'I feel like a prisoner': Gazan workers trapped in the occupied West Bank fear arrest

Thousands are suffering poverty and living in constant fear of detention

A Gazan man shows his belongings in the central West Bank on November 3, 2024. He is among thousands of Gazan workers trapped in the occupied territory after Israel cancelled his work permit followingShow more

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Every two or three days, when the phones work, Ahmed calls his wife and eight children, who are facing Israeli strikes in the besieged Jabaliya area of northern Gaza.

“They are staying in their homes. If they go outside, they will be killed, there are [armed] quadcopters,” Ahmed, not his real name, told The National. “They don’t have any food or water. They are all besieged.”

For the past 13 months, Ahmed, 61, has been trapped in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Before the war began he was among about 18,500 Gazans who held permits to enter Israel for work. Cogat, the Israeli body responsible for co-ordination with the occupied Palestinian Territories, told The National that “dozens” more entered Israel every month for medical treatment unavailable in the enclave’s limited healthcare system.

After Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, Israel and Egypt tightened a blockade on the enclave. Israel widely viewed its granting of work permits as a goodwill measure; its critics saw it as a means of controlling Gaza’s population.

More than a year later, Ahmed is one of thousands of Gazans unable to move around the occupied West Bank freely, for fear of arrest at an Israeli checkpoint, and unable to find work. Others cannot undergo scheduled medical treatment in Israel. The National interviewed three men and changed their names to protect their identities.

All the while, the men fear for their families at home in Gaza – worsened since the Israeli military increased attacks on Jabaliya last month.

“We didn’t imagine that we would be stuck like this, in this depressing situation,” said Ahmed, from the simple apartment he shares with three other men in the central West Bank. They all mostly stay at home, following the news from Gaza on social media. “We are pained because of our children in Gaza, in Jabaliya. We can’t do anything for them.”

Ahmed was a painter and plasterer working in Beersheba, a large city in southern Israel. He would spend a month earning money before returning for a few days to Gaza, where job opportunities were few and earnings low. After the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 Israelis and resulted in about 250 being taken hostage, Israel swiftly cancelled all permits for Gazans in the country.

“Overnight, these people became illegal aliens in Israel,” Jessica Williams, director of HaMoked, a non-governmental legal aid organisation for Palestinians, told The National.

Israeli security forces rounded up and detained thousands of workers in Israel, before sending most of them back to Gaza, amid widespread reports of abuse. Before being sent back to the enclave, some were held without representation, in two Israeli military compounds in the West Bank, Anatot and Ofer, where human rights observers documented cases of mistreatment.

More than 43,700 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave since the war began.

Ahmed was among thousands of Palestinians who fled to the West Bank before they could be detained and returned to Gaza last October which was, by then, a war zone.

“We had nowhere else to go. We couldn’t go back to Gaza,” he said. “We weren’t allowed to stay in Beersheba. There were police and they would arrest you.” Some who initially fled to the West Bank have since voluntarily returned to Gaza: there are no exact figures on who went where and when, according to human rights observers and the interviewees. They are among thousands more who chose to stay in the West Bank, partly because they had heard stories of alleged abuse by Israeli forces of arrested Gazans.

Others, like Jamal, 58, were rounded up from their homes in Israel after the October 7 attacks and sent to the West Bank. The men’s stories were consistent with accounts of the arrests and transfers from two human rights observers interviewed by The National and multiple reports by rights organisations.

Jamal described how in November last year, police came to his home in the Galilee in northern Israel, where he had been working in construction with a valid permit.

“The Israeli police took us from the house to a police station, where they took our fingerprints,” Jamal described. "Thank goodness we found ourselves with the police and not the army, with the police it was slightly better," he added.

The next day, Jamal said Israeli security forces took him to the Jalamah checkpoint, which separates Israel from the northern occupied West Bank. Local Palestinian authorities kept him in a reception centre before he managed to join friends further south.

While Jamal managed to move within the West Bank, Gazans there are generally afraid of travelling through Israeli checkpoints for fear of arrest.

“We can’t go anywhere [ …] because there are checkpoints and they will arrest me because I am from Gaza,” Ahmed said. “I feel like a prisoner.”

Israel’s conduct regarding Gazans in the West Bank breaches several areas of international law, human rights observers told The National. One of those is preventing the movement of Gazans within the West Bank: as both areas are internationally recognised as Palestine, people should be allowed to move freely in either area, said Sari Bashi, a West Bank-based programme director at Human Rights Watch.

“Governments are required to allow that kind of freedom of movement, so not allowing people from Gaza to travel freely throughout the West Bank is not lawful,” Ms Bashi told The National.

The inability to travel also means that the men cannot easily find work. That is a situation worsened, they said, by the preference among West Bank Palestinians for giving work to locals, and an economic crisis spurred on by the current conflict. Israel has also banned workers from the occupied territory from going to their former jobs in Israel – a scheme that used to bring significant liquidity into the area.

“The people here were relying on working in Israel. Now they are prevented from doing that too,” said Jamal. “Even if there was work for us, they’d give it to a local from the area.”

The men live on small amounts of money they were able to save from their time working in Israel, but struggle financially to cover the $700 they pay as a group in rent and bills per month. The Palestinian Authority, the Ramallah-based governing authority, has given each 750 Israeli shekels ($200) on four occasions over the past year.

Three Palestinian officials were either unable to provide answers or did not respond to requests for comment about Gazan workers in the West Bank.

Gazans who used to have Israeli work permits who fled to the West Bank are in a very vulnerable situation, human rights observers said.

“For somebody who came last year on a worker's permit, there's very little protection, there's no way to stop them from being returned to Gaza,” said Jessica Montell of HaMoked.

COGAT confirmed to The National that it is seeking to return Gazans in the West Bank to the war-torn enclave.

“The security forces in the area have been working to return Gazans currently in Judea and Samaria to the Gaza Strip,” Cogat said in written remarks, using a term preferred by the Israeli government for the West Bank.

Gazans who were in the West Bank awaiting medical treatment in Israel have also been affected. Mustafa, 36, said he came to the West Bank in 2021 to receive treatment for a nerve condition. He walked with a visible hobble, his face pale and drawn.

He was due to undergo major surgery at a hospital in Jerusalem in October 2023, he said, but Israel would not allow him to travel from the West Bank into the city. Unable to work even when he lived in Gaza because of his medical condition, Mustafa relies on friends and family for money – just enough to pay for food and the painkillers he takes every day.

“I have a nerve problem in my leg and was supposed to go to the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem for an operation – but because I have a Gazan ID, they won’t accept me there,” Mustafa told The National.

In response to his specific case, Cogat told The National that Mustafa had been in the West Bank without a permit, but he was granted a one-day permission for treatment in a hospital in Nablus, in the northern West Bank. “He did not return to the Gaza Strip after completing the treatment and remained in Judea and Samaria without a legal permit,” the body said. Shaare Zedek Hospital did not respond to a request for comment.

Because Palestinians are widely recognised as living in occupied territory, Israel is obliged under international law to provide for their welfare, including by allowing medical treatment.

“Since October 7, the ability for patients from Gaza to access treatment in Israel has been extremely limited,” said Sari Bashi of Human Rights Watch.

Israel does not appear likely to revoke the ban on work permits any time soon.

“That's a political decision that this current [Israeli] government does not appear to be taking right now,” said Ms Bashi.

While they may not be able to return to work in Israel, the workers are adamant about wanting to return to Gaza – one day. But they recognise that the level of destruction in the enclave means it will not be the same place they left.

“I will return, but I’ll tell you something,” said Jamal. “Today there is war. But what about after the war? There is no Gaza. Where are we supposed to live? Where are we supposed to go?”