GAZA CITY
The Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) held a special session on Sunday outside the gates of the Rafah crossing on the borders with Egypt.
"More than 1.8 million Palestinians have been suffering under an eight-year siege imposed on the Gaza Strip," PLC deputy speaker Ahmed Bahr told the session.
"The closure of the Rafah crossing has tightened the blockade on the strip and left thousands of students and patients in suffering," he added.
The top lawmaker went on to call on Egyptian authorities to permanently open the Rafah terminal to help ease the siege on the Palestinian seaside enclave.
Egyptian authorities have tightened their control over the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip since last July's ouster of elected president Mohamed Morsi by the Egyptian army.
In recent weeks, Egypt has repeatedly closed the Rafah crossing, which – due to an ongoing, eight-year Israeli siege – represents Gaza's only window to the outside world.
The Egyptian army has also launched a campaign aimed at destroying the network of tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, which in recent years had been used to bring vital commodities into the besieged coastal enclave, home to nearly 2 million Palestinians.
Egyptian authorities blame Hamas, an ideological offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the group which propelled Morsi to power in the 2012 elections, of involvement in recent attacks in Egypt, a claim vehemently denied by the Islamist group.
They have accused several Palestinians of involvement in a mass jailbreak during the 2011 revolution that ousted autocratic president Hosni Mubarak.
"The charges are an attempt to drag the Palestinian resistance into the Egyptian crisis," Bahr said.
By Mustafa Haboosh
englishnews@aa.com.tr
