Egypt on Saturday (May 15th) opened its land border with Gaza and sent ten ambulances to the Palestinian enclave to evacuate and treat Palestinians injured in Israeli shelling in its hospitals, an Egyptian medical source told AFP.
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Cairo "
exceptionally opened the passage (from Rafah, editor's note) to (allow) the entry of ten Egyptian ambulances into the Gaza Strip in order to transport wounded Palestinians (with a view to) treating them in Egypt
", specified this source on condition of anonymity. The Rafah crossing is the only opening in the Gaza Strip to the world that is not controlled by Israel. The Hebrew state has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian enclave since 1967.
A security official at the border said the decision was "
exceptional
" because the crossing usually remains closed on public holidays, including the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Fitr which began on Wednesday.
The state health care authority announced on Friday that three health facilities had "
started to prepare
" to receive wounded from Gaza.
The latest Palestinian authorities' death toll shows 139 dead, including 39 children, and nearly 1,000 injured in Israeli air raids and bombardments in the Gaza Strip since Monday.
The Hebrew state has for its part recorded nine dead, including a child and a member of the army.
Israel launched these punitive strikes in the face of hundreds of rockets from Hamas, the Islamist movement controlling the Gaza Strip, fired after Israeli police injured hundreds of Palestinians on the Mosque Plaza in East Jerusalem, an area of the city illegally. occupied by the Hebrew state since 1967. These clashes followed several days of clashes in the Holy City, mainly due to threats to evict Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
Representing the largest Christian minority in the Middle East, the Coptic Orthodox Church on Saturday called on “
all parties
” to negotiate “in
order to avoid a bloodbath
”. On Friday, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, a respected institution of Sunni Islam, launched a campaign in support of the Palestinians. "
I call on the peoples of the world and their leaders to support the peaceful and oppressed Palestinian people in their legitimate and just cause to recover their rights, land and holy places
," the sheikh wrote on social media.