Special Envoy to Jerusalem Before the Hamas attack two weeks ago, some 18,000 Gazan workers were working in Israel, most of them in the construction sector. The October 7 Hamas attack surprised them at the works and they have been unable to return home since then, while their wives and children try to survive the constant shelling. But they are also in danger: Israel has recently arrested 4,000 workers from the Strip, accused of having participated in the planning of the attack.
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“My wife is alone with my six children, the youngest is 1 year old and the oldest is 14. They fled Gaza City and are now in the south, in a UN school,” explains one of the men , who asks that we not publish his name for fear of reprisals. “We already know that schools are not a safe place, neither are hospitals, nor are churches, and they don’t have enough food or water.” He is one of the hundred workers who have been resettled in a cultural center in Bethlehem, where we find the group, all men over 35, devastated. “Without internet or electricity it is very difficult to communicate: out of every 20 times I call I only get through once.”
He worked in the Israeli city of Jaffa: he used to stay on the job for two or three weeks, living in a shack, and return to spend the weekend with his family in Gaza. On the day of the Hamas attack, he received a message on the app that Israel uses to manage work permits for Palestinians from the occupied territories hired by Israeli companies: it was a notice that his permit had been suspended and that he had to go in the West Bank. Shocked by what was happening, he took a taxi to Ramallah, and once there the Palestinian Authority sent him to Bethlehem. “All I want now is to go back to my family, they are under the bombs and there is nothing I can do about it. When I manage to talk to them I can only tell them not to be afraid, to trust that everything will be fine, but neither do I I believe it myself”, he despairs. There is a heavy silence: the other workers who are in the same situation nod their heads.
They explain that the events of October 7 surprised them as much as the Israelis they worked for. “The rockets launched from the Strip could have fallen on us, us too!” says Nabil, who is 46 years old and has been working for the same company for 10 years. “We have no problems with our Israeli bosses, and neither do they with us. We do the work, they pay us and we have known each other for many years. There is nothing in Gaza and it is the only way we have to feed our families “says another man in the group, as he whiles away the hours sitting on a plastic chair in the compound’s yard. He says that in Israel he earned 6,000 shekels a month, a little above the minimum wage, which is equivalent to 1,400 euros today.
Surprise arrests
On their own, Gazan workers left Israel as fast as they could to take refuge in the West Bank. The conflict in the region, which has been going on for a century and has shaken the world so many times, is being fought on a very small land: between the Israeli towns near Gaza that suffered the attack and the West Bank there are about 100 kilometers, which they traveled in the midst of chaos. When they arrived at the military checkpoints that monitor access to the Palestinian territory, the Palestinian Authority, in coordination with the Israeli army, separated them into groups to accommodate them in sports halls and other facilities in the cities of Bethlehem, Jericho and Hebron . “The Israeli authorities knew who they were and where they were,” Mohamed Abu Adia, spokesman for Bethlehem City Council, which is responsible for providing them with shelter, clothing, food and medical care, told ARA.
Last Wednesday, at three in the morning, according to the official and those affected, the Israeli army entered the center, located inside the Dheisheh refugee camp, and took away 70 men, who were caught sleeping in the second floor People in the countryside tried to stop it, and a 17-year-old boy died from a shot in the head, after the soldiers used tear gas and, according to witnesses, also live fire. Since then there has been no news. “We don’t know where they are, neither we, nor the Red Crescent, nor the department of the Palestinian Authority that deals with prisoners – says Abu Adia -. There are rumors that say they are in a military base in Anata, but we don’t know for sure,” he says. Although he has stated otherwise in front of the workers, he admits to this newspaper that he cannot protect the rest.
One of the men in the group, who also does not want to be identified, receives a call from Gaza: “It’s the son of a colleague who asks me about his father, he says he hasn’t heard anything about him for a week, but I can’t give him no information,” he says. Israeli media say that the army has decided to arrest them to investigate whether they participated in any way in the planning of the attack. The workers reply that if they had a permit to work in Israel it is because they met all the security requirements: “They don’t let you leave Gaza if they don’t know for sure that you have no ties to any Palestinian faction.”
As we speak, a man in his 60s breaks away from the group: he hides because he doesn’t want to be seen crying. The others don’t even come close: they too are consumed glued to their mobile phones. One of the workers, who worked in the Israeli city of Ashdod, explains that he cannot contact his family in Rafah, south of the Strip. The news of the arrival of the first trucks with humanitarian aid after two weeks of constant bombing does not relieve him: “What are 20 trucks for 2.3 million people? If my wife tells me that they are trying to conserve the little water that they have as much as they can, and that they didn’t have to leave home!”
The relatives of the man sitting next to him lived in Jabàlia, in the north of the Strip, and had to move to the south. “Now there are twenty people in a small house, because at the UN school they were told there was no room. I would give anything to be with them now: I could not bear to survive if they die.”
2023-10-21 21:27:19
#families #bombs
