The Israeli Employers Who Want to Bring Palestinian Workers Back
Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Abu Naeem, a forty-two-year-old from Ramallah, in the West Bank, finished an overnight shift at a large produce-distribution center in Israel. He showered and went to sleep in a small private room that his employer had built for him. Then he woke to sirens and distant explosions. Somewhere above him, he could hear the cracks of interceptor missiles colliding with incoming rockets. Abu Naeem felt as if he were in a movie. He soon learned that Hamas and other militant groups had attacked Israel, killing about twelve hundred people.
For the next six weeks, as the Israeli military bombarded and then invaded Gaza, Abu Naeem’s employer persuaded him to stay in Israel, afraid of what might happen if he crossed back to the West Bank. Israel soon barred nearly two hundred thousand Palestinian laborers from its workforce. “The economic Cabinet decided that Palestinian workers should not return to Israel,” Nir Barkat, Israel’s economy minister, declared in late 2023. Abu Naeem was able to avoid detection by Israeli authorities only because he spoke fluent Hebrew. He learned how to make himself small, invisible, and useful.
Before October 7th, a fifth of the West Bank’s labor force was employed in Israel, earning more than double the prevailing wage at home. Palestinian workers were required to obtain permits, but a 2007 ruling by Israel’s High Court awarded them the same labor rights as Israelis. After October 7th, however, the number of Palestinian workers entering Israel each day fell from more than a hundred thousand to well under ten thousand. (Another thirty-four thousand maintain permits to work around Israeli settlements in the West Bank.) Unemployment in the West Bank surged to twenty-nine per cent. A World Bank report on the state of the Palestinian economy described what amounted to an economic collapse.
The decision to ban Palestinian workers was originally presented as an emergency measure, but as it continued, many business leaders and economists came to oppose it. According to the Times of Israel, a proposal to allow some Palestinian workers back into Israel, in late 2023, was supported by representatives from the Israeli military; from Israel’s security agency, the Shin Bet; and from COGAT, the agency responsible for implementing Israeli policies in Palestinian territories. Senior figures argued that job opportunities in Israel helped stabilize the West Bank, reducing tensions by providing income and a sense of economic mobility. But some Israeli politicians argued for a permanent shift. “Israel can and must advance alternatives that will provide a different solution to the economy,” Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, said. “We are leaving the old conception behind: stop employing Palestinian workers,” Barkat said, in 2024. More than two and a half years after October 7th, the ban is still in effect, and it no longer reads as temporary.
Abu Naeem returned to Ramallah in late November, 2023. He has never crossed back into Israel. More than two years later, I passed through Qalandia checkpoint, in northern Jerusalem, so that I could meet him on the other side. He came with Malek and Ihab, two other men who had worked in Israel. We sat at a table together; they set down phones and cigarette packs and lit one cigarette after another. Malek, a welder and ironworker from Al-Khalil (Hebron), held his head in his hands until someone suggested he go first.
Malek said that in Israel he worked on industrial frames and bridges weighing several tons. He earned enough to build a house for his family. Since the ban began, though, he had gone so deep into debt that he was denied access to a loan program established by the Palestinian Ministry of Labor. He described himself as living in hiding, afraid even to travel between Al-Khalil and Ramallah, for fear of being pursued by creditors. He depended on others to support his three daughters and a baby boy. He spoke longingly of izzat al-nafs—the dignity of not having to ask for help.
Abu Naeem, a broad-shouldered man with expressive eyes, told us that he’d recently been unable to afford his ten-year-old son’s school fees of fifty shekels, or fourteen dollars. When he asked for a pencil and an eraser, he had to respond, “Tomorrow.” Two weeks later, he said, his son came home crying. The school had announced the names of families who had not paid. He had to borrow seven hundred shekels for the fees and school supplies.
Ihab, the other man who joined us, worked in Israel for almost eighteen years, he said, most recently as a supervisor for thirty workers at a supermarket in Or Yehuda, near Tel Aviv. At the time, he’d considered himself middle class, but now he lived with his mother. His marriage had collapsed. He refused to cross into Israel illegally, as many others did; he said that two of his relatives were killed trying to climb the border wall, and another was critically injured.
Earlier this year, Palestinian workers who had lost jobs in Israel organized themselves on TikTok. They protested the closure of border crossings and appealed to the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank. Ihab showed me a photograph of a meeting with the P.A.’s minister of labor. When the workers explained that they could not afford school fees, he said, the minister brought up the possibility of loan programs or school waivers. But loan programs would require clean bank records, Abu Naeem said, and unemployment has destroyed their credit. Even obtaining paperwork for the waiver, he added, would cost money that he did not have.
During our conversation, Ihab called his longtime employer in Israel, who was named Danny. Over speakerphone, Danny said that he missed Ihab and called him “a man who does the work of three people.” He told me that he had tried to “turn the world upside down to secure a permit,” but he had had no success. “I miss Or Yehuda,” Ihab said. Later, Abu Naeem called Hassan, a contractor from the Tulkarm area who once supervised more than a hundred workers in Israel. Hassan said that workers affected by the ban were in an abyss. He had seen families lose access to electricity and water, pull their children out of school, and go days without eating. “Not poverty,” Hassan said. “Something worse.”
The framework that currently governs Palestinian workers in Israel dates to 1994, when Israeli and Palestinian officials agreed to the Paris Protocol of the Oslo Accords. The protocol established that the Israeli shekel would be the currency of the Palestinian economy, and that Israel would control borders, trade, tax transfers, and work permits. Walid Habbas, a researcher at the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), argued that Israeli policies made Palestinians dependent on Israel, and that work permits always functioned as a “mechanism of control.” Earnings from Israel made up nearly a quarter of the West Bank’s gross domestic product, generating income for households, local markets, and the government’s tax base.
Raead, a contractor from Tarqumiyah, erected high-rise buildings in Israel for twelve years. “We built Tel Aviv,” he told me proudly. His house has polished stone floors and a central courtyard; photographs of his father, the owner of a major construction company, were displayed in every room. Families like his used to lend support to relatives and neighbors; they paid when others couldn’t. Now, he told me, he was two hundred thousand dollars in debt. Palestinians are liquidating their possessions, he said—cars, furniture, jewelry, even land meant to be passed down to children. “When people are desperate, they sell,” he told me.
Some Palestinians have decided that they can no longer wait for new opportunities. Ashraf, who studied media at Hebron University and then found construction work in Israel, ran out of money after about eight months of unemployment. He kept hearing about men who were entering Israel without permits, for cash work in construction or agriculture. He began to weigh the possibility of getting hurt while sneaking across the border against the certainty of going hungry at home. He showed me a video of a man who was shot near the border wall, his lower leg soaked in blood. But another video showed Palestinians successfully using ropes to climb over the wall and disappear into Israel.
Ashraf runs a popular TikTok account that focusses on the lives of workers. In one video, he greets viewers from the fiftieth floor of a construction site in Tel Aviv. “Good morning to all the workers,” he says. In our conversation, he criticized the Israeli work ban as a form of collective punishment. He is particularly troubled by the Hebrew term Shabach, a portmanteau for “illegal resident” that has connotations of criminality. “I’m not coming to hurt anyone,” he told me. “I’m coming to work.”
I started my reporting in late 2025, shortly after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. By then, more than seventy thousand Palestinians had been killed, and where I live, in the Netherlands, the war in Gaza was widely discussed as a genocide. The workers I met in the West Bank, in contrast, did not seem eager to talk about the political situation. They seldom brought up the subject of Gaza, expressed little interest in political factions, and focussed on practical concerns: work, income, survival. They expressed anger at Israel for the work ban and frustration with the Palestinian Authority for failing to mitigate it. Some blamed Hamas for destroying years of hard-won economic security.
Then there are the workers who used to cross into Israel from Gaza. After October 7th, thousands were rounded up, bused to Ramallah, and dispersed across West Bank cities. In Ariha (Jericho), a low-lying, sun-struck town on the edge of the desert, four hundred and eighty Gazans have spent two years of limbo in a military base operated by the Palestinian Authority Security Forces. On my way there, I passed villas with pools, encampments where displaced persons lived, and government compounds. I paid a visit to Ariha’s governor, Hussein Hamayel, who said that the Palestinian Authority lacked the resources to help those affected by the work ban. He said that the West Bank was under a “financial siege.” Israel has withheld tax revenues that it collects on the P.A.’s behalf, a major source of the P.A.’s budget, and the government struggles to pay its own employees.
On the military base, I was accompanied by a Palestinian officer. He insisted on listening as I interviewed a sixty-year-old worker from Gaza. The worker, whom I’ll call Salim, moved slowly, his slippers brushing the floor as he walked in; he talked without inflection, as though his story belonged to someone else. On October 7th, he said, he was in the Sderot area, where Hamas carried out relentless attacks. He pointed to places where he said he was shot that day: his leg, his hand, near his eye. He was treated briefly in the south of Israel and then the Israeli military—the I.D.F.—took him to Ofer prison. Salim told me that, during a seventy-day incarceration, he slept on stones in an open yard, wondering what would happen to him. He said he was never charged with a crime but had no contact with his family or a lawyer. Because he suffered from chronic health issues, he was eventually released to the Palestinian Authority. (An Israeli military spokesperson told The New Yorker, “The I.D.F. operates in accordance with Israeli and international law.")
Only when Salim talked about his family did his posture change slightly; energy returned to his voice. Periodically, he said, he received about seven hundred shekels from the Palestinian Authority. He sent half to his family by phone. He has ten children and about fifty grandchildren. When I asked if he knew all their names, he said, “Not all of them.” He laughed briefly, then fell silent for a moment. “We wish to go see them before we die.”
In 2025, the Fattal Hotel Group, which describes itself as Israel’s largest hospitality organization, dismissed more than a hundred Palestinian workers. They were not accused of misconduct, and they had continued working throughout the war. Many of them turned to MAAN, a workers’-rights organization based in Israel, for help. After MAAN began to investigate, the management of the hotel chain produced a letter from Israel’s Ministry of Tourism. The ministry was informing hotels of a forthcoming policy: Palestinian workers were to lose their work permits and be replaced by laborers from abroad.
Assaf Adiv, MAAN’s executive director, recently visited a café in al-Eizariya, a city in the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, to meet some of the dismissed Palestinian workers, who wore pressed shirts and leather shoes. One of them showed a video from a farewell party; his colleagues at the Leonardo Club Dead Sea, an all-inclusive waterfront hotel, warmly thanked him for his work. Adiv had bad news for the hotel workers: the letter from the Ministry of Tourism seemed to provide a legal justification for their dismissals. He offered to seek compensation from their employers. What the workers really wanted, though, was to get their jobs back.
Adiv told me that, nowadays, wherever he goes in Israel, he sees newly arrived workers from Asia. They have limited rights, he added, and depend on staffing agencies for their housing and their work. He also said that he has been hearing about Palestinian workers being shot, sometimes fatally, while attempting to cross into Israel. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said. Those who make it to Israel increasingly hide in construction sites, warehouses, and vehicles, moving at night and avoiding checkpoints; they remain vulnerable to anyone who decides to report them. “The longer this continues, the more desperate people become,” he said.
On the Israeli side, employers described a different kind of collapse. I met Ran Cohen, a fifty-three-year-old contractor from an Israeli settlement near Jerusalem, at a large bank that was being renovated near Tel Aviv. I could barely hear him over the sound of walls being torn down. For more than two decades, he told me, he had run a renovation company that depended on dozens of Palestinian workers from a single extended family in Yatta, south of Hebron. Fathers taught sons. The crew moved from project to project together. They built his house. He attended their weddings. “Like family,” Cohen said, without irony. “Sure, they probably want us out of this land—and we would also like to have the place to ourselves. So what?” Politics remained outside the construction site. Trust grew anyway.
Cohen’s workers were denied entry to Israel on October 8, 2023, and have not been able to return. He described the ban as a “death sentence” for businesses like his. Without his crew, he was forced to refund clients; he spent months at home, depressed. He did not want to hire Palestinians without permits because Israeli authorities were carrying out inspections; Israeli employers caught hiring unauthorized workers can face heavy fines, arrests, and temporary closures. “This is not a political position,” he said. “It is math.” He’d paid skilled Palestinian workers six hundred to eight hundred shekels a day; foreign workers from third-party staffing agencies cost fifteen hundred. In Cohen’s telling, the work is slower, the quality is lower, and there aren’t enough workers available; the primary beneficiaries are the agencies. Ironically, the result is that homes scarred by war—including the ongoing conflict with Iran and its proxy Hezbollah—are going unrepaired. To stay afloat, Cohen took out mortgages worth millions of shekels, and he began working temporary jobs as a construction-site manager.
The official justification for the ban remains security. “The policy governing the entry of Palestinian workers . . . is determined in accordance with security assessments and subject to the directives of the political echelons,” COGAT said in a statement. But Esteban Klor, an economist at Hebrew University, reviewed seventeen years of data about attacks inside Israel and found that only three were carried out by Palestinian permit holders. The security argument, he concluded, doesn’t hold; he sees the ban as a political choice. Still, even if the ban were lifted tomorrow, many Israelis might not want Palestinian workers in their homes, according to Eran Sib, the chairman of the Renovation Contractors Association.
When I met Cohen, he was preparing to make his second trip to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to recruit workers who could fill jobs in Israel. Cohen is also a member of the Renovation Contractors Association. During his first trip, he had watched hundreds of candidates lay tiles and finish drywall. Only a few had had the necessary training.
Before we parted, Cohen showed me some WhatsApp messages from Uda, a Palestinian worker from Yatta who had spent nearly twenty years on his crews. The two men still exchanged voice notes, jokes, and holiday greetings. Cohen also showed me a receipt from a money transfer. He’d sent a thousand shekels to a stranger who’d promised an Israeli work permit for Uda. Cohen knew it was probably a scam, but he’d paid up because he didn’t know what else to do. “I sent it so Uda would see I was still trying,” he told me. ♦
Reporting for this story was supported by the Dutch Fund for In-Depth Journalism (Fonds B.J.P.).