As War Halts Israel Permits, Palestinians Return to Farming

The Norwegian Refugee Council also says that Israel had denied Palestinians access to 99 percent of the land in Area C of the West Bank, which is solely under Israeli control - AFP
The Norwegian Refugee Council also says that Israel had denied Palestinians access to 99 percent of the land in Area C of the West Bank, which is solely under Israeli control - AFP
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As War Halts Israel Permits, Palestinians Return to Farming

The Norwegian Refugee Council also says that Israel had denied Palestinians access to 99 percent of the land in Area C of the West Bank, which is solely under Israeli control - AFP
The Norwegian Refugee Council also says that Israel had denied Palestinians access to 99 percent of the land in Area C of the West Bank, which is solely under Israeli control - AFP

Hussein Jamil held a permit to work in Israel for 22 years until the war in Gaza broke out. Now, after setting up a greenhouse in a West Bank village, he swears he'll never go back.

Harvesting his tomatoes in the occupied West Bank, the 46-year-old says his former Israeli boss has already called several times to ask him to return.

"But I told him that I would never go back to work there," he says in Bayt Dajan near Nablus, the northern West Bank's commercial center.

There, dozens of men have returned to the traditional pursuit of tilling the land, rather than board buses to queue at the heavily guarded checkpoints that lead into Israel.

"It's a very useful job and above all safer" than working in Israel, says Jamil, as he tends to his plants with his sons, AFP reported.

Israel stopped issuing work permits for Palestinians after October 7.

Israeli war in Gaza have so far left 39,790 dead, according to the health ministry in the strip.

Jamil was one of 200,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who were working in Israel legally or illegally, according to the Palestinian General Confederation of Labour, and who lost their livelihoods overnight.

Salaries in Israel are more than double what Palestinians can make in the occupied territories, according to the World Bank.

Many of those workers are now busy in the greenhouses that have sprouted up in recent months on the hillsides where, Palestinian elders say, their ancestors once grew wheat.

Working this way, "we are independent and peaceful," says Jamil, adding: "It's much better than working in Israel. Here we work on our land."

Economic prospects have dived since the war, with West Bank unemployment leaping from 12.9 percent to 32 percent in the final three months of 2023.

Some 144,000 jobs have been lost in the territory, many because of rising violence that has prompted the army to block roads, strangling economic activity.

Since October 7, at least 617 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army or settlers, according to an AFP count based on official Palestinian data.

At least 18 Israelis, including soldiers, have died in Palestinian attacks in the same period, according to official Israeli data.

Every day, around $22 million in income is lost in the West Bank, according to International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates.

In Bayt Dajan alone, 300-350 men worked in Israel out of a population of 5,000.

Mazen Abu Jaish, 43, who spent 10 years working in Israel, took his time before deciding to pick up his shovel and rake and set up a tomato greenhouse.

"We waited, thinking that we would get our jobs back again after the war," he told AFP.

But unlike previous wars in Gaza, which never lasted more than a few weeks, the current conflict is fast approaching its first anniversary.

"So we ended up getting together with 35 other people from the village and we decided to start farming rather than keep waiting," says Jaish.

Since October 7, 15 hectares of Bayt Dajan have been covered by greenhouses with tomatoes and cucumbers, grown by people who used to work in Israel, municipal officials say.

Mohammad Ridwan, a member of the municipal council, sees other advantages as well, as the greenhouses are in Area C -- the West Bank land controlled solely by Israel, and vulnerable to being used for illegal Israeli settlements.

Area C makes up 59 percent of the West Bank, and 63 percent of its agricultural land.

The Norwegian Refugee Council also says that Israel had denied Palestinians access to 99 percent of the land in Area C, in many cases preventing them from growing their own fields there.

"Local unemployed people have found work and above all, we are preserving land in Area C," said Ridwan.



Sickness Can Be ‘Death Sentence’ in Gaza as War Fuels Disease 

A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)
A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)
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Sickness Can Be ‘Death Sentence’ in Gaza as War Fuels Disease 

A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)
A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)

In Gaza, falling ill can be a death sentence. Cancer patients are waiting to die, polio has returned, and many of the doctors and nurses who might have offered help are dead while the hospitals they worked at have been reduced to rubble.

Doctors and health professionals say that even if the Israel-Hamas war were to stop tomorrow, it will take years to rebuild the healthcare sector and people will continue to die because preventable diseases are not being treated on time.

"People are dying on a daily basis because they cannot get the basic treatment they need," said Riham Jafari, advocacy and communications coordinator at rights group ActionAid Palestine.

Cancer patients "are waiting for their turn to die," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed on limited pauses in the fighting to allow children to be vaccinated against polio after a one-year-old baby boy was found to be partially paralyzed from the disease, the first case in the crowded strip in 25 years.

But even as crowds gathered in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis for vaccinations on Sept. 5, bombs continued to fall in other areas with Gaza health officials saying an Israeli strike killed five people at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah.

"It will take long and so much effort in order to restore the level of care that we used to have in Gaza," said Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, medical program lead at Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Every day he sees around 180 children with skin diseases that he "just cannot treat," he said.

"Due to vaccination campaign interruptions, lack of supplies, lack of hygiene items and infection prevention control material, it (healthcare) is just deteriorating."

The conflict was triggered when Hamas-led fighters attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, more than 40,800 Palestinians have been killed by Israel's offensive in the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry, with around 92,000 wounded.

But beyond the death toll from the fighting and airstrikes, people are also succumbing to illnesses that could be cured in normal circumstances.

As with the re-emergence of polio, children will bear the brunt of these long-term consequences, health experts say.

"We are talking about disabilities, we are talking about intellectual disabilities, mental health issues," said Aghaalkurdi.

"Things that will stick to the child until they die."

SPECIALISTS KILLED

At least 490 healthcare workers have been killed since the conflict erupted, according to Gaza's health ministry. A Reuters investigation found that 55 highly qualified specialist doctors were among those killed.

With each specialist killed, Gaza has lost a source of knowledge and human connections, a devastating blow on top of the destruction of most of the Strip's hospitals.

Many people have become weak from a lack of food, as prices of basic commodities have more than quadrupled since the conflict began. When they become ill, they are also too frightened to journey to the few remaining hospitals, Jafari said.

Eighty-two percent of children aged between 6 and 23 months have limited access to quality food, according to a report by the Global Network Against Food Crises, and more than 90% of children under 5-years-old suffer from infectious diseases.

Meanwhile, skin diseases are rampant because of a lack of cleaning supplies and hygiene products, Jafari said. In markets, a bottle of shampoo can cost around $50.

Israel has severely restricted the flow of food and aid into Gaza, and humanitarian agencies have warned of the risk of famine.

Jafari expects a reckoning after the war ends.

"There is delayed suffering, delayed sadness, there are diseases that are being delayed," she said. "There is an entire journey of suffering that is being delayed until the end of the war," she said.

CANCER 'DEATH SENTENCE'

Manal Ragheb Fakhri al-Masri, 42, is one of those facing that health reckoning.

Displaced seven times with her nine children, she has a heart condition and a benign tumor in her stomach and was supposed to leave Gaza for treatment earlier this year.

But then her husband was killed and she could not bear to leave her children.

Now, having also suffered several strokes, she is bedridden, unable to leave her tent by the sea in Al-Mawasi, which Israel had declared a safe zone. She has not had any medicine in five months and has not even been able to shower for two weeks.

"My husband used to take care of me and get medicine and feed his children," she said in a phone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Now I do not know what do. We do not have the most basic things."

Her children try to help as much as they can and sometimes bring her seawater for her to wash with but the salty liquid offers no respite. Her children are also all suffering from red rashes but they have no creams to soothe their burning limbs.

Waseem Alzaanin, a general practitioner with the Palestine Red Crescent Society, said the lack of drugs, equipment and medical facilities is killing his cancer patients.

Gaza's only cancer center was destroyed earlier this year, he said, and many of his stage-one cancer patients are now classified as stage-four.

"The most basic requirements are not present. We cannot do anything except give them painkillers and make them comfortable with what life they have left," he said.

"It is like a death sentence," he added. "Let us not kid ourselves. We have no medical system."