What is the Rafah crossing? The Rafah border crossing from Gaza into Egypt is the only one of the Gaza crossing points that does not communicate with Israel. While it was intended to be a significant crossing, since the Hamas takeover in 2007 it has only intermittently been open to Palestinians, most notably during the brief period when the Muslim Brotherhood governed Egypt until 2013. Israel and Egypt’s joint blockade of Gaza under Hamas has made the crossing highly politically sensitive in Cairo – a situation that was exacerbated by an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai, which led to Egypt imposing controls on who was allowed to travel to towns and cities close to the Rafah crossing, not least the city of Arish. Rafah, once a smuggling hub, is split between Egyptian Rafah and Palestinian Rafah, with the border running through it. Egypt’s deliberate flooding of the border area in 2015 was designed to close smuggling tunnels that connected the two, which at one time allowed people and goods to pass from Gaza to Egypt. Have people been allowed to use the crossing before today? Despite international pressure to open the crossing since the beginning of Israel’s latest conflict with Hamas in Gaza, Rafah has been closed, apart from a small number of aid trucks. Now, after international intervention and the mediation of Qatar, which has close contacts with Hamas’s leadership, the crossing has been opened to hundreds of dual nationals living in Gaza who have foreign passports, as well as people who are injured and need treatment outside Gaza and its collapsing health system. According to the arrangements put in place by Cairo, the embassies of those people being allowed to cross have been informed in advance and the hope is that further evacuations will be allowed in the coming days. By late Wednesday at least 320 dual nationals had crossed into Egypt. What about injured people? Casualties were taken to the crossing in Palestinian ambulances, two to an ambulance, where they were ferried to a triage centre on the other side staffed by Egyptian paramedics, who examined the wounded and put them into a waiting fleet of Egyptian ambulances. Nahed Abu Taeema, the director of the Nasser hospital in the Gaza Strip, said 19 critically injured patients from his hospital would be among the 81 being evacuated to Egypt, suggesting the criteria for medical evacuation. “Those require advanced surgeries that can’t be done here because of the lack of capabilities, especially women and children,” said Abu Taeema. Most are understood to have been taken to hospitals in Arish, as well as to an Egyptian field hospital at Sheikh Zuweid in the Sinai and Turkish field hospitals that have been established in recent weeks. Who has left so far? Some foreign nationals have been allowed to leave Gaza. Among them are two Médecins Sans Frontières doctors from the Philippines, a Philippine foreign ministry official has said. Following claims that no US citizens had left, it emerged later on Wednesday that three US citizens working for international organisations had crossed. There were also conflicting reports over why some nationalities had left and others not. Despite claims that Hamas might be blocking the departure of US citizens, later reports suggested the US may have been waiting to see how initial evacuations went before alerting its citizens to go to the border.