Hello and welcome to the details of Egyptian truckers endure months at border to deliver vital aid to Gaza and now with the details
Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - A driver waits next to trucks loaded with aid to cross into Gaza from the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing in Rafah on January 19, 2025. Trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip on January 19 after a long-awaited truce between Israel and Hamas came into effect, the United Nations said. — AFP pic
RAFAH, Jan 20 — A corridor of lorries carrying vital aid stretched out Sunday on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing with the war-battered Gaza Strip, manned by drivers who haven’t been home in months.
They were waiting for a truce in the Israel-Hamas war, and when it finally took effect they began rolling through the armoured gates, delivering food, medical supplies and fuel to the Israeli crossings of Nitzana and Kerem Shalom, where they were meant to cross into hunger-stricken Gaza.
Down the aisle of trucks, those returning from their mission wave peace signs and honk their horns in a deafening symphony, ecstatic to have finally achieved what they had come to the edge of Egypt for.
“For months, we’ve been eating, sleeping, and showering in our trucks, just waiting for the moment we’re told we can go in,” said Essam Desouky, a burly trucker from the Nile delta town of Al-Mahalla Al-Kubra.
Mohamed Aboul Maati, a clean-shaven driver in his 50s from Ismailia across the Sinai Peninsula, told AFP at the border he was “unbelievably proud to be able to do even this much.”
Some drivers told AFP they had spent three months at the border, where aid groups say they have hundreds of trucks of supplies stocked up, waiting to enter the Palestinian territory.
First hours of quiet
For months, they have felt the shocks of ceaseless Israeli shelling inside Gaza, just across the border.
On Saturday, the eve of the truce, “my truck windows shook with the force,” said 45-year-old Desouky.
“I woke up terrified, I thought the bombs were falling right outside.”
Gaza’s civil defence agency reported deadly Israeli strikes in the territory’s south, close to the Egyptian border, on Saturday.
At the border on Sunday, as the afternoon stretched without the familiar sounds of fighting, those who live and work in the area seemed disoriented.
“This is the first time it’s been this quiet,” said one humanitarian worker who has been stationed at the border since the war began more than 15 months ago.
Sixty-three-year-old driver Saad Ismail Rakha, who says he has relatives in Gaza, could not shake off the crushing sense of helplessness at the horrors and devastation next door.
“Every time I feel a pang of hunger, I imagine what they must be feeling across the border, it’s agonising,” the man dressed in a dust-worn galabiya told AFP.
“We would do anything we can to help our Palestinian brothers, we would give our lives if we could, but all we can do is drive our cargo.”
‘Uncle, please’
At only 22, Nasr Ayman Nasr has been driving his father’s truck for four years across the vast distance from the Nile delta town of Sharqiya to Gaza, delivering aid.
Even before the current war, the tiny Palestinian territory was under a crippling blockade and in dire need of assistance.
But Nasr says nothing could have prepared him for what he has seen in this war.
“Children clamoured around my truck going, ‘uncle, uncle please,’” he told AFP of his trips into Gaza before Israeli forces seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing last May, forcing it shut.
“A middle-aged woman once threw herself in front of my truck begging me to stop,” said Nasr.
The sudden shriek of a horn shook him out of the painful memory, as a now-empty truck embarked on its long way home.
Still waiting by the side of the road for his turn, Nasr cheered at the driver, yelling for a cigarette.
“Man, I’ve been here for three months, I don’t have any left,” he yelled down with a laugh, driving off.
According to several drivers, many of those leaving will only be gone for a few days: visiting home, loading up more cargo from aid organisations, and heading right back to the border. — AFP
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