Charlotte Ritz-Jack & Dana Mills
+972 Magazine / May 6, 2026
Long a cornerstone of Israel’s low-wage economy, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza have been frozen out since October 7 — replaced by an influx of migrant workers in highly precarious conditions.
A garbage truck’s tailgate opens slowly. Inside, around 70 Palestinian men are packed tightly together, their eyes struggling to adjust to the light after what appears to have been a suffocating journey. They shield their eyes as flashlights illuminate their faces. Israeli police officers point rifles at them from close range and shout commands, causing some of the men to instinctively raise their hands. One by one, they are pulled off the truck, one arm forced behind their backs, and led away into custody.
The nearly 10-minute video released by the Israeli police on April 13, shortly after the vehicle was intercepted on the highway connecting the Tel Aviv metropolitan area and the occupied West Bank, captures the aftermath of an attempted crossing into Israel by Palestinian labourers without permits. Treated as though they were dangerous terrorists, these men wanted little more than to make a living so they could provide for their families.
For decades, employment in low-wage sectors inside Israel — particularly construction, agriculture, and other forms of manual labour — has been a cornerstone of Palestinian livelihoods in the occupied territories, where Israel’s stifling of the economy keeps salaries low and unemployment high. Before October 7, 2023, such workers injected an estimated $380 million per month into local markets. In some towns in the West Bank, more than 90 percent of men depended on jobs inside Israel.
Today, these opportunities have all but vanished. After October 7, over 200,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza — including 150,000 permit holders from the West Bank, an estimated 50,000 working without permits, and 18,500 from Gaza — were barred from entering Israel, ostensibly due to “security concerns.”
In effect, the war on Gaza has provided the Israeli state with the impetus to significantly scale back its long-standing reliance on Palestinian labour, marking a decisive shift in the decades-old balance between the ideological imperative to exclude Palestinian workers and their essential role in Israeli economic development.
An uneasy balance
“Before the war, the inclusion of Palestinian workers in the labour market was in Israel’s economic interest,” Maayan Niezna, a legal expert who tracks Israel’s use of migrant labour, told +972 Magazine. “But it was also part of the political project of the occupation, creating dependency while ‘containing’ the risk of resistance by providing a degree of economic stability.”
To this end, when Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it soon began granting permits to Palestinians who wished to work inside Israel — initiating a policy that has been termed “controlled inclusion.” Between 1968 and 1973, the number of Palestinians working inside Israel increased more than 38 percent a year. In response to the First Intifada that began in the late 1980s, however, Israel imposed a strict permit regime that limited Palestinian access to its labour market, and started replacing those workers with a migrant workforce.
Thai workers filled agricultural jobs, while Chinese and Indian labourers were recruited for construction and Filipinos for care work. By 2000, when the Second Intifada broke out, approximately 240,000 migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, comprised roughly 10 percent of Israel’s labour force.
But the economy was doing poorly: in 2002 it had its worst performance year since 1953. With Jewish supremacism and racism becoming increasingly overt in Israeli policy, the government started scapegoating foreign workers for the recession, blaming them for rising unemployment and “undermining the Jewish nature of the state as a result of mixed marriages.”
In 2002, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched a mass deportation campaign targeting migrant workers. The authorities cultivated informants who left visible marks on the doors of foreign workers in an attempt to intentionally fracture migrant communities. Some 40,000 people were deported, and around twice this number were intimidated into leaving of their own accord.
The 2010s and early 2020s saw Israel increasingly open its borders to foreign workers again — particularly in the fields of agriculture, construction, and domestic caregiving. In the former two fields, foreign workers actively replaced Palestinian labourers, while the latter created a new niche (government quotas have regulated foreign labour in agriculture and construction at around 30,000 per sector, while caregiving is not capped).
Although Palestinian employment in Israel continued to rise in the years leading up to October 7 — with more than 20 percent of Palestinians in the occupied territories employed in Israel by 2022, up from 13 percent in 2020 — their employment remained highly controlled: concentrated in low-status sectors, dependent on volatile permit systems and employer sponsorship, and often informal or unregulated with little recourse against exploitation.
And then came October 7. Almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers lost their jobs as their entry permits were revoked. Thousands of Gazans, once the backbone of this workforce, were detained or left stranded in the West Bank. In the months that followed, residential construction in Israel fell by 95 percent, while production on farms declined by 80 percent.
The “security concerns” used by Israel to justify the move — suggesting that workers could exploit their access to assist Hamas in the war — do not stand up to scrutiny. Research by institutions tied to Israel’s own security establishment, such as the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), indicates that permit-holding Palestinian workers are almost never involved in militant activity, including on October 7.
“It’s a form of collective punishment,” Niezna said. “Banning Palestinian workers makes no sense from a security standpoint; it only makes sense as part of a political project of occupation and annexation.” Against the backdrop of settler violence in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza, Niezna reasoned, undermining the Palestinian economy is intended to squeeze out the last breaths of Palestinian self-sufficiency and political autonomy.
‘Migrants are invited as workers, not human beings’
While efforts to end reliance on Palestinian labour long predate the current Israeli government, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has emerged as a central figure in their acceleration. Under the cover of war, his ministry has moved to fast-track neoliberal labour reforms, loosening regulations while shifting the heaviest costs onto migrant labourers and the few remaining Palestinian workers, who have the least access to legal and societal protections against abuse.
“We’ve reduced regulation,” Smotrich boasted in a 2024 announcement promoting policies to expand foreign labour recruitment. “[We] brought over 20,000 foreign workers into the country since the beginning of the Gaza war.”
That same announcement outlined plans to recruit some 65,000 workers from India, Sri Lanka, and Uzbekistan through new recruitment centers in major cities, with negotiations underway to raise that number to as many as 80,000. According to labour rights organization Kav LaOved, around 270,000 migrant workers are currently employed in Israel.
The consequences of this shift have been devastating for Palestinian workers. The 8,000 permits issued in 2025 for work inside Israel represent only a fraction of what is needed to keep the West Bank’s economy afloat, even as more than 10,000 Palestinians continue working in settlements. Without access to Israeli wages, entire households have lost their sole source of income and are being pushed to the brink.
“Palestinian labourers are facing real poverty,” said Yael Berda, a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has written extensively on Palestinian labour under Israel’s permit regime. “They don’t even have enough food on the table — it’s very extreme.”
In this vacuum, many Palestinian workers are taking serious risks to provide for their families. An estimated 10,000 Palestinians are believed to be working inside Israel without permits, a number that would likely be higher if not for the deterrent posed by rampant abuse within Israel’s prisons.
Palestinian workers, while undoubtedly the hardest hit, are not the only ones whose livelihoods have been strained over the past few years. Israel’s permanent state of war has pushed unemployment among its own population to nearly 10 percent. Meanwhile, government compensation frameworks have shifted away from wage protection toward unpaid leave — disrupting pension accumulation and leaving many without stable income.
These changes have been accompanied by austerity-oriented budgets and growing confrontation with organized labour, including attempts to block union strike actions. Israeli courts have increasingly sided with the government, at times ordering employees back to work even amid ongoing missile fire. As a result, low-wage workers across the board are struggling to make ends meet, with little collective bargaining power.
For migrant workers and Palestinians, the risks are compounded: the threat of deportation or permit revocation gives employers significant leverage to exploit labour. “These workers can unionize,” said Yaniv Bar Ilan, spokesperson for the Israeli labour union Koach LaOvdim. “But since they are in a very fragile position — [they] cannot complain for fear of retribution, and are often unaware of their rights — attempts to do so remain limited.”
While labour rights are equal on paper for Israeli workers and migrant workers alike, “we see clear differences in how safety regulations and protections are implemented,” explained Yahel Kurlander, a sociologist who studies agricultural migrant labour in Israel. On average, migrant workers in Israeli agriculture receive only around 70 percent of the wages they are legally owed.
These disparities are further magnified in times of war. Access to bomb shelters and other safety measures is frequently left to employers, despite the heightened risks — particularly in agriculture, where work frequently takes place in volatile border areas. The state has largely failed to provide basic safety training or guidance, leaving workers without even a minimal understanding of emergency protocols.
The results have been catastrophic. During the October 7 attacks, 22 Thai workers were taken hostage and 32 were killed. Since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in late February, at least three migrant workers have been killed in missile strikes. Yet the plight of these workers has received limited public attention, reflecting their status in Israeli society: essential to the economy, yet rendered invisible.
Two and a half years into the war on Gaza, “there are still no instructions for home care workers on what to do during an alarm,” Kurlander said. “Migrants are invited to Israel only as workers, not as human beings.”
‘It could swing back’
In Israel, much like the kafala system used in Gulf countries, visas (for migrants) and permits (for Palestinians) are generally tied to the worker’s employer. Migrant workers are typically issued five-year visas sponsored by employers, who are legally required to provide housing, facilitate access to bank accounts, and ensure sufficient time off per week. Further, they often take out loans to finance their move, bound by thousands of dollars of debt that requires months or years of wages to pay back.
In practice, this dependency leaves workers highly vulnerable — and even when their rights are formally equal to those of Israeli citizens, enforcement is uneven. A 2014 report by Kav LaOved found that agricultural workers routinely reported being exposed to pesticides without proper protection or training, having wages withheld, enduring starvation, and living in housing unfit for human habitation. Employers also frequently failed to open bank accounts for workers, as required by law.
Without government intervention, these abuses have become the new status quo. As the report noted, the “Israeli agricultural sector has become dependent on illegally low wages,” warning that “enforcement of the law without compensation of some kind to farmers may do great harm to the sector.” These violations amount to NIS 500 million in annual losses to workers.
Recent wartime dynamics have underscored the shift. The killing of three migrant workers in Israel by Iranian missiles during the latest escalation adds to similar casualties in Gulf countries, highlighting parallels between Israel’s labour model and those of more migration-dependent economies.
While migrant workers make up a smaller share of Israel’s workforce — roughly 7 to 15 percent, compared to 90 percent in the UAE — the system shares a key feature of workers’ dependence on the will of their employers and the state. This renders workers easily replaceable, allowing for vast, rapid shifts in the labour market — as seen after October 7, when Palestinian labour was swiftly curtailed and substituted with migrant workers.
However, it remains too early to say whether this exclusion of Palestinian workers marks a lasting shift. As quickly as Israel replaced Palestinian labour with migrant workers, it could opt to do the reverse should the political and economic conditions change. “It’s a pendulum,” Niezna said. “It could swing back.”
The erosion of workers’ protections has not been limited to migrants: Across the labour market, low-wage Israeli, Palestinian, and foreign workers alike have seen conditions deteriorate as a result of deregulated migrant labour.
Yet even as their fates are deeply intertwined, high unemployment and precarious conditions have undermined the possibility of cross-ethnic solidarity. In sectors like construction and agriculture, Palestinian workers have often been portrayed as competing with Israeli labour, while migrant workers are sometimes cast as undermining both.
After the First Intifada, for example, the revival of “Hebrew labour” campaigns — first popularized during early Zionist immigration to Palestine — pressured companies to avoid hiring Palestinian workers, whom they saw as driving down wages and displacing Israelis. Such narratives obscure the role of Israel’s neoliberal policies in lowering wages and protections while feeding easily into racist popular discourse that scapegoats Palestinians and migrant workers.
“I’ve heard some refer to migrant workers as ‘scabs,’” Matan Kaminer, a professor of anthropology in the UK who researches migrant labour in Israel, told +972 Magazine. Even while they have been brought in to replace Palestinians in low-wage work, he rejects this framing. “The Israeli state is based on an idea of Jewish supremacy, and these people are being used for political and economic ends that really have nothing to do with whatever they themselves think about the situation.
“A really progressive, decolonial imaginary thinks about a future in which everyone who lives in the country has equal rights,” he continued. “It looks beyond nationalism and even bi-nationalism as the only possible frontier.”
Charlotte Ritz-Jack is the Editorial Fellow at +972 Magazine based in Jerusalem
Dana Mills is a writer, activist, dancer, and the +972 Magazine / Local Call resource development manager
