The cross-border workers return via the Kerem Shalom border crossing after detention and mistreatment in Israel.
Thousands of Gazans, who previously worked in Israel and the occupied West Bank and were subsequently detained by Israel, are being pushed into the war-torn enclave, news agencies report.
Some of the Gazan workers returned on Friday through the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) border crossing in Israel, east of the Rafah crossing between the besieged Gaza Strip and Egypt, Reuters reported.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Thursday evening: “The Gaza workers who were in Israel on the day the war broke out will be sent back to Gaza.”
Workers who entered the Palestinian enclave said they were detained and abused by Israeli authorities in the aftermath of the October 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas, the group that rules Gaza. Some still had plastic stickers with numbers on their legs.
“We served them, worked for them, in homes, in restaurants and in markets in exchange for the lowest prices, and despite that we were humiliated,” said Jamal Ismail, a worker from the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza. Strip.
Palestinian officials said those from areas in northern Gaza should remain in the south after Israeli forces closed roads connecting the two parts of the enclave late Thursday.
About 18,500 Gaza residents had permits to work outside the besieged strip before the outbreak of the war.
The exact number of workers present in Israel when hostilities began remains unknown, but it is believed that thousands were rounded up by the Israeli military and taken to secret locations.
Jessica Montell, executive director of Israel-based human rights organization HaMoked, told Al Jazeera in October that more than 400 families and friends of missing Gaza workers had been in contact with the organization since the start of the war.
A group of six local organizations, including HaMoked, have petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to reveal the names and locations of the detainees and to ensure humane conditions.
According to the petitioners, some Palestinians were detained in the Almon area, as well as in Ofer, near Ramallah, and Sde Teyman, near Beer al-Sabe (Be’er Sheva), in the southern Naqab or Negev desert.
Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from east Jerusalem, says the legal challenge from human rights groups appears to have convinced Israel to release the workers, with about 3,200 believed to have been taken to the Kerem Shalom border crossing.
The same human rights groups now say sending them to Gaza could be a death sentence, he said.
The UN was also concerned. “They are being sent back, we don’t know exactly where,” or whether they “even have a home to go to,” and “we are deeply concerned about that,” UN human rights office spokeswoman Elizabeth Throssell told reporters. conference.