Out of crisis springs opportunity, but Hamas, Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority must work together, writes Ezzedine Choukri-FishereThe destruction of the "Rafah Wall" on 23 January brought to the forefront a question that has unfortunately been ignored for the last six months: what to do with the Rafah crossing while Gaza is under Hamas's effective control? In the absence of an answer, the crossing has been, for all practical purposes, closed since June 2007 when Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip. The EU, at that point unable to carry out the main task of its Border Assistance Mission (to assist the Palestinian Authority in implementing the Movement and Access Agreement at Rafah), withdrew its monitors from the crossing.
Egypt, faced with the ensuing administrative, legal and security vacuum on the Palestinian side of the border, shut its own door until a solution could be found. Neither the Palestinian Authority (PA) nor Hamas seemed in a hurry to find that solution. Israel maintained its distance but kept a close watch. In the meantime, Hamas's calls for an unconditional opening of the crossing, at the cost of breaking remaining economic and administrative ties between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and Israel, went ignored.
While Hamas, the PA and Egypt watched the paint dry at Rafah, the security situation in the north of Gaza slowly deteriorated. Israel launched a rolling military operation. It also cut off most fuel and other supplies, bringing life in the Strip to a complete halt. Instead of responding with its own strikes, as many thought it would, Hamas moved south and orchestrated the fall of the wall separating Gaza from Egypt. The reported hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who flowed into Sinai, and continued to cross back and forth despite Egyptian attempts to re-seal the border, were the materialisation of Egypt's worst nightmares.
In the aftermath, all four parties began proposing their own solutions for the Rafah crossing. But for any solution to be sustainable, it has to be supported by all members of what has become the "Rafah Quartet": Egypt, the PA, Hamas and Israel, who between them exercise de facto or de jure control of the Rafah area. During the past six months, each of these four parties has been trying to impose its own vision, or exclude that of another member. That strategy has failed, and it has become clear that the consent of all four is a prerequisite for any arrangement to work.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/882/fo91.htm
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