The town of Rafah on the border of Israel and Egypt, has a history stretching back thousands of years to the time of the pharaohs. It began as settlement around an oasis at the point where the Sinai meets the Gaza Strip. In 1906, under British pressure, a border line was drawn between Egypt and the Ottoman-ruled Palestine and Rafah became a divided city. When Israel was created in 1948, Gaza was under Egyptian control but Rafah was kept divided. After the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel captured the Sinai and Gaza, Rafah was united and the old border taken down. Then in 1982 Rafah was again divided, this time by a barbed-wire fence, with half the town in Israel and the other half in Egypt.