Child breadwinners – the ones settlements like to employ
Young Palestinian boy at work in a date palm orchard on a settlement near Jericho in the Jordan valley, 2010. Photo by Mohamad Torokman/Reuters
Israel: Settlement Agriculture Harms Palestinian Children
Out of School, Doing Risky Work for Low Pay
By Human Rights Watch
April, 2015
(Jerusalem) – Israeli settlement farms in the West Bank are using Palestinian child labour to grow, harvest, and pack agricultural produce, much of it for export, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The farms pay the children low wages and subject them to dangerous working conditions in violation of international standards.
The 74-page report, “Ripe for Abuse: Palestinian Child Labor in Israeli Agricultural Settlements in the West Bank,” documents that children as young as 11 work on some settlement farms, often in high temperatures. The children carry heavy loads, are exposed to hazardous pesticides, and in some cases have to pay themselves for medical treatment for work-related injuries or illness.
“Israel’s settlements are profiting from rights abuses against Palestinian children,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. “Children from communities impoverished by Israel’s discrimination and settlement policies are dropping out of school and taking on dangerous work because they feel they have no alternatives, while Israel turns a blind eye.”
Discriminatory Israeli restrictions on Palestinian access to farmland and water in the West Bank, particularly in the Jordan Valley, a traditional center of Palestinian agriculture, cost the Palestinian economy more than US$700 million each year, according to World Bank estimates. Palestinian poverty rates in the Jordan Valley are up to 33.5 percent, among the highest anywhere in the West Bank. Some Palestinians lease agricultural lands from Israeli settlers, to whom Israel allocated the lands after unlawfully appropriating them from Palestinians.
Israeli policies that support the transfer of civilians into occupied territory and Israel’s appropriation of land and resources there for settlements violate Israel’s obligations as the occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. These violations are compounded by rights abuses against Palestinians working in the settlements, including children, Human Rights Watch said. Israel should dismantle the settlements and, in the meantime, prohibit settlers from employing children in accordance with Israel’s obligations under international treaties on children’s rights and labor rights.
Virtually all the Palestinian children Human Rights Watch interviewed said they felt they had no alternative but to find work on settlement farms to help support their families.
Israel has allocated 86 percent of the land in the Jordan Valley to settlements, and provides vastly greater access to water from the aquifer beneath the valley to the settlement agricultural industry than to the Palestinians living in the valley. Israeli agricultural settlements export a substantial amount of their produce abroad, including to Europe and the United States.
Official statistics are not available, but Israeli and Palestinian development and labor rights groups estimate that hundreds of children work in Israeli agricultural settlements year-round, and that their numbers increase during peak harvesting times.
The children whom Human Rights Watch interviewed said they had suffered nausea and dizziness. Some said they had passed out while working in summer temperatures that frequently exceed 40 degrees Celsius outdoors, and are even higher inside the greenhouses in which many children work. Other children said they had experienced vomiting, breathing difficulties, sore eyes, and skin rashes after spraying or being exposed to pesticides, including inside enclosed spaces. Some complained of back pain after carrying heavy boxes filled with produce or “backpack” containers of pesticide.
Israeli labour laws prohibit youth from carrying heavy loads, working in high temperatures, and working with hazardous pesticides, but Israel has not applied these laws to protect Palestinian children working in its settlements. Israeli authorities rarely inspect working conditions for Palestinians on Israeli settlement farms. The Israeli Defense, Economy, and Labor Ministries all say that they are studying how to apply more labour protections for Palestinians working in settlements, but that in the meantime no authority has a clear mandate to enforce regulations.
Of the children interviewed for the report, 33 had dropped out of school and were working full-time on Israeli settlements. Of these, 21 had dropped out before completing the 10 years of basic education that are compulsory under Palestinian as well as Israeli laws.
“So what if you get an education, you’ll wind up working for the settlements,” one child said.
Teachers and principals at Palestinian schools in the Jordan Valley said that children who worked part-time on settlements during weekends and after school were often exhausted in class.
Israeli military authorities state that they do not issue work permits for Palestinians under 18 to work in settlements. However, Palestinians do not need Israeli work permits to reach the settlement farms, which are outside the gated areas of settlements that Palestinians need permits to enter.
All of the children and adults working for the settlement farms whom Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were hired by Palestinian middlemen working for Israeli settlers, were paid in cash, and did not receive pay-slips or have work contracts. Israel denies Palestinian authorities’ jurisdiction in the settlements as well as much of the Jordan Valley, but they should do more to enforce laws against child labor by prosecuting middlemen, Human Rights Watch said.
According to news reports and settlement and company websites, Europe is a significant export market for settlement agricultural products, and some products are exported to the US. The EU has moved to exclude Israeli settlement products from the preferential tariff treatment it provides to Israeli goods, and EU member states have issued advice to businesses that they needed to consider the legal, financial, and reputational risks of involvement with settlement trade, but have not instructed businesses to end such trade. The US in practice continues to grant preferential treatment to Israeli settlement products under the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement. The US should revise the agreement to exclude settlement products. The US Department of Labor maintains and publishes a list of more than 350 products from foreign countries that are produced with the use of forced labour or child labour in other countries, but has not included Israeli settlement products on the list.
Other countries and businesses should uphold their own responsibilities not to benefit from or contribute to the human rights abuses against the Palestinians in the West Bank by ending business relationships with settlements, including imports of settlement agricultural produce, Human Rights Watch said.
“The settlements are the source of daily abuses, including against children,” Whitson said. “Other countries and businesses should not benefit from or support them.”
Palestinian boys under the minimum age at work under the minimum wage on the Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Efrayim, Jordan Valley. Photo by Keren Manor/ ActiveStills
Palestinian children: The invisible workers of Israeli settlements
Defence for Children International – Palestine
First published in Daily Beast
August 2013
Ramallah,—The summer air grew considerably hotter as we drove down to the Jordan Valley. Its red fertile soil radiated heat beneath our feet as we walked toward the lush agricultural field dotted with young boys picking vegetables.
Wearing a red hoodie over his baseball cap, Omar, 17, quickly jumped off a tractor to greet us. He appeared thin and sun-burned and his hands felt calloused from picking vegetables bare-handed. Omar’s younger brother, Fouzi, 16, wearing a baseball cap and carrying his plastic bucket, followed close behind. Beads of sweat trickled down their faces as they proudly displayed the eggplants and peppers they had collected over the past five hours.
Four years ago, Omar became the primary breadwinner for his eight member family after his father passed away. In significant debt due to medical bills, Omar began picking, cleaning and packaging fruits and vegetables near the agricultural fields of the Israeli settlement of Hamra in the Jordan Valley.
When balancing work and school became exhausting, both Omar and Fouzi left school to work full time in the fields. Depending on the season, around 10,000 to 20,000 Palestinian labourers work in Israeli agricultural settlements in the Jordan Valley. Approximately five to 10 percent of these workers are child labourers, according to the Ma’an Development Centre.
One of the most restricted places on earth, the Jordan Valley is home to vast swaths of rich agricultural land used by Israeli settlements. Since 1967, Israel has implemented systematic measures to ensure absolute control over the region, depriving Palestinians of their right to their own resources.
While Israeli settlers make up 13 percent of the population, they effectively control 86 percent of the land. The annual value of agricultural production in the Jordan Valley settlements is estimated at about $132.6 million, according to a report by the Palestinian human rights organization, Al Haq.
Omar and Fouzi are from the West Bank village of Duma, 13 miles southeast of Nablus. During the months they work, they stay in storage units near the Hamra settlement sleeping on tiny cots for months at a time.
“We work up to 10 hours or more and we don’t get many breaks to drink water and rest throughout the day,” says Fouzi. “The units we sleep in are very cramped and humid; sometimes it feels like we’re choking, but we’re used to it.”
At the end of each week, they send the money they earn home to their mother. Child labourers earn an average of 40 to 60 NIS ($12 to $18) per day. This is not even enough to buy a bag of flour to feed her family, Omar and Fouzi’s mother, Muntaha, says.
Palestinian children as young as 11 work up to 12 hours a day, in temperatures that can reach up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit [50ºC] and drop to 32 degrees Fahrenheit [0ºC].
Child labourers can suffer from injuries and chronic pain due to long hours, poor working conditions and the harsh physical nature of the work. The use of inorganic pesticides and fertilizers is widespread and unregulated in the Jordan Valley, creating highly polluted runoff water with high levels of chemicals to which children are exposed.
Exposure to these chemicals can have grave long-term consequences including hormonal, renal and nervous system abnormalities, and cancer.
Palestinian child labourers are undocumented, meaning no records of their hours worked are kept. They are paid in cash so that there is no proof of them working on settlements, and they have no official status, health insurance, or rights as employees. Settlers that employ them are well aware of this.
“Last year, one boy fell off the tractor and injured his back. He’s nearly paralyzed and didn’t have insurance so he can’t work,” shares Omar, eyeing the tractor he was just riding.
Young Palestinian women at work in a farm packing shed on the Tomer settlement. Photo by Mitch Ginsburg, Times of Israel.
Undocumented child labourers are more vulnerable to exploitation, fearful of complaining or exposing any rights abuse that may jeopardize their source of income and safety.
“Cases of sexual assault and abuse are very common in settlements,” according to Amjad Jaber, director of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Labour office in Jericho. “I hear horrific stories from many women and children, who are most vulnerable to the abuse.”
Limited vocational training or other alternatives forces many Palestinian families to turn to waseets. Families trust waseets to find work for their children in Israeli settlements. Many waseets were child labourers themselves.
Waseets generally take commissions from the wages of the child labourers they recruit. Some also collect fees for housing and transportation. Israeli settlers pay higher wages to waseets because their services make running the entire agricultural settlement enterprise affordable and profitable.
The Palestinian Authority prohibits children from working in the settlements, and under Israeli law employing minors is illegal, which results in a workforce that is invisible under the law and not guaranteed basic protections and rights.
“I view the use of child labour inside settlements as a form of human trafficking,” said Khaled Quzmar, an attorney at Defence for Children International Palestine, who was involved in drafting the Palestinian Labour Law that went into effect in 2000.
“Child labour is a very complicated issue,” says Quzmar. “The fractured legal system in the West Bank makes it easy to exploit child labour because Palestinian Labour Law only applies to children working in areas under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction, not Israeli settlements.”
Sitting down with Omar and Fouzi’s mother, Muntaha, in Duma, the sound of distress in her voice over her dependency on her children’s work is clear.
“No mother wants to send her children to work in a settlement. Of course not,” Muntaha sighs. “But what choice do we have?”
Dina Elmuti is a consultant with Defence for Children International Palestine. This article was originally published on The Daily Beast:
Notes and links
Ripe for Abuse
Palestinian Child Labor in Israeli Agricultural Settlements in the West Bank, pdf, report from HRW, April 2013US Dept of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs
2014 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor
Minimal Advancement
In 2014, the Palestinian Authority (PA) made a minimal advancement in efforts to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in the areas of the West Bank under its control. The PA acceded to the UN CRC and the UN CRC Optional Protocol on Armed Conflict. However, children in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are engaged in child labor, including in agriculture and in work on the street. The PA’s legal framework does not include prohibitions against forced labor or human trafficking. The PA also lacks programs to prevent or eliminate the worst forms of child labor.