Gaza Herald_ After months of closure beginning in May 2024, punctuated only by a brief and tightly restricted opening in early 2025 and characterized by systematic delay, obstruction, and evasion, Israeli occupation authorities finally reopened the Rafah Crossing from both the Palestinian and Egyptian sides. The move came not out of humanitarian concern but under American pressure and within the framework of US President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza.
For Palestinians in Gaza and international humanitarian organizations alike, Rafah Crossing is known as the Strip’s sole land gateway to the outside world. Yet even with its reopening, Israeli authorities continued to bar civilians and thousands of patients in desperate need of medical care, despite estimates underscoring the scale of the crisis. Humanitarian aid trucks also remained largely stranded on the Egyptian side, with only a limited number allowed to enter Gaza, and only through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
The conduct imposed by the occupation was entirely predictable in its cruelty. Travellers were subjected to intimidation, verbal abuse, physical assault, handcuffing, blindfolding, degrading interrogations, and deliberate delays. These measures were enforced indiscriminately, without regard for children, women, or the elderly, and despite the very small number of people Israel had agreed to allow through. Once again, this behavior exposed the occupation’s deepening descent into fascism, racism, and institutionalized brutality, carried out openly even in the presence of European monitors. In practice, American pressure has amounted to little more than tacit permission for Israel to refine its methods of humiliation and repression.
What appeared particularly striking in this latest episode was the occupation’s apparent fear of children’s toys. Israeli authorities confiscated toys from Gaza’s children in full view of sobbing youngsters and distressed mothers, as though a toy in a child’s hands posed a threat comparable to armed resistance. This is the same army whose leaders and defenders continue to repeat the hollow claim that it is “the most moral army in the world,” even as it commits some of the gravest genocidal crimes of our time.
At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly reacted with fury to the emblem adopted by the Palestinian national committee tasked with administering Gaza under Trump’s plan. The emblem, a golden eagle facing right, bearing the Palestinian flag on its chest, provoked Netanyahu’s objection because it resembled symbols associated with the Palestinian Authority. He declared such imagery unacceptable and insisted that the Palestinian Authority would have no role in Gaza’s governance. Notably, this rejection came before the committee had even entered the Strip, offering a clear indication of the obstruction and paralysis it would face under continued Israeli interference.
While it is unlikely that US envoy Steve Witkoff will address the confiscation of children’s toys during his current visit to Israel to oversee arrangements for the second phase of the American plan, it is far more likely that the eagle bearing the Palestinian flag will feature prominently in his discussions with Netanyahu, assuming the Israeli prime minister does not move to block the committee’s entry into Gaza altogether.
In the end, the reopening of Rafah has revealed not a shift toward humanitarian responsibility, but the occupation’s enduring obsession with control: control over movement, over symbols, over memory, and even over the toys carried by Gaza’s children.
