Gaza back: thousands more stuck in the West Bank? An Israeli-palestinian dads’ perspective on the israeli forced workers in Gaza
“My son, when I speak with him, I say, ‘How are you?’ and he tells me, ‘Baba, I write my name on my arm, in case I am killed,’” Zrain says. His son wants people to know who he is when he dies.
His wife and five children are staying in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, where the United Nations estimates some 50,000 people are seeking refuge from Israeli strikes. He relishes every text message and every call, even if the news is chilling.
In the courtyard of the university, another worker from Gaza, Basel Zrain, tells NPR even though he and the other men are safe here, with food and water, being away from their children haunts them.
He looks at photos of his daughters, Layan and Razan. The pictures of their faces help him forget about the bad things that have happened, he says.
Alfarany has nearly two dozen nieces and nephews and says he gets overwhelmed thinking about all the children going through the trauma of war right now.
From Gaza to Palestine: A Palestinian Worker’s Journey in the Nearby West Bank and How Israel Helped His Brother in the Post-Oct. 7 Attack
“I had a video, but it disturbed me too much that I deleted it,” he says. “I watched it four or five times, and then said, ‘I’m gonna delete it,’ and I did.”
The family escaped an Israeli airstrike several weeks ago while at a playground. There are no buildings left in his neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Gaza City, he says, and his house was among those destroyed.
Alfarany says he is happy and relieved to know his brother is still alive, though the life in Gaza is hard to watch from afar.
While Alfarany was able to take a bus to the West Bank after Oct. 7, his brother was detained by the Israeli military near Nahariya, in northern Israel. Alfarany finally talked to his brother on Friday after more than 20 days of losing contact, when his brother was in Gaza.
One of the Palestinian workers, Ibrahim Alfarany, has been staying at Al-Istiqlal University for more than three weeks. He works at a store south of Tel Aviv where he stocks produce for a few weeks at a time, then goes back to Gaza.
Many workers from the Gaza Strip who were not arrested after the attack are stuck in shelters in the West Bank. They were able to get to the West Bank. For now, their accommodations are provided by the Palestinian Authority, which has some local control in the West Bank.
At the Al-Istiqlal University campus in the Palestinian city of Jericho, laundry hangs from the windows. There are dorm rooms stacked with bunk beds, and in larger halls, men lounge on mattresses pushed up against the walls, scrolling on their cellphones for news from Gaza. Whatever belongings they have fill plastic bags that dot the floor. If you join the waiting list, you can get a shave and a trim at the impromptu barber shop in the communal sinks.
More than 18,000 work permits were issued to people from Gaza by Israel. Many people worked in construction, retail, and restaurants in Israel and would send money back to their families at home.
Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7 have killed more than 9,000 people, 70% of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials. Nearly 200,000 homes have been destroyed.
They can’t return to Gaza through Israel because they’re not allowed in. There is no way to know how they would get to Gaza.
They heard on Friday that thousands of other laborers, who were dropped off several miles from the Israeli border with Gaza, were wearing numbered tags on their ankle.
News from the Gaza Strip can be heard in conversations in the hallway, between bunk beds and calls to relatives in the West Bank. For thousands of workers from Gaza who are stuck in makeshift shelters and camps in the West Bank, much of their world — including their families — is still 60 miles away.
The construction sector in Israel is operating at 15% of its prewar capacity, according to Pauzner, a Palestinian trader in Tel Aviv
Just outside of downtown Tel Aviv, the half-built apartment building has been empty for almost a month: conduits of wires hanging loose from the ceiling, piles of unused rebar rusting, water collecting in dirt around the foundation.
The manager of the project, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said that normally there would be 20 or 25 workers here. There is only himself and a few others who are looking at the site to make sure nobody has broken in.
Work on these apartments has been paused since the beginning of October when a bunch of fighters from Hamas went across the border into Israel.
In peacetime, more than 110,000 Palestinians held permits to work in Israel or Israeli settlements, according to Palestinian officials, the majority of them in the construction industry.
Left without those workers — and without alternative sources of labor, as Israeli reservists have been called to war and many foreign workers have fled the conflict — the construction industry in Israel is operating at 15% of its prewar capacity, according to the Israel Builders Association, an industry group.
“It’s a very, very big problem for the Israeli economy,” said Shay Pauzner, the association’s deputy director-general. One of the places where every Israeli will feel the impact of the war is in his pocket.
And for Palestinians in the West Bank, the sudden shutoff of income has rippled through the economy, as workers struggle to pay their rent, car payments and children’s tuition. The longer it goes on, workers say, the more desperate their situations will become.
Israel and Palestinians agree the current situation has no resemblance to recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas when the workers permits returned relatively quickly.
A handyman for a monastery in west Jerusalem told NPR he was likely to be replaced if he missed much more work. A metalworker for construction sites in Israel said he was relieved he had paid his daughter’s tuition before the war began — if the war lasts too much longer, he said, his family will become lower class.
Raed said that he chose to work for Israeli employers because of the higher salary. (Palestinian workers in the West Bank gave NPR only their first names due to concerns that Israel could deny them a work permit in the future.)
But Raed has been unable to return since Oct. 7, not even to collect his wages from last month. Now, he has no income, he said, with a wife and two small children to feed.
“What can I do? Nobody knows if we’re going to go back or not. I’m destroyed on a financial level. I don’t know how to help my family.
“We don’t have any money”: Israel’s problem with the West Bank, as the electrical contractor protested after the Arab Spring
The owner of a grocery store in the occupied West Bank watches news about the war as he checks out.
During normal times, he allows regular customers to buy their groceries on credit. But since the war began, the number of customers asking to make purchases on credit has gone up fivefold, Nasser told NPR, and the amount of money they owe has risen, too.
“The economy of Israel is affected when those who work there put their money here,” said the electrician, asking to not be named. We don’t get any money if no one is working in Israel. Everything stops. We’re turning on the same wheel.
But his biggest problem is that few people have the money to pay him anymore. Those that do have savings are holding their money tight, in case the war drags on, he said.
Asked if he wanted the war to end so things could get back to normal, he answered yes, but only if victory is on the Palestinians’ side, and not with Israel.
“This is a sacrifice for the sake of getting at least part of my rights one day,” he said. It won’t be the same thing as my cousins in Gaza are going through.
The vice President of Gottlieb Construction said a person who leaves at 5 in the morning and returns at 7 in the evening has no time for terrorism. “This was a concept that I believed in.”
But the chill on worker permits has extended to workers from the West Bank, who had long been seen as safer than those from Gaza, in part because the West Bank is run by the more moderate Palestinian Authority, as opposed to Hamas, which governs Gaza.
The national security minister of Israel stated in a post on the social media siteX that he was against the entry of thousands of workers from the PA who may endanger civilian lives.
“This situation has made everyone who hears Arabic fear that there are terrorists roaming around,” he said. Some mayors have asked for construction companies to close their sites because of security concerns.
Like almost all Israelis in the construction industry, Gottlieb has worked alongside Palestinians for his entire career. He said that they have a relationship with them and that he loves them. “I have employees who I know better than my friends.”