GAZA, Nov 3 (Portal) – Israel sent thousands of Palestinians back to the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday, cracking down on workers and laborers from the territory who had previously been granted permits to work in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
Large numbers of workers returned through the Kerem Shalom crossing, east of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, which has been bombarded by Israeli warplanes and tanks for weeks since the Oct. 7 attack on southwestern Israel by gunmen from the ruling Hamas group there.
“We used to serve them, work for them, in houses, in restaurants and in markets, in return for the lowest wages, and yet now we were humiliated,” said Jamal Ismail, a worker from the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza.
Israel has previously issued more than 18,000 permits allowing Gazans to enter Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to take jobs in sectors such as agriculture or construction, with salaries typically up to 10 times what a workers in the blockaded Gaza Strip could earn.
However, the system has been scrapped as Israel has abandoned its previous policy of offering economic incentives for stability and instead launched a combined air and ground offensive to eradicate the militant Hamas movement that controls Gaza.
“Israel breaks off all contact with Gaza. There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “The workers from Gaza who were in Israel on the day the war broke out will be returned to Gaza.”
Since then, Israel has bombed the Palestinian coastal enclave continuously and launched a ground offensive that has killed more than 9,200 Palestinians, almost half of them children, according to Gaza health authorities. U.N. officials say more than 1.4 million of Gaza’s roughly 2.3 million residents have been displaced.
[1/5]Palestinian workers who were in Israel during the Hamas attack on October 7 arrive at the Rafah border after being sent back by Israel to the strip in the southern Gaza Strip, November 3, 2023. Portal/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa Acquire License Rights
It is unclear how many Gazans were in Israel on October 7 when Hamas gunmen broke through the fenced border and rampaged through southern communities, killing 1,400 people and capturing 240 in Gaza.
However, a senior Palestinian Authority official said 4,950 Gazans had fled Israel to the West Bank and about 5,000 were believed to have been detained by Israel.
“Nobody knows what’s going on,” said Ghazal Ghazal, 50, who worked in a Tel Aviv candy factory before fleeing to the West Bank last month after hearing from colleagues that Israeli authorities were making arrests.
Palestinians have limited self-rule in the areas where they live in the West Bank, which is under Israeli military occupation.
For those who remain in the West Bank, spotty internet and telephone connections have meant news from home has been sporadic as Israeli bombings have continued.
Nidal Abu Jidian, a father of three who worked as a paver in Israel before seeking refuge at a community center in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said he was monitoring the news on his phone to find out more about his family’s condition experience.
“I spoke to my uncle on the phone. He was shot at while I was talking to him. I looked for him and my children and he was killed.
Additional reporting by Henriette Chacar in Ramallah; Editing by Jason Neely, Angus MacSwan and Mark Heinrich
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