On Monday, 2 February, Israel reopened the Rafah crossing in the southern Gaza Strip at the border with Egypt, in a step forward in the US-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
The crossing was supposed to reopen earlier, during the first phase of the ceasefire that began in October 2025. However, Israel postponed it until the return of the body of the last Israeli hostage, which happened last week.
How have people in Gaza reacted to this development? What does it mean for the relationship between Israel and Hamas? And how has the European Union (EU) responded?
To answer these questions, Euronews’ weekly podcast Brussels, My Love? talked to Lisa Musiol, head of EU affairs at International Crisis Group, Martin Konečný, director of European Middle East Project, and Stefan Grobe, Euronews’ political correspondent.
A small step forward
“It’s a small positive step forward,” Konečný said, commenting on the reopening of the Rafah border crossing. He explained that the number of people Israel allows to pass through the crossing is very limited and that Palestinians in Gaza are still in danger, given the recent killings by Israel in the Strip.
To monitor the site, the EU redeployed the EU civilian Border Mission (EUBAM) to the Rafah crossing point. This mission provides a neutral third-party presence on the Gaza-Egypt border, supporting the coordination among the actors involved.
According to Grobe, EUBAM is an important signal, underlying the EU’s presence in the Middle East. However, he claimed that “the future of Gaza will not be decided in Brussels or any of the European capitals,” due to the entrenched diplomatic divisions among EU member states.
Trump’s Board of Peace
But if there are doubts about whether Brussels is suitable for helping to bring long-term peace to the Middle East, there are also doubts about the Board of Peace, the organisation proposed by Donald Trump to promote peacekeeping.
Musiol explained that the United Nations (UN) resolution 2803 endorsed the establishment of the Board of Peace to implement a peace plan in Gaza, but Trump’s Board of Peace “does not even mention Gaza” and seems to be positioning itself more as an alternative to the UN.
For now, the only two EU countries that have joined the Board of Peace are Bulgaria and Hungary. The president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, has just said that she received the invitation, in a move that, according to Grobe,“is a polite way of saying it [the Board of Peace] is a joke”.
Will Hamas ever disarm?
Questions remain over whether Hamas will relinquish control of the Gaza Strip or fully disarm, which remains a red line for Israel. Hamas is an armed Palestinian group and political movement in the Gaza Strip that attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing over 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. This triggered a massive Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
In October 2025, the first phase of a ceasefire deal brokered by US President Donald Trump saw the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages released and nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees freed from Israeli jails.
Additional sources • Georgios Leivaditis, sound editing and mixing