Israelis warned of food shortages due to crackdown on Palestinian migrant workers

“Instead of 900 employees on a normal day, today 60-70 go to work,” Israeli information and analytical website “Details” quotes the owner of a poultry slaughter company, Dani Mizrahi. “We have almost no workers, they are not allowed in, and this is a serious problem. In the south, five or six slaughterhouses are also not working.”

Due to the sudden shortage of workers, many chickens remain in chicken coops, which not only costs a lot of money, but can also lead to their death: the birds cannot be watered or fed, and it is also impossible to take them to slaughterhouses, Mizrahi complains. And it seems that this problem will not be solved quickly.

At a meeting of the heads of the Israeli Ministry of Economy, the shortage of labor resources caused by the absence of many Israeli Arabs and Palestinians from the workplace was recognized. But it is planned to eliminate this deficit in the near future by hiring about 4 thousand young people preparing for military service.

But while the Israeli authorities are generally optimistic about solving the labor problem, the prospects for workers from the Palestinian territories (especially from the Gaza Strip) look bleak.

AFP tells the story of a Palestinian named Abderrahman Balata who, like many other Gazans who worked in Israel, now finds himself in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, an unfamiliar place far from his war-torn homes.

Sitting in a one-star hotel, Balata said that he decided to leave Tel Aviv, where he worked as an electrician, fearing retaliation after an attack carried out by militants from Gaza: “With three other workers, we left Israel by taxi.”

“There’s no way to get into Gaza, that’s why we went to the West Bank,” he says. “I don’t know anyone here. Nobody accepted us, so we went to the governorate building and they put us up in this hotel.”

While Balata decided to go to the West Bank himself, other Palestinian workers said the Israeli army forcibly brought them here after being detained for hours, AFP noted. In the governorate building of Ramallah and al-Bira, dozens of workers from the Gaza Strip sat in a room waiting to be moved for the night.

Governor Laila Ghannam told AFP: “These are our people and we cannot abandon them in these exceptional circumstances, so at least they have everything they need to live.”

But many workers refused to speak to AFP for fear of losing their work permits.

Since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel has blockaded the Palestinian enclave, home to some 2.3 million people, more than 50 percent of whom are unemployed.

Dozens of Palestinian workers have been driven out of their jobs in Israel since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel, according to the Palestinian Labor Office.

“Our employer locked us up in Tiberias on Saturday for our safety, then put us on buses on Sunday morning and told us he was sending us to the West Bank without giving us any money,” said Jawad, 43, who worked in construction and cleaning. – When we asked him to pay us, he threatened to hand us over to the police… I have no money. My family is in Gaza and my children call me in tears, asking when I will return. If they are martyred, I will not be able to see them. It would be better if I were there with them so that we could die together.”

Meanwhile, Israel’s Office for the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said last month that it had issued some 18,500 work permits to Palestinians in Gaza.

The Gaza Strip has been under blockade by both Israel and Egypt for more than 15 years in an attempt to contain the enclave’s Hamas rulers. Israel says the tough restrictions on goods and people are necessary because of the terrorist group’s efforts to arm itself en masse for attacks on the Jewish state. Critics have lamented the impact of the blockade on ordinary Gazans, about half of whom are unemployed, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Sky-high poverty rates make working in Israel a very attractive option for those lucky enough to receive a permit.

In Gaza, Palestinian workers can expect an average daily wage of about 60 shekels ($17.35). The few who are allowed to enter Israel to work can receive up to 400 shekels ($115.66) a day, according to a report published on the Zman Yisrael website.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense has approved a preliminary plan to increase the number of entry permits from Gaza to 20,000, an unprecedented increase. In mid-2021, only 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza had permits to work or trade in Israel, the Times of Israel wrote. Israeli defense officials at the time expressed hope that allowing more Gazans to work in Israel would bring much-needed income to the impoverished coastal enclave while promoting stability.

But, alas, as recent events have shown, neither the Gaza Strip nor Israel have achieved stability after the attack by Hamas militants.