Sisters Saher and Summer Dawwas, draped head to toe in black abayas, hugged joyfully. Saher had spent the last 18 days in a sun-baked tent on the Egyptian side of the border, where she and her father, Khalil, were marooned with thousands of Palestinians, many of whom had gone to Egypt for medical treatment.
Saher and Khalil Dawwas were traveling from the United Arab Emirates, via Cairo and Rafah, to the Gaza Strip, to attend Summer's wedding, which will be Monday.
"We were the lucky ones," Khalil Dawwas said. He and his daughter were on the first bus to cross yesterday because the people ahead of them on the growing list of Palestinians in transit had given up and gone back to Cairo and the nearby Egyptian town of El-Arish, he said.
Egyptian officials estimate that 2,000 people were stranded and had been living in tents and sleeping on mattresses inside the crossing's small terminal building. They were eating canned food and occasional hot meals provided by charities, and standing in long lines to use makeshift toilets and emergency showers set up by the Egyptian Red Crescent. It was not clear how many people were able to cross into Gaza yesterday.
As many as 6,000 more may be staying in homes and hotels in the surrounding northern Sinai area waiting to cross, said Walid Saleh, director of Palestinian Preventive Security for the Gaza district that includes the Rafah crossing.
Israel closed the crossing last month, saying it had information about a possible attack by Palestinians tunneling under the crossing and planning to blow it up - a tactic used in a recent attack.
During the closure, Israeli troops, aided by sophisticated monitoring equipment, searched the area but did not report finding a tunnel under the terminal.
