'No liquidity': Israel's punitive measures bite in the West Bank

Cancellation of work permits amid Gaza war cuts off flow of money from tens of thousands of Palestinians with jobs in Israel

Young mechanics work on a car at the Qalandiya refugee camp. Khaled Yacoub Oweis / The National

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Palestinian farmers carrying the last figs of the season wait for customers at Al Jib crossing near Ramallah, eager to sell their produce to customers who earn salaries from jobs near Jerusalem.

Drivers of service taxis loiter. Before the start of the Gaza war in October they took a steady stream of Palestinian daily workers, who typically worked at production lines or slaughterhouses in Israel, back to their homes in Ramallah, the main Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank, or in the villages around it.

But their numbers coming through the small Al Jib crossing have fallen from 1,000 a day to a couple of hundred, after Israel started cancelling or not renewing work permits in October, residents on the Palestinian side say.

This and other measures widely seen as punitive, such as withholding tax revenue collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, have been supported by the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other religious ultranationalists in Prime Minister's Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet.

“Smotrich has killed us," said Khaldoun Al Nabali, a taxi driver who used to earn the equivalent of $100 a day and now makes $10. "He is turning the West Bank into a scarecrow economy. I don't know what I will do after my savings run out."

As the sun begins to set, the farmers begin dropping the price of the pinkish figs, called Boueizi, from 35 shekels ($9.50) for a 1kg box to 25 shekels.

“You can have 2kg for 40 shekels," one young farmer says, adding that she was even struggling to sell fruit to Palestinian merchants with a Jerusalem ID that enables them to live there and who usually have a second home in Ramallah. “Even in Jerusalem they are complaining that business is bad."

Settlement expansion and settler attacks on Palestinian communities have reached all-time highs, and have only increased since the outbreak of war in Gaza began 11 months ago. The Israeli army has conducted several raids on towns and cities, and the death toll from the most recent West Bank operation that began on August 28 has reached 39 on Thursday.

About 165,000 Palestinians were employed in Israel and in West Bank settlements, with 130,000 of them possessing work permits and the rest working illegally, a report by the Institute for National Security Studies, an independent Israeli think tank, showed.

Since the war began, 8,000 have been designated as essential workers and another 18,000 also allowed to continue in their roles. "In practice, 120,000 people became unemployed and unable to earn a livelihood, with commensurate implications for stability in the territories," the report said.

It estimated the damage to the Palestinian economy to be "in the hundreds of millions of shekels every month".

A main reservoir for labour to Israel is the Palestinian refugee camp of Qalandiya, which is right at the main crossing between Jerusalem and the West Bank – called the Qalandiya crossing.

The distance between Al Jib and Qalandiya camp is 12km. But it takes about 90 minutes by car, partly because the roads have to bypass Israeli settlements that criss-cross the West Bank and result in a disjointed Palestinian self-rule area.

Abdel Raouf, a 32-year-old resident of Qalandiya, had worked for years in the kitchen of an Israeli company in the industrial zone of Atarot, a few hundred metres from the camp. The company distributes ready meals to Israeli schools.

Without a high school degree, Mr Raouf was able to make 300 shekels a day, many times more than what he earned before doing menial work in Ramallah. He says his employer cited a previous arrest by Israeli forces as the reason his work permit was revoked.

“I was arrested once for throwing stones and I began to think how much that had cost me. Then I realised that so many permits in Atarot were revoked for people with clean records,” he says.

But a tiny sandwich and falafel shop at the camp, owned by a teacher who gave his name as Nasser, was doing swift business. Nasser teaches Arabic at a UN school in the morning and opens his shop in the evening.

"I used to sell roast beef but people now only want falafel,” he says. "There is no liquidity. Falafel is the kebab of the poor.”