bolts — a solution it described as less robust.
The WASH cluster counted 19,969 cubic metres of drinking water delivered daily across Gaza as of 11 February, through distribution points it listed in North Gaza, Gaza city, Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis. None were listed in Rafah.
In July, OCHA reported that engine oil shortages were disrupting water and sanitation services and raising the risk of sewage overflows. Médecins Sans Frontières, in an April report on water in Gaza, found that finding water has become one of the most time-consuming tasks of daily life, with families depending on trucks run by aid groups, municipalities or private borehole operators.
School, for most children, means a tent.
UNICEF said in January that 60 per cent of school-aged children in Gaza had no access to in-person learning, that more than 90 per cent of schools were damaged or destroyed and at least 92 per cent need reconstruction or major repair, and that it was teaching 135,462 children in 111 temporary learning spaces.
Its Back to Learning programme aims to reach 336,000 children by the end of 2026. The European Training Foundation, citing World Bank estimates, put the rubble at 40 to 50 million tonnes, which must be cleared before schools can be rebuilt at scale.
Work, for many, is a food queue. OCHA reported that between 1 and 5 July partners distributed food to more than 53,500 people at 36 sites — two parcels, a 25-kilogram bag of flour and 2.5 kilograms of high-energy biscuits per family, covering 75 per cent of minimum calorie needs, with biscuit top-ups suspended that month to preserve stocks.
Reconstruction has not started. OCHA has recorded continued bans or tight controls on steel, cement and heavy equipment classified as dual-use. The Israeli broadcaster Kan reported in May that armed Hamas members threatened contractors due to enter an Israeli-held area of Rafah to begin UAE-funded work; no Hamas response to that account is on record.
Hamas and other factions, quoted by Mondoweiss in May, said Israel had implemented none of its own first-phase obligations, citing the closed crossing and the absence of building materials.
Briefing the Security Council on 21 May, the Board of Peace's high representative, Nickolay Mladenov, said that while the guns had largely fallen silent and food security had improved, "there is no recovery in Gaza", with some 80 per cent of buildings damaged or destroyed and more than a million people without permanent shelter. Denmark's representative called the situation neither war nor peace.
What comes next for Rafah is a plan its residents have not been consulted on. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, in comments reported on 1 July, said proposals for a "green city" to house Palestinians inside territory currently under Israeli control amount to re-engineering where people live under military administration, and to erasing Rafah while extinguishing its residents' right to go back to their own streets.
No date has been published for reopening Rafah to the people who lived there, and no authority has said where the yellow line will finally stop.
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