A group of Palestinians stuck on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing into Gaza on Thursday called upon Egypt to open the crossing after three weeks of closure in order to allow them to return to the Gaza Strip.Outside of Israeli, Jewish and Arab media, this story has been almost completely ignored. (The Huffington Post published an article that buried the Egyptian closure in a larger diatribe against Israel.)
"We have been stuck in Egypt for 20 days, but no one has helped us or even talks about us," Talal Salim, one of those stuck at the crossing, told Ma'an.
The Palestinians stuck at the border are victims of the Egyptian government's policies regarding the crossing's opening hours, which can be sealed shut for weeks at a time with little notice.
The most recent closure came after a bomb hit Egyptian soldiers in el-Arish, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the Gaza border. The crossing was closed in response, despite the lack of a clear relationship between the incident and Gaza.
The Deputy Minister of the Interior in Gaza, Kamel Abu Madi, called upon Egyptian authorities to open the Rafah crossing permanently, arguing that "there is no excuse for its closure."
However, when Israel closed the its crossings for a couple of days earlier this month after rocket fire, wire services reported on this worldwide.
Construction materials were also being imported from Egypt to Gaza, so that has stopped along with the people being stranded, medical patients with nowhere to go except Israel, and students who cannot get to their Egyptian universities.
So why does an Israeli closure for two days get far more media coverage than an Egyptian closure of three weeks and counting?
We all know the answer.