No permit, no work, no future: inside the lives of West Bank workers crushed by Israel’s labor ban
Qassam Muaddi reports in Mondoweiss on 16 April 2026:
Palestinians in 2021 passing through Qalandia checkpoint on the way to work inside Israel.
Bir Nabala, a ghost town of abandoned houses and empty streets, is surrounded by the Israeli separation wall and was once a vibrant middle-class community. Its diverse businesses benefited from the town’s strategic location north of Jerusalem, which made it one of the city’s important gateways. Then the wall cut Bir Nabala off, killing its commercial life overnight and turning it into a remote village on the far edges of Ramallah. Residents have since been gradually leaving the town.
The Israeli wall stretches across the horizon in the village from edge to edge. Lining the streets are a few scattered workshops that continue to function, buried in the silence of empty neighborhoods. Several men take a break from work in front of a metal recycling workshop, right across from the wall.
“Permit revocations? That’s everybody’s story here,” says Muhammad (not his real name), who spoke to Mondoweiss on the condition of anonymity. “We’re lucky to even have this job here. Every week, hundreds of workers come here to jump over the wall and find work on the other side. All of their permits were revoked.”
For decades, Palestinian day-laborers in the West Bank have relied on work inside Israel and Israeli-annexed Jerusalem for their economic survival. They needed to request a special working permit from the Israeli military authorities in order to cross a militarized checkpoint to reach their workplaces, hundreds of thousands of which were issued.
But after October 7, Israel revoked the permits of about 150,000 workers legally working in Israel en masse. An additional 50,000 workers were estimated to be working in Israel without permits, having infiltrated through smuggling networks, bringing the total to 200,000 laborers. Their salaries contributed to a vital flow of money into the West Bank’s economy for years.
When Israel cut them off overnight, the Palestinian economy was plunged into crisis. The persistent labor ban has continued to form one of the main pillars of the ongoing collapse of the West Bank economy, increasing economic pressure on hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their families.