Ramallah- In parallel with its devastating war and genocidal massacres in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation is waging a parallel war against workers in the Strip who were granted work permits within the Green Line in various fields and have suspended these permits since October 7, 2023.
The last of these measures was to stop the allowances for Palestinian workers who suffered work-related injuries and suffered a disability that required them to receive these allowances, according to what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last Sunday.
This came days after the Labor and Welfare Committee in the Israeli Knesset held a discussion to deprive 23 Gazans of insurance benefits, who receive about 7.3 million shekels (about two million dollars) every year, and it continues to do so even during the war.
The Knesset members initiating the session demand to know the reason for the continued transfer of money, and to re-examine the identities of those entitled to that money.
Specialized figures described the Israeli measure as “retaliatory” against people who were permanently disabled, and touched on the types of torture and persecution that sector workers have been subjected to for about 7 months.
Punishment and revenge
The legal advisor to the Arab Workers Union in Nazareth, Wahba Badarneh, told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that what is happening to Gaza workers is “part of a series of collective Israeli sanctions and retaliation for months.”
Badarneh added that what was published by the Haaretz newspaper indicates a decision to cut allocations that are the right of their Palestinian owners in Gaza.
In his explanation of the rationale for these allocations, Badarneh explained that every Palestinian worker from the West Bank or Gaza who obtains a work permit from the Israeli government coordinator and is registered with the Ministry of Interior is considered a foreign worker, and in terms of rights he has the same rights as Israeli workers.
Therefore, when a Palestinian worker is exposed to a work-related injury, he has the right – according to the law – to obtain all medical expenses and coverage through the “Health Fund,” and then the Israeli “National Insurance” takes over the cases of the injured, Badarneh adds.
For example, the law stipulates a 90-day paid leave from the National Insurance Institute for work-related injuries, after which those with a disability rate of 50% or more are entitled to a monthly pension, regardless of their place of residence, whether inside Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. And the words are for badarna.
But what is new – according to Badarneh – is the move to stop these allocations “as part of a programmed policy of revenge against Palestinian workers, in continuation of previous steps of persecuting, arresting, opening detention centers for workers, torturing them, and killing them in prisons, in addition to punishing employers who employ Palestinian workers.”
The Arab Workers Union in Israel intends to go to the Israeli Supreme Court to demand the cancellation of this decision because “there is no legal justification for cutting off benefits if the National Insurance recognizes the existence of the injury.”
Badarna believes that the chance of the case being successful in the Supreme Court is “very great, especially since we are talking about disabled people who are entitled to disability allowances and work injury allowances.”
The union’s legal advisor, via Tel Aviv Tribune Net, appealed to any worker who has an injury – whether from the West Bank or Gaza and has not received his allowances – to go to them to follow up on his case, “because we as a union cannot follow up without going to us.”
Billions of frozen shekels
For his part, Abdul Hadi Abu Taha, a member of the General Secretariat of the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions, says that the occupation authorities have been withholding billions of shekels (a dollar equals 3.7 shekels) for decades and refuse to give them to their owners or to the Palestinian Authority.
Abu Taha revealed that the Israeli authorities deduct large sums from the benefits of workers in the West Bank and Gaza under various names – including insurance deductions – within a system that also applies to workers from within the Green Line, and that these deductions go in the form of a pension for those within the Green Line, but they are withheld for For the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.
The Palestinian side has always demanded these benefits, which began to be deducted since 1972, according to Abu Taha, who explained that the occupation recognized these rights after the Oslo Accords and the Paris Economic Agreement, but for a period after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, and when the Authority demanded them, Israel stipulated the existence of a social security institution. When the Palestinian government began to form, the occupying state failed it.
The spokesman pointed out that there are Palestinian movements at the level of the International Labor Organization “to stop discrimination against workers and pay their dues.”
After preventing Palestinians from the West Bank from working in Israel, estimates by the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions indicate that there are about 500,000 unemployed people in the West Bank and Gaza, with monthly losses amounting to one billion and 350 million shekels.
Prisons and torture
In parallel with the financial prosecutions, Gaza workers are subjected to torture and starvation, according to the director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, Abdullah Al-Zaghari, who confirmed in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net that the issue of prisoners in the Gaza Strip – including workers – “is one of the biggest challenges facing prisoner institutions in general because the occupation is still implementing the policy of disappearance.” Forced and unknown fate, and not disclosing any information related to them.”
The director of the Prisoners’ Club spoke of “horrific testimonies coming out of the camps confirming that detainees are subjected to deadly and lethal methods of torture,” and criticized the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross, “which is not playing any role currently and over the past eight months.”
Data obtained by Tel Aviv Tribune Net from the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions indicate that about 19,200 Gazan workers had work permits in Israel that were canceled with the start of the aggression.
Work permits are not granted to Palestinians except after a strict security check conducted by the occupation authorities to ensure what is called “security safety,” the basis of which is that the worker should not belong to any party or Palestinian resistance movement or a house in which there is a Palestinian resistance member.
After October 7, 2023, the occupation launched a massive arrest campaign among workers, and most of them were transferred to the West Bank.
📌 Among them are workers from Gaza.. Confrontations and clashes during a massive arrest campaign in the West Bank
read more: pic.twitter.com/klOVLqV3t0
– Palestine Online (@F24online) June 2, 2024
The Labor Union monitored the presence of about 10,000 workers inside Israel at the time of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) attack on the settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip. About 4,000 of them were arrested inside their workplaces, then about 3,200 were released and returned to the Gaza Strip, while the needs of about 3,200 were secured. 5,800 of them were returned by the Union after their deportation to the West Bank.
Regarding the fate of the workers deported to the West Bank, the Labor Union indicated that most of them remained and about 80 were arrested during the return of 1,488 workers from the West Bank to Gaza, while human rights organizations monitored continuous raids on the whereabouts of Gazans in the West Bank.
