A garbage truck full of hunger and shame – and the Israeli system that drives it

Palestinian men crowd inside the back of a garbage truck after around 70 of them were found hiding inside while attempting to cross into Israel for work at the Trans Samaria crossing in the Israeli occupied West Bank, in this screengrab from a video released on 13 April 2026

Odeh Bisharat writes in Haaretz on 28 April 2026:

The adjectives in the newspaper headlines about the “attempted infiltration” ranged from “rare” to “embarrassing” or “stinking.” The subject was a garbage truck into which 68 Palestinians had been crammed. These Palestinians, who are defined here as “illegal entrants,” were heading to Israel to earn money and support themselves.

Many people were angry about the humiliating situation in which these workers found themselves. But that humiliation wasn’t enough for the police officers. Instead of relating to them with dignity after this traumatic experience and giving them medical and psychological assistance, the officers treated them harshly, as if they were criminals.

Woe to the regime in which people at its mercy are forced into situations like this by hunger. If you’re looking for an incident that embodies the meaning of the Hebrew phrase “the shame of hunger,” this is it.

Ever since this incident occurred a little over two weeks ago, I’ve been reflecting on it. I thought about the Palestinian who said goodbye to his family at dawn that morning and rushed to cram himself inside this suffocating vehicle amid the garbage, like sardines in a tin, so that at the end of the day – if he wasn’t arrested and hosted at one of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s lockups – he could bring home a few shekels for bread and a little milk.

How would the children react to their father agreeing to enter this transport from hell in order to support them? Would they be angry at him for humiliating himself? Or would they be proud of their father, who was willing to die for them? I’m not able to put myself in those children’s shoes, but I would urge them to be proud of their father. Israeli society is the one that ought to be ashamed.

Israel’s leaders, its judges, its police, its intellectuals and even its Arab citizens are the ones who have allowed this disgrace to continue. The shame of hunger belongs to those who are starving others, and also to those who stand by idly. Under no circumstances does it belong to the hungry and the starved.

The story of this garbage truck reminded me, and perhaps many others as well, of the heroes of Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani’s shocking novel “Men in the Sun.” It is the story of three Palestinian refugees who cram themselves into a water tanker to travel to another country, but die inside it of heat and suffocation because they refused to bang on the sides to alert others to their situation. The frequently cited phrase, “Why didn’t you bang the sides of the tank?” is also the name of an impressive biography of Kanafani by author and journalist Danny Rubinstein.

At the same time, for some reason I can’t fathom, my thoughts traveled decades back in time. I wondered whether the fathers of Zionism ever imagined that one day, members of another people living under the rule of their children and grandchildren would be forced to cram themselves into a stinking garbage truck to earn a living? It turns out that Jewish intellectuals thought of a great many things, but not about these 68 illegal entrants.

One could offer 1,001 excuses to “explain” this disgrace. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk might say that all the blame rests with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party; with fanatic terrorism; with those who “rose up against us to destroy us,” and would have annihilated us had it been in their power; with the Arabs who didn’t accept the 1947 Partition Plan; and numerous similar statements.

But in the end, this embarrassing scene and many others are the fruit of what the state’s founders did. And if anyone had the courage, they wouldn’t blame those Palestinians; they would investigate what went wrong in the work of establishing the state and what is wrong with its ongoing management.

There are numerous injustices in Israel, one of which is the brutal battle against those termed “illegal entrants,” who are humiliated on a regular basis, and not just when they are traveling in a garbage truck. For instance, there’s the police’s practice of making them lie down on the ground with their hands cuffed in front of a crowd of curious onlookers who neither protest nor intervene on their behalf.

We have denied them the opportunity to earn a living, to the point that they are going hungry. And then, when they dare to try to get work anyway – not to steal – they are treated like garden-variety criminals.

The Hebrew acronym for “illegal entrant,” shabah, is also an Arabic word that means “ghost.” And these ghosts will accompany us as long as the occupation lasts. There is only one way to get rid of them – by ending the occupation.

This article is reproduced in its entirety