On Monday and Tuesday, Israeli police forced hundreds of Palestinian workers out of Israel and into the West Bank. The workers were among 21,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who have permits to work in Israel. Following the surprise attack by Hamas fighters on Israeli military bases and communities around Gaza on Saturday, and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Israeli police began forcing Palestinian workers to leave their places of employment.
They were forced into the northern West Bank, which is completely cut off from the other occupied Palestinian Territory, the Gaza Strip. Most of the workers have no family or contacts in the West Bank.
An unknown number of Palestinian workers have been blindfolded, arrested and taken to Israeli prison camps for so-called ‘harsh interrogation’.
Al Jazeera reported on the story of Loay Zaqout, 31, who found himself staring up at Israeli police at 3 am, who beat him and other workers and forced them to leave the place they were staying, saying, “They treated us horribly because, they said, we were from Gaza. The police threatened to return us to Gaza and said that our workers’ permits were invalid.” Zaqout is from the central town of Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip, and he has been working in Nazareth for about a year in an auto body shop.
As Al Jazeera reported, Zaqout is one of more than 21,000 Palestinian workers from Gaza who work within Israel in order to support their families – with his salary, he supports his wife, their three children, and 16 members of his extended family.
Zaqout was one of around 600 workers who were rounded up and forced to leave Israel on foot – eventually ending up in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. “I didn’t have my phone, any money or my identity card”, he told reporters. Now that Israel has launched a full-scale assault on the Gaza Strip, Zaqout found himself separated from both his home and his work, saying “now I am on one side and my family is on the other, and I cannot reach them”.
Most of the Gaza workers now stranded in the West Bank are unable to reach their families living in Gaza because of power blackouts and phone service interruptions.
Israeli forces have killed more than 1500 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,000 since Saturday, following the surprise attack by Hamas which killed an estimated 900 Israelis.
Laila Ghannam, governor of Ramallah and al-Bireh, told reporters that around 600 workers from Gaza had been displaced from Israel into the West Bank, and the Palestinian Authority was trying to support them by putting them up in hotels and providing dentists and doctors to help with injuries inflicted on their faces by Israeli police, who had punched and beaten many of them.
The Gaza Strip has been under siege by the Israeli military since 2007, and unemployment is around 50%. Those Palestinians who managed to get permits to work in Israel are able to make much higher rates of pay – around ten times higher than what they would make in Gaza.
According to Shaher Saad, the secretary-general of the Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions, the Palestinian workers who managed to escape to the West Bank are the lucky ones, telling Al Jazeera, “Hundreds of workers are contacting us to get them out of the areas they are stuck in. Sometimes we can’t do anything because they are surrounded by Jewish extremists and are under siege. They’re scared because there’s a lot of tension, especially after these extremists called for the workers to be taken as hostages. We’re working around the clock to get these workers out,” he added. “I call on the Palestinians living in the areas occupied in 1948 to help these workers and get them to the nearest safe area.”
Osama Sbeih, 34, from Gaza City, had been working in construction in the Rishon area (south of Tel Aviv) for two years, and told Al Jazeera that on Monday, at about midnight, large forces from the Israeli army stormed the dorms where about 37 workers from Gaza lived.
“They began searching, checking our identities, beating us, and insulting us. They expelled us towards one of the checkpoints near Ramallah. We did not have a single penny, and we were not allowed to take any of our belongings. We’re so worried about our families, and about our own fates.”
