On the road from Cairo to the Egypt–Gaza border, passing through no fewer than ten security checkpoints, a bus convoy of over 150 Egyptian journalists inched towards the gates of an internationally enabled genocide. It was 19 January 2025, and this state-organised expedition – a 20-hour round trip from the capital, with up to two hours on the ground at the Rafah crossing – represented the Egyptian press’s sole opportunity to witness firsthand the isolated, militarised doorstep to the decimated Gaza Strip.   

Necropolitics – the politics of death – effectively dictates who and what passes through Rafah’s gates, or any crossing into the Israeli-besieged Strip. Despite the toll of delaying life-sustaining supplies and medical evacuations – embodied by Palestinian child amputees like Mariam Sabbah – Israel persists in wielding healthcare, hunger and logistics as weapons of genocidal war. On the ground, admitted aid trucks meet around one third Gaza’s minimum survival needs, while just 12 evacuees on average are cleared to cross daily from a waitlist of over 20,000 critical patients. Injured and ill Palestinians die waiting for security clearance from the same forces that relentlessly kill civilians and seize over two thirds of their homeland – all during a so-called ceasefire.

The Cairo-based photojournalist Hamada Elrasam, a passenger on that 2025 Rafah-bound press convoy, sought to document ‘signs of resilience’ among the Egyptian aid truck drivers thwarted at the crossing. Most Palestinian families rely on this lifeline, now more than ever amid Israel’s ‘holy war of annihilation’ and the resulting 77-year setback for human development across Gaza, according to a recent United Nations–European Union report. ‘These aid trucks are not just numbers,’ Elrasam reflected, recalling his conversations with dozens of drivers in the border zone between 2023 and 2025. ‘Each truck has a story.’   

In the waiting line of trucks sprawling before the gates, longtime Egyptian driver Mostafa Ibrahim and his 20-year-old son, Mohamed, welcomed the photojournalist as they brewed tea at their roadside kitchenette. A full laundry line swayed between their towering shipments of chickpeas, starch and rusk – aid for hundreds of Palestinian families, blocked month after month while everyday essentials remain banned as ‘dual-use’. Trucks are often delayed, Elrasam noted, ‘because, like anyone who stands with the residents of the Occupied Territories, they’re treated as seeds of terrorism’ – despite the caring, family-oriented workers at the wheel.

Mostafa, tea in hand and laundry on the line, turned to his son and the photojournalist with a protest for a politics of life. ‘It’s not about being Jewish or Christian or Muslim,’ the aid truck driver told them, putting humanity first. ‘Palestinians are human beings.’  

Right now, scorched-earth doctrines – fuelled by the US’s booming military-tech complex – continue to leave rights and lives in ashes, from Gaza to Yemen, Lebanon to Iran, and into the Gulf states to Iron Dome–protected Israel. ‘One of the core values of humanity is that we learn from each other,’ Elrasam said, looking back on Rafah’s weaponised waiting lines. ‘When I talked with Mostafa and his son, I was documenting news, but there was a thread connecting everything together: purpose and love. It’s not about religion but humanity.’ Invoking the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi, he added: ‘The religion of Love is apart from all religions.’

Revisiting Rafah’s gates in his digital and mental images, Elrasam pictured the aid trucks, ambulances and rubble-clearing machinery either halted or, by brutal design, only trickling through. For the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who evacuated through those gates in 2023, Rafah is ‘no longer a border crossing; it is a military checkpoint’. Last March, the Al-Shati refugee camp–born author performed his 2024 poem ‘Under the Rubble’ in New York City, protesting the erasure of hundreds of families across Gaza — where many tens of thousands have been killed by lethal Israeli violence, mostly women, children and the elderly. ‘Some of [my relatives] remain under the rubble even now,’ Abu Toha ached, mourning the thousands of missing Gazans believed to be buried in the bombed-out ruins. ‘But heaven has been blocked,’ he read, ‘by the drones and F-16s and the smoke of death.’

Unlike a politics of life or a religion of love, a politics of death remains unmoved by civilian devastation – whether it’s the more than 20,000 Palestinian children killed over the first 23 months of Israel’s genocide, or the 120 Iranian students massacred at their bombarded primary school on 28 February, day one of the US’s Operation Epic Fury. ‘From what we’re seeing today as a global community, the values world powers are selling us serve no religious or human purpose but their own political power,’ Elrasam said. Arms deals and rights violations continue to flow with impunity. ‘Some political leaders think saving themselves is more important than saving the world.’

Hamada Elrasam & Elle Kurancid

Hamada Elrasam is an award-winning photojournalist with a law degree from Cairo University and a certificate from the International Center of Photography in New York, where he also volunteers as a teaching assistant. Since 2011, he has produced hundreds of visual stories for Egyptian and international media, deeply reporting the invisible and universal scars of Egyptian, Palestinian and Rwandan youth and families. Elle Kurancid is a journalist who has collaborated with more than a dozen documentarians on justice-seeking stories based across Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, India, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Kenya, Ireland, Rwanda, Palestine, France and her hometown of Peace River, Canada. She co-founded the site Above the War with Yemeni storytellers Elham Al-Oqabi and Amira Al-Sharif.