Border workers return through the Kerem Shalom crossing after being detained and mistreated in Israel.
Thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, who previously worked in Israel and the occupied West Bank and were then detained by Israel, are being pushed into the war-torn enclave, according to media reports.
Images show some of the workers returning Friday through Israel’s Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) border crossing, east of the Rafah border crossing between the besieged Gaza Strip and Egypt.
The move comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Thursday evening that “Gaza workers who were in Israel on the day the war broke out will be sent back to Gaza.”
Workers crossing the Palestinian enclave said they were arrested and mistreated by Israeli authorities following the October 7 attack by Hamas, the group that rules Gaza, on southern Israel. Some still wore plastic stickers with numbers around their legs.
“We served them, worked for them, in homes, restaurants and markets in exchange for the lowest prices and despite this, we were humiliated,” said Jamal Ismail, a worker at the Maghazi refugee camp, in the center of Gaza. Band.
Those coming from areas of northern Gaza are expected to stay in the south after Israeli forces finished cutting off roads connecting the two parts of the enclave on Thursday evening, according to Palestinian officials.
Around 18,500 Gazans held permits to work outside the besieged strip before the war broke out.
The exact number of workers present in Israel at the start of hostilities remains unknown, but thousands of them are believed to have been rounded up by the Israeli army and transferred to undisclosed locations.
Jessica Montell, executive director of the Israel-based human rights organization HaMoked, told Al Jazeera in October that more than 400 families and friends of workers missing in Gaza had been in contact with the organization since the beginning of the war.
A group of six local organizations, including HaMoked, asked the Israeli High Court to release the names and locations of detainees and ensure humane conditions of detention.
According to the petitioners, some Palestinians were arrested in the Almon area as well as in Ofer, near Ramallah, and in Sde Teyman, near Beer al-Sabe (Be’er Sheva), in the southern Naqab desert. or the Negev.
Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from East Jerusalem, says the legal challenge from human rights groups appears to have convinced Israel to begin releasing workers, around 3,200 of whom were reportedly taken to the Al Jazeera crossing. Kerem Shalom.
The same human rights organizations now say sending them to Gaza could well be a death sentence, he said.
The UN was also disrupted. “They are being sent back, we don’t know exactly where”, or if they “even have a home to go to”, and “we are deeply concerned about this”, declared the spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, Elizabeth Throssell, to the press. conference.