Ramallah: Palestinian workers, subjected daily to grave inconvenience due to Israeli policies at the checkpoints between the West Bank and their workplaces inside Israel, have appealed to the Palestinian Authority and human rights groups to help make their situation more bearable.
The workers say they suffer daily humiliation when going through the prolonged electronic security search measures at the border checkpoints. To begin with a worker needs to wait for at least a couple of hours in a long queue to get to the checkpoint where he passes through eight electronic gates in the security search process, which scan each individual with rays which are claimed to be extremely dangerous for health.
The large amount of time required means some workers have to start their day as early as midnight the day before in order to be near the head of the queue at the gates.
Stampedes among thousands of workers are common and have caused the deaths of at least three in the past three years, with huge cases of injuries and broken limbs for others leading to loss of livelihood, sometimes for an entire family.
Workers interviewed by Gulf News said their daily commute in Israeli territories was a trip to hell.
"The Israelis have made it so, despite our knowledge that they have a real need for us in their work," said Abdul Aziz Mohammad Zaid, a Palestinian worker.
Check posts
He added that the Israelis have put in needlessly exaggerated security measures for the Palestinian workers at the border points. The check post and gate areas are full of monitoring towers and workers need to pass through several security scanning gates, apart from submitting to manual searches.
Zaid said thousands of workers eager to cross the checkpoints to get to their workplaces at the earliest are ordered to enter the area one by one for the search and security measures. Once these are completed, the workers then move to a windows area, where their identity cards, work permits, and fingerprints are checked, scanned and cleared to be finally allowed outside the West Bank area and to their workplaces.
Zaid said most of the workers were illiterate and did not fully comprehend these advanced security measures. In case they commit a mistake at any stage during the lengthy procedure, the time needed to finish up their procedures expands and puts the thousands of others waiting in queue under pressure of missing their transports outside the gates that drive them to their workplaces all over Israel.
Hussain Sowaileh, another Palestinian worker, told Gulf News that the Israelis make two or three days of the week even more difficult for the workers. Sunday, the first working day of the week, is usually a time of greater suffering for the workers.
Unpredictably, and for any trivial reason, the Israelis close the checkpoints for indefinite lengths of time and leave the workers waiting while the clock is ticking. He said when this happens, it becomes extremely difficult to control the restless crowds and keep order, and sometimes fights break out among people jostling to reach the gates first, resulting in injuries.
The Palestinian Authority has earlier tried to get involved in organising and managing the queues but has not been successful.
Magnetic card
Sowaileh said the Israeli's complicated security measures at the checkpoints were not needed. Each worker is granted a work permit in Israel after going through many security steps.
He said a worker is granted a magnetic card, which is a security clearance from the Israeli internal security services, followed by a six-month work permit which requires the approval of the Israeli security and civil authorities once more. Once all these procedures are secured, the worker's fingers and hands prints are taken and files with the Israeli authorities to be verified for entrance purposes.
Permission to travel into Israeli territories to work is anyway denied to those whose relatives have security records with the Israelis or are wanted for any security reason, Sowaileh said.
Ahmad Al Sous, anther Palestinian worker, told Gulf News that applications for magnetic cards - the initial step for the work permit - are rejected by the Israelis for thousands of Palestinians for trivial reasons, which the Israelis sum up in their replies as "refused for security reasons".
He said the Israelis consider those Palestinians who are granted the magnetic cards and the work permits to be law-abiding people without criminal antecedents and, therefore, the exaggerated security procedures at the checkpoints, which made the lives of the workers miserable were pointless.
The procedures are vague, he added, and people cannot judge whether the Israelis really want the Palestinian workers in the first place. The Israeli employers usually tell their Palestinian employees that Israel cannot run without Palestinian workers, but the security measures are a major threat to the existence of Palestinian workers in Israel, Al Sous said.
A senior official at the Palestinian Ministry of Labour told Gulf News that the ministry is aware of the problems Palestinian workers face to enter Israel daily. He said the problems were being addressed by an Israeli-Palestinian civil coordination body and the conditions on the ground were improving gradually.
Initially, he said, the Israeli authorities used to issue a magnetic card for the Palestinian workers valid for one year. The validity was extendable to four years, but was to be renewed every two years. Now the Israelis are issuing permits valid for six months.
Explaining that his ministry, along with other Palestinian authorities concerned, was exerting all possible efforts to improve the conditions of the Palestinian workers traveling to Israel daily, the official said the Palestinian Authority has been working on securing the rights of the Palestinian workers with the Israeli Ministry of Labour.
The authority is currently working on setting up agencies to be in charge of recruiting Palestinian workers for jobs in Israel. The agencies will have direct agreements with Israeli employers and authorities in order to ensure more comfortable circumstances for the Palestinian workers.
