Israel, meanwhile, made a deal with Egypt for them to cross through Israel into Gaza, and over the past week, that's what has been happening.
Now there are only 30 left - all of them refusing to go to Gaza because they know Israel will arrest them as being terrorists:
ARISH, Egypt -- The last batch of 6,000 Palestinians stranded in Egypt since Hamas took control of Gaza in June returned home Thursday, leaving behind 30 Hamas supporters who cannot travel via Israel.Here we have a classic case of erstwhile "leaders" of Palestinian Arabs who are willing to allow thousands of their people to suffer for their cause. Hamas did everything they could to not allow the stranded people to come to Gaza - and they continue to blame Israel, when the hated Zionist entity worked so hard to help out the Palestinian Arabs stuck in the desert.
The final group of 400 Palestinians crossed the Oja (Nizana) checkpoint, near the divided town of Rafah on the Egypt-Gaza border, before continuing to Gaza via the Jewish state, a Palestinian source at the border said.
Rafah, the usual crossing point between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, has been closed since Hamas militants violently took over the territory June 15, stranding thousands in dire conditions in the Egyptian desert.
"These 30 Palestinians would rather stay in Egypt until the Rafah terminal is opened, and they refuse to cross via Oja," an Egyptian border source said. "They know they're down as belonging to or sympathizing with Hamas and fear being arrested by the Israeli authorities," he said.
"They don't have any choice but to wait for the Rafah crossing point to open, because either they're wanted by Israel or because the Zionist enemy won't allow them in," Hamas MP Moushir Masri said Tuesday.
"We demand that the Rafah crossing point be opened and reject any Israeli involvement" in controlling who crosses, said Masri, himself stranded in Egypt.
When open, Rafah is operated in close cooperation by Egypt, European Union monitors, Israel, and the Palestinians, and can be closed if any one party refuses to participate.
Once again, Israel shows more concern for the welfare and well-being of Palestinian Arabs than their own leaders do.
Once again, Israel was vindicated in its reasoning of why the Rafah crossing needed to be monitored to begin with - because known, wanted terrorists were freely crossing between Gaza and the rest of the world via Egypt.
And once again, a few weeks ago the world media had a field day with suffering PalArabs that could (erroneously) be blamed on Israel, but now when Israel helps those people despite their own leaders' objections and Hamas is still fuming that their human pawns have disappeared, the story is almost impossible to find.
UPDATE: Look how the Palestinian Arab English propaganda press is spinning this story to make Israel look as bad as possible. Orwell is alive and well at IMEMC.org.