Rafah, Palestine: History, Heritage and Palestinian Roots

Rafah, Palestine (رفح) sits at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip, on the sand and citrus plain where the coastal road from Egypt meets the rest of the country. For roughly 3,300 years it has stood at that same threshold: named in an inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I around 1300 BCE, fought over by empires, split by a line drawn on a map, and rebuilt by the refugee families who arrived there in 1948 and never left. It belongs to the same map of Palestinian cities and land as the rest of FALASTIN's Palestinian Clothing collection, each piece carrying a place that outlasted whoever tried to redraw it.

Origins and Ancient History

The name is old even by the standards of a country where every hill has a layer underneath it. The Assyrians recorded the town as Rapihu; the Greeks called it Raphia. Both point to the same place: a caravan stop on the frontier between Egypt and the rest of the Levant, mentioned in an inscription of Pharaoh Seti I around 1300 BCE, which makes Rafah's documented history roughly 3,300 years long.

That frontier position made Rafah a battlefield more than once. In 720 BCE, an Assyrian army under Sargon II defeated an Egyptian-Philistine coalition there. Nearly five centuries later, in 217 BCE, Rafah hosted the Battle of Raphia, part of the Fourth Syrian War between the Ptolemaic king Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt and the Seleucid king Antiochus III the Great of Syria. An estimated 120,000 to 150,000 soldiers and some 175 war elephants took part, making it one of the largest battles of the ancient world. Ptolemy's victory kept Palestine under Egyptian control for another two decades.

The town's importance did not end with antiquity. During the Byzantine era, Rafah became the seat of a bishopric; its bishop, Romanus, was recorded at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Rafah is also marked on the Madaba Map, the sixth-century mosaic map of the Holy Land, evidence of its standing on the region's trade and pilgrimage routes. In 635, early Rashidun Muslim forces took Rafah from the Byzantines, and the town passed afterward through Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman rule.

A Line Drawn Through a Town

Rafah's location, exactly where Egypt ends and Palestine begins, has cost it its unity more than once. On 1 October 1906, the Ottoman Empire and British-administered Egypt signed the Ottoman-Egyptian Separating Line Agreement, drawing an administrative boundary that ran through the town itself on its way from Rafah to the Gulf of Aqaba. It was meant, at the time, as an internal line inside two territories still nominally under the same empire. After the First World War, that same line became the international border between Egypt and British Mandate Palestine, and Rafah found itself sitting directly on top of it, a position it has never fully escaped since.

The Nakba and a Refugee City

The 1948 Nakba changed Rafah's population more than its borders. Families displaced from villages and towns across southern Palestine arrived at Rafah by the thousands, and in 1949 the Rafah refugee camp was established to house them, one of eight such camps that the newly formed UNRWA, created by the United Nations on 8 December 1949, went on to administer in the Gaza Strip. The camp did not remain a temporary stop. It grew into a permanent part of the city, and generations of the same families have lived there since.

The refugee camp's early years were marked by further violence. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, Israeli forces occupied the Gaza Strip for four months, from November 1956 to March 1957. On 12 November 1956, Israeli troops killed refugees in Rafah in what has become known as the Rafah massacre, with death tolls recorded between 48 and 111 depending on the source. Israel withdrew from the Strip in March 1957 under international pressure, restoring the town, and its wound, to Egyptian administration.

Why Is Rafah, Palestine Divided by a Border?

Rafah was reunited, briefly, in 1967, when Israel occupied both the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War and the old 1906 line ceased to matter under a single occupying power. The reunion did not last. Under the 1979 Camp David Accords and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty that followed, Israel and Egypt agreed to restore the 1906 line as the international border in North Sinai. Israel's withdrawal from Sinai was completed in 1982, and Rafah was split for the third time in the twentieth century, part of it in Egyptian Sinai and part of it in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Families found relatives on the other side of a fence they could no longer cross freely. The Rafah Crossing, opened after the 1979 treaty as the passage point between Gaza and Egypt, remained under Israeli control until 2005.

Craft and Heritage in Southern Palestine

Rafah sits inside the region that produced one of Palestine's most distinct embroidery traditions, sometimes called the Gaza or southern thobe. Compared with the embroidery of central Palestinian regions, the southern style favors broader chest and sleeve panels, a palette that adds indigo alongside the red used elsewhere, and larger, bolder motifs, some of them carrying the trace of trade routes that ran across the Sinai and into Egypt long before any modern border did.

That heritage found a dedicated home in December 2022, when Palestinian researcher Laila Shaheen opened the Rafah Museum, the first museum in the city devoted to Palestinian heritage. It was the result of a personal collecting effort three decades in the making: thousands of items documenting the material culture of Bedouin, farming, and city communities across southern Palestine, from embroidered thobes and headdresses to baskets, agricultural tools, coins, and jewelry, some pieces dating back to the Byzantine period the town itself lived through.

Lesser-Known Facts About Rafah

• Rafah's documented history runs to roughly 3,300 years, among the longest of any Palestinian town, starting with an inscription of Pharaoh Seti I around 1300 BCE.
• The 217 BCE Battle of Raphia is estimated to have involved up to 150,000 soldiers and 175 war elephants, ranking it among the largest battles of the ancient Mediterranean world.
• A Rafah bishop, Romanus, represented the town at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and Rafah appears by name on the sixth-century Madaba Map.
• The line that splits Rafah today was first drawn in 1906, more than four decades before the state that now enforces it existed.
• Rafah has been divided by an international border, reunited by occupation, and divided again at least three separate times across the twentieth century: 1948 to 1967, briefly reunified in 1967, and again from 1979 to the present.

A Living Legacy of Endurance

Rafah is not just a border town, it is a record of every line that has ever been drawn across Palestine and every family that kept living on both sides of it. The columns still standing from its Roman and Byzantine centuries, the refugee camp built in 1949 that became a permanent home, and the museum a researcher spent thirty years assembling in 2022 are the same story told three different ways: something is taken, and something is kept anyway. The same is true a little further north in Khan Yunis, where refugee families and displaced weavers rebuilt a craft economy inside a Mamluk caravan town, and it is true of every family that has ever kept a key to a house it no longer lives in, waiting on the right of return.

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Palestinian Clothing collection.

100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.

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