An estimated 7,000 other Gazans remain stuck outside of the enclave, stripped of their Israeli work permits and temporarily sheltered by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Wael Abu Omar, a border official in Gaza, said on Saturday.
The deportations mark an end to what had been a pillar of Israel’s efforts to maintain some kind of economic outlet with Hamas-controlled Gaza, which Israel blockaded in 2007 after the militant group seized control of the enclave.
Before the war, an estimated 18,500 Palestinians held permits to work in Israel, a coveted ticket out of Gaza’s crushing unemployment made worse by Israel’s tight controls.
Low-wage Gazan workers took jobs on Israeli farms and construction sites and became one of the few personal and economic exchanges between the two sides. Those who crossed Friday were reunited with their families in the Palestinian enclave, where more than 9,400 people have been killed after one month of Israeli bombardments. Gaza also faces dire shortages in food, water, electricity and medicine.
The body of at least one Gazan worker, Mansour Warsh Agha, 61, was also returned, according to the Associated Press.
Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, which oversees Palestinian workers in Israel, the prime minister’s office and the Israeli military all declined to comment.
It remains unclear how many Gazan workers were in Israel when the war began. But within days of Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel — in which militants killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took more than 230 hostages — Israeli authorities canceled all work permits and erased them from the phone app that Palestinians from Gaza used to prove their legal standing.
In the war’s early days, Israeli authorities arrested thousands of Gazans from their work sites and temporary homes and sent them to the Anatot and Ofer military prisons in the West Bank. Many were blindfolded, interrogated, beaten and repeatedly left without food and water, according to their accounts.
One man said he was held for 24 days at Ofer prison. “They tied our hands and feet tightly,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy. “We were kept awake day and night.”
Another detainee, Feras Nasr, told Reuters that he was arrested in Nazareth on the first day of the war and jailed there before being transferred to Ofer prison in the West Bank, where he was held for 20 days, unable to make any calls or contact his family. “We were humiliated and beaten, every day they would beat us, every single day they would torture us,” he said. “Until this moment we don’t know whether our families are okay. I have no idea if my children are alive or not.”
The Israeli cabinet decided Thursday to return Gazan workers. “Israel is cutting off all contact with Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza and the workers who were in Israel when the war broke out will be returned to Gaza.”
The Israeli rights group Gisha said in a statement Friday that detainees were “cut off from the world and without access to legal representation, deprived of their right to due process.” Gisha was among six human rights organizations that had petitioned the Israeli High Court to release those unlawfully detained to the West Bank.
Thousands of other Gazans sought safety in Palestinian parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where they remain without information about when they may be able to return to their families.
Adly Saleem, a construction worker and father of seven, said on Saturday by phone from Jericho that he was still desperate to return to his wife, children and parents. Already, he said, a cousin, his wife and children were killed in an airstrike while out looking for food and water in Deir el Belah in central Gaza.
For the past three weeks, Saleem has been staying with about 450 other Gazans in Jericho at a large police training center run by the political party Fatah, a rival of Hamas that leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. There were about 1,500 workers from Gaza under the Palestinian Authority’s care in Jericho, the city’s deputy mayor, Yusra Sweiti, said.
“They hear every day that their families are being killed and attacked,” she said.
Saleem told The Washington Post he was beaten unconscious by police while he was detained in the wake of the Hamas attack. He was later released and fled to the West Bank. On Friday, he finally made contact with his two brothers, who were back in Gaza among the deportees. They exchanged greetings, he said, and then the phone line cut out.
