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JERUSALEM – Without money, identification papers or even phones, thousands of Palestinian workers trudged through a gate between Israel and Gaza – ending weeks of wartime detention and potentially ending a rare economic point of contact between the two sides.
The men who passed through the Kerem Shalom border crossing on Friday in tattered clothing were among 10,000 Gaza workers forced to be deported after spending weeks in Israeli prisons. Some still wore plastic tags with numbers from their detention around their wrists.
An estimated 7,000 more Gazans remain stuck outside the enclave, having their Israeli work permits revoked and being temporarily housed by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Wael Abu Omar, a border official in Gaza, said on Saturday.
The expulsions mark the end of what had been a pillar of Israel’s efforts to maintain some sort of economic access to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, which Israel blocked in 2007 after the militant group seized control of the enclave.
Before the war, an estimated 18,500 Palestinians had work permits in Israel, a coveted ticket out of Gaza’s grinding unemployment, made worse by Israel’s strict controls.
Low-wage workers from Gaza took jobs on Israeli farms and construction sites, leading to one of the few personal and economic contacts between the two sides. Those who crossed on Friday were reunited with their families in the Palestinian enclave, where more than 9,400 people have been killed after a month of Israeli bombings. Gaza also faces severe shortages of food, water, electricity and medicine.
The body of at least one Gaza worker, Mansour Warsh Agha, 61, was also returned, according to the Associated Press.
The Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, which oversees Palestinian workers in Israel, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Israeli military all declined to comment.
It remains unclear how many workers from Gaza were in Israel at the start of the war. But just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage in southern Israel, in which militants killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took more than 230 hostages, Israeli authorities revoked all work permits and deleted them from the phone app that Palestinians use from Gaza provided proof of their residence permit.
In the early days of the war, Israeli authorities arrested thousands of Gazans from their workplaces and makeshift shelters and sent them to the Anatot and Ofer military prisons in the West Bank. According to their reports, many of them were blindfolded, interrogated, beaten, and repeatedly left without food or water.
One man said he was held in Ofer prison for 24 days. “They tied our hands and feet tightly,” he said on condition of anonymity to protect his privacy. “We were kept awake day and night.”
Another detainee, Feras Nasr, told Portal that he was arrested in Nazareth on the first day of the war and detained there before being transferred to Ofer prison in the West Bank, where he was held for 20 days without being allowed phone calls or contact could take in his family. “We were humiliated and beaten, every day they beat us, every day they tortured us,” he said. “As of now, we don’t know if our families are okay. I have no idea whether my children are still alive or not.”
The Israeli cabinet decided on Thursday to send workers back from the Gaza Strip. “Israel breaks off all contact with Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza and the workers who were in Israel when the war broke out will be returned to Gaza.”
Israeli human rights group Gisha said in a statement on Friday that the detainees were “cut off from the world and deprived of access to legal representation and their right to due process.” Gisha was among six human rights organizations that petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court for the release of those illegally detained in the West Bank.
Thousands of other Gazans sought shelter in Palestinian parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where they still have no information about when they might be able to return to their families.
Adly Saleem, a construction worker and father of seven, said by telephone from Jericho on Saturday that he was still desperate to return to his wife, children and parents. He said a cousin, his wife and children had already been killed in an airstrike as they searched for food and water in Deir el Belah in central Gaza.
For the past three weeks, Saleem has been staying in Jericho with about 450 other Gazans at a large police training center run by the Fatah political party, a rival to Hamas, which leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. In Jericho, about 1,500 workers from Gaza were under the care of the Palestinian Authority, the city’s deputy mayor Yusra Sweiti said.
“They hear every day that their families are being killed and attacked,” she said.
Saleem told The Washington Post he was beaten unconscious by police while detained after the Hamas attack. He was later released and fled to the West Bank. On Friday he finally made contact with his two brothers, who were among the deportees in Gaza. They exchanged greetings, he said, and then the phone line went dead.